As a younger man—one with significantly more free time on my hands than I knew what to do with, courtesy of a disinclination toward social activities that were not sports-related (i.e. mandatory) and a group of friends with similar opinions, my brother and I spent a large amount of time playing video games through most of our schooling careers.

What this meant more than anything else was that we had time for the sort of lengthy epics typical of JRPGs at the time, and while I and my cohorts were somewhat late to the game, Final Fantasy-wise, we made up for it in enthusiasm once we’d managed to get into it (a process which involved convincing our friend to play Kingdom Hearts, then further convincing him that Final Fantasy IX was “basically just like it, but better” which, while the ‘better’ part was true, the ‘just like it’ part was a complete fabrication), even obtaining an old cart of the first game in the series so that we could begin at the beginning—though we’d never beat that particular entry.

I have a distinct memory of my father irately informing us that we’d wasted an entire summer on video games at one point, shortly before returning to whatever it was he’d come upstairs to do. At the time, we’d chewed through Kingdom Hearts and were two discs into Final Fantasy IX. We would go on to beat VII, VIII, and X, then waste some money on XI, and begin to suspect that we’d be finishing off any subsequent Final Fantasies as they came out.

Except by the time FFXII came out, we were all a little burned out on fantasy JRPGs, so we never quite finished it, and then XIII was… XIII, so we never finished that off either, and I tried real hard to give a shit about Lost Odyssey but never quite got there (although I think I got to the second disc? I don’t remember). Basically, I stopped caring about JRPGs entirely, partially because the settings were stale as hell, and partially because who the fuck has time for that sort of thing anymore?

Now I should make something clear, which is that our attempts at finding a good JRPG extended beyond the Final Fantasy series. Somewhere, probably in a box belonging to my brother, is a copy of Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne (or something like that), which I had briefly gotten super into, shortly before getting fed up at how long it took to get to a save point and losing something like an hour’s worth of progress (and so much demon fusing or whatever the persona fusion equivalent is). So when a friend of mine started talking to me about Persona 4 (post-college, because I’d already missed its release completely) I was naturally skeptical, and my friend, in spite of his enthusiasm for the game, failed utterly to sell me on the concept of the game (it does not help that he was on the Kanji boss fight and excitedly told me that he’d been doing it for like two hours). I stopped thinking about the game entirely for the next two years.

Then of course I broke down and started to visit Giantbomb regularly, which inevitably lead to being told that I should watch the Persona 4 endurance run, and by that point my fate was more or less sealed. I picked up a copy off PSN and started playing, in spite of knowing how the story goes (although it’s so long that I don’t really remember everything, even though I only finished watching the ER like a month or two ago).

I mentioned earlier that I don’t have as much time to play games as I used to—I have a job, and I try to be a sociable dude more than I used to these days, and while that’s still true, I’ve also gotten to the point where it’s nice to just set aside an hour or two a night to sit down and play something for a little while, then go to bed or whatever. Generally you’d think that a game like Persona 4 would not lend itself to short play experiences (I mean you just sit and hit x for a long time before you can even save for the first time), but through generous use of the Goho-ms I’ve got a good system going.

The fights in P4 are surprisingly satisfying, far more than I remember that sort of turn-based nonsense being as a general rule. I spend a surprising amount of time dicking around with Personae, figuring out what’s weak to what, and then attempting to burn through fights as quickly as possible. It is safe to say that it will take me a very, very long time to get through Persona 4—it is not the only game I’m currently playing, for starters, and will continue to not be the only game I’m currently playing because I like to have options when I sit down every evening—but it is strangely satisfying to have a JRPG that I actually enjoy sitting down to play again.

Maybe, if I’m lucky, I will even have Persona 4 finished by the time Persona 5 comes out (but I doubt it).

AN: Is there more to say about the Persona series, and am I going to end up writing more about it? Oh, undoubtedly.