Metaphor: Refantazio is Persona for old people

I’ll never claim to be anything other than an odd man regarding my media consumption. I have some extremely specific guidelines for a story for me to want to play.

1. It must be simple. I’m old. Don’t waste my time with frivolities and symbolism hidden beneath three layers of the writers’ drool.
2. If you like passive voice, I don’t like you. Stop it. Stop it, you evil piece of shit. 
3. If your entire plot is driven by miscommunications that could be solved by the characters being clear with each other in their intentions, you don’t have a story worth dealing with unless the point of the story is the comedy behind the egregious miscommunications. (My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU, for some ungodly reason, gets this perfectly. Watch it. It might look cringe, and it is cringe. It’s also peak.)
4. If you insist on having cringe, horny bullshit in your game/show, make it skippable. I’m a wrestling fan who lived during Vince McMahon’s worst years. Don’t make me pay my dues twice.

Anyway, this laundry list of things I hate describes what for the last few years has been my favorite series, the Persona games. I mostly keep my talk about them to specific places because good lord do Persona fans elsewhere need some help.

You know who doesn’t need help, though? Atlus. Somehow, they broke free of the weird horny bullshit of every past title, Catherine excluded since the horniness is the main conflict of the game.

Metaphor: Refantazio has a cast of adults! They talk to each other, and they share what they can and acknowledge what they can’t. It’s a lot of fun! 

It’s a breath of fresh air for me, personally. The last few months or so, I’ve been limited in what I can read and play because I’m getting particularly bitter about these things. I’m a little more than a year sober, and my ability to look past things has disappeared. I was beginning to think that maybe I just don’t like games all that much anymore.

It feels nice to be wrong.

Also, I 100% acknowledge that I am a grown man playing games intended for teen/early-20s audiences and complaining. This is what old people do. Why doesn’t the world cater to me, specifically anymore? (This is sarcasm. The world shouldn’t cater to me. I don’t know what I want.)