I lost count of how many jokes I cracked about Final Fantasy, orphaned clichés, and emo-licious pretty-boys wielding gigantic phalluses (err… swords). I don’t care for mystically enchanted forests and orchestral scores. I am a city-boy, raised on high-rise malls and fast food. I can’t remember the last time I slayed a dragon in my sleep, let alone dreamt of one, and that’s why I love the Persona series. They are RPGs for the Facebook generation of kids who don’t know squat about lashing scabbards (or something suitably anachronistic), but they can weasel a social life and video games between midterms with ease.

I highly recommend playing Persona 3 if you haven’t already, but not for continuity reasons. You need to know what you are getting into, because it takes about three hours of fantastically voiced dialogue and top-notch cutscenes before the introductory reigns are removed. That fact alone is enough to turn most people away, but the payoff is worth the investment. Most RPGs are content with tossing players into foreign lands with one simple-minded motivation. The player is the hero and the hero should care. Persona 4 (P4) excels because it doesn’t rely on gamers’ innate urges to progress and win. It gives reasons to genuinely care about the characters, the town of Inaba, and what will happen next.

The protagonist of P4 didn’t leave the wreckage of his homeland to avenge his parents, nor is he a rebellious experiment of the government, and he certainly doesn’t have amnesia. He’s a transfer student at Yasogami High School looking to make a few friends. He’s average in every way, with one extreme exception. After watching The Midnight Channel – a channel of urban legend on which one’s soul mate appears on a blank TV – he develops the power to cross the physical boundaries of the black box and enter TV World. It’s a realm occupied by the Shadows of our malicious halves, with a dark secret. The Midnight Channel isn’t a vision of a soul mate. It’s a vision of someone falling prey to the deadly embrace of his/her Shadow.

I’ll admit that the premise has a ludicrous flair, but it has implications far beyond the simplistic ‘good vs. evil’ scenarios of other RPGs. P4 is an exploration of the media’s role in shaping the expectations and modes of conduct for our lives, and our self-inflicted need to escape the dull realities that we create. I felt a viciously eye-opening parallel between my own sister and the hero’s pre-teen cousin, who sings commercial jingles like nursery rhymes and spends every day accompanied by her two-dimensional friends. Furthermore, it is a critique of our ‘bigger and better, at cheaper prices’ attitude seen in the closed facades of shops surrounding the encroaching monster that is the Junes department store. Ironically, the massive flat-screens of Junes happen to make the best portals to TV World.

Unlike Persona 3’s Tartarus, which was the static epicenter for battling Shadows, TV World morphs to suit the hidden desires of its victims. The levels of the “dungeons” are still random, bland mazes of corridors, but the warp points are no more. If you plan on stepping into the next level, you better be prepared with a stockpile of supplies to last through the long haul or a bottle of GoH-M for a last-ditch escape. Nothing hurts more than pounding through 90 minutes of battle and gathering a hefty bag of loot, only to bite it at the final boss and restart the entire dungeon. It’s devastating when it happens, but when you succeed, you know that you earned it.