Escapism in video games is a curious thing. I'm not just talking about the fact that video games place us in the lives of people whose decisions actually have a purpose, but additionally give the player himself the illusion that his actions are to be celebrated as tasks are accomplished. Other forms of media are also rife with the first form of escapism, but save for the primative forms as seen in shit like American Idol, you never see much of the second outside video games. The two types of escapism are closely intertwined and strengthened in video games, not only are you identifying with some hero, you feel as though you have some form of control over his actions although designer choices limit your actual involvement to about the same extent of deciding whether to keep turning the pages of a book. Most games naturally try to hide this fact from the player, both through sneaky game mechanics or making the protagonist someone either blank-slatey or flawed enough that we don't feel ridiculous for having this guys life for 20-25 hours.
Persona 3 is pretty amazing how it utterly lays bare its contempt for the player and his attempts to gain escape from his/her own terrible life. Your character is a wonder boy; no sport or subject is beyond his grasp, there's never a need to really try to make friends, people throw themselves at you and always call you, never a need to seek them out. Even in the magical fantasy fighting world, you're clearly top dog, being the only one that can summon multiple beings of indiscriminate destruction (and the only one that doesn't decide that an elemental break spell is totally a worthy use of magic points). No one ever seems that perturbed by your completely perfect perfecthood; one character gets jealous for like 2 weeks and subsequently feels bad and apologizes to you with no real effect on the game itself.
While this degree of flawlessness is bizarre, by itself I don't argue that escapism is affected. I raved about Stocke is Radiant Historia, after all, and he was for all intents a slightly more gruff version of Persona 3's protagonist, doing shit like the "I just mastered what took you a decade to learn" and having every character fall over themselves in worshipping you.
The difference between Stocke and Persona 3's protagonist (we're just going to call him CHUGGO for the rest of the review, shall we) is twofold. In Radiant Historia, while you controlled Stocke, he sort of felt as his own man, the player himself was just a sort of subconscious along for the ride who occasionally told him to take the obviously wrong choice because you wanted that time map totally filled out. Chuggo, on the other hand, is you yourself and nothing else. You tell him what to do for everything, and never says anything that you aren't selecting from a list that has no point.
There's also the setting. Stocke is a pretty perfect dude, but he's also head of a kingdom's intelligence operations. It's understandable and expected that he's totally qualified and kicks amounts of ass all the time. Chuggo is a high school student. If you're a person playing an Atlus game, there's a fair assumption that you did not exactly peak in high school. It's fine for you to admit that, don't feel bad!!!! But now you are faced with a game that is essentially going "hey look at this dude who is in the JAPANESE high school who does everything without trying, everything including fucking a girl that has been scientifically tested to appeal to your greasy interests (for the record, Elizabeth)." You're not in an escapist fantasy anymore, you're strapped to a machine that is going to feed you all the DOUGHNUTS IN THE WORLD. Some gamers are going to be Homer Simpson and be totally fine with this, but at least for me, fantasy was rubbing a little too hard against the fabric of my reality and giving me a boner that I could never tell my girlfriend about.
The biggest issue, as alluded to above, is that Chuggo has no real personality aside from "perfect." He is a tofu god filled with gold, and the game essentially forces you to take over the controls, pretending that you can do everything easily and sexily. This wouldn't be an issue if you could at least impose some of your personality on the character, or at even pretend to impose it when it had no effect on how the game went. But Persona 3 isn't going to have that shit, no fucking sir.
The only time in the game you actually get to express yourself (aside from choosing to pick that cute little mitama as your point man against the sleeping table) is during social link conversations, when you have to say correct things so you can make your personas big and bad when you fuse them up. You might think on your first social link, talking to the guy that wants to fuck his teacher, that the conversations are sort of a test of helping to guide various characters in correctly choosing a path through life via careful logic. But this is absolutely incorrect. Chuggo's role in people's lives in Persona 3 is very simple: enable.
I mean, sure, you could tell the sexually confused French exchange student that sewing a dress for his uncle back home is probably not the best way to stay in Japan, or counsel the young girl that running away from home isn't a good idea, and that choosing which parent she needs to stay with is a choice she has to make. But, then you won't get invisible progress that makes your personas better, culminating in a special MYSTERY PERSONA that could be either utterly game breaking or terrible useless, depending on who you're talking to (indeed, the golden rule of Persona is that the less interesting a given social link is, the better the associated persona arcana is gameplay wise). So if you want to get those shiny mythological figures as interpreted by a back issue of Heavy Metal, you are required to be bland as humanly possible, grunting in vague agreement when people tell you dumb things.
Leigh Alexander said that this phenomenon was "suggesting that all others ever really know of your “self” is the mask you choose to show them." That'd be a good theory if you knew what the fuck your actual self was in Persona 3. As it stands, I think the actual truth is that Persona 3 does, for all intents and purposes, place one into the rule of someone your real-life self could never hope to be even today, then deny you of even experiencing the fruits of that role by forcing your personality out of the equation entirely. In other words, Tartarus ain't just a pretty boring dungeon that comes out of your high school at midnight. Going back to what I was talking about above, Persona 3 takes the two kinds of escapism in video games and forces you to experience how empty they are when the artifice is stripped out. I still beat the game after one hundred twenty hours, mostly due to one of the best fucking soundtracks around, fun battles and art design, and a plot that more often than not fucked with my mind in a good way, but I have to wonder about those people cosplaying as Chuggo.
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