15. persona 4 arena ultimax
at the beginning of 2014 i gave my friend - the doctor from t. coffey, if you've been reading in order - some batteries. i took some from the infinite source of batteries that was my parents' closet, put them in a ziploc bag, and brought them to school to give to him. i did this because his wii remote had died, and we couldn't play brawl online anymore. i remember this day clearly because it was also when i told him about project 3.0, which had just come out, per an article i read. it, i informed him, put mewtwo back in brawl.
this action led him and i down a path that includes probably several thousand hours of melee played with each other, and led me in particular, eventually, to play basically every fighting game i can get my hands on.
around 2022 a friend - okay, "friend" might be overselling it, but he was a nice guy - bought me persona 4 arena ultimax for basically no reason other than he knew i liked fighting games and maybe(?) knew i liked persona. i had heard it was good from the fgc oldheads so i played it for 10 minutes and then got back on tekken 7.
4 years later, freshly brutalized by a sociopathic cracker hick, i moved here just in time to watch one of my roommates play basically all of persona 4 golden. he didn't like it! i wasn't surprised. that game sucks! but it does have rise, and i recalled that she was playable in that fighting game, so i went and downloaded it.
we played the shit out of persona 4 arena ultimax. i was in the fighting game discord asking "anyone personaing today" just about every day. i had fallen off of deadlock by then (previously detailed week-long depressive episode put a stop to that one) and persona was my jam.
i did end up playing as rise, too. her power level is low so she has to work very hard for her damage, and i never quite reached the point of grinding out all of her setups, but i love the way she controls space and creates setups off of oki that continue to threaten the opponent even if they've guessed correctly on wakeup. she can be such a demon.
i started playing melee when i was 12, but i picked up dragon ball fighterz, and with it, more traditional fighting games, when i was 17. that means it's only been 8 or so years that i've been a fighting game player, but persona, and the experience of having to teach some of my tekken-brained friends the fundamentals of 2d anime fighters, was one of my only "look how far i've come" moments that i've ever had with the genre.
persona is, immediately, made more addictive than most other fighting games because you can listen to the persona soundtracks. the visual presentation, too, is above and beyond most of its contemporaries. i'm comfortable calling it some of the best sprite work i've ever seen, even by the very high standards set by arc system works' other products.
compared to modern games, which all ask you to map 10,000 buttons and put a year of startup on every button, it's delightful to play a game that just wants you to get in there and get nasty. and i did get nasty. rise's jB is, simply, a ridiculous button to give to a setup character. the speed the game is played at felt perfect for my hands and brain; not so fast as to be unapproachable, but fast enough that trying to overload your opponent's mental until they shut down is a viable strategy.
counterhit, as a mechanic, has always felt underutilized to me in fighting games. a newer player probably isn't going to be super excited about learning conditional hit properties, and the system in general feels a bit too "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" for my liking. persona arena takes the basic idea of counterhitting an opponent and combines it with the source material - that is, persona 3 and persona 4 - to create something fresh.
so, the way personas work in this game is like this: you have 4 buttons. your A and B buttons just control your character. your C and D buttons summon your persona to do spells ripped from the jrpg - and, just like in the jrpg, when you use these abilities, your persona appears. when that happens, your opponent can run right up and hit your persona with any move. when that happens, you lose a persona card, represented by little icons under your healthbar. it varies how many cards a character has, but when they run out, they completely lose access to any move in their kit that makes use of their persona. and in a game called persona, that's usually really bad. these sorts of secondary objectives in fighting games are so exciting to me, and i think persona's is one of the most interesting ever.
i only played the game for a little over 40 hours, and then other fighting games came out and my friends all got back into deadlock and my time with persona just kind of ended, in the way that my time with discord fighters always ends: too soon and too quietly. but i'm really holding out for another entry in the series. i think, if i had been there during persona arena's heyday, it might've ended up being my favorite fighting game ever. i can't overstate just how much i loved my time with that game.