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News Metaphor: ReFantazio announced by Atlus, releasing on Oct 11th [Read Staff Post]

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I love how on LBGTQ+ month, a particularly depressing month where many storefronts and cities are directly banning the use of Pride flags and kowtowing to right-winged terrorists, people are acting as if LGBTQ+ people are the hateful ones because they...-checks notes-...criticize a game director on repeatedly transphobia, homophobia, and misogyny on a video game forum.

And by love, I mean fucking hate.
 
xaszatm said:
I love how on LBGTQ+ month, a particularly depressing month where many storefronts and cities are directly banning the use of Pride flags and kowtowing to right-winged terrorists, people are acting as if LGBTQ+ people are the hateful ones because they...-checks notes-...criticize a game director on repeatedly transphobia, homophobia, and misogyny on a video game forum.

And by love, I mean fucking hate.
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Right? Accusing LGBT folks of "creating hate" because they criticized a bad writer/director when said writer/direction was the one with the bigotry is hilariously backwards and a poor showing in priorities.
 
Donkusei said:
The problem is: no, there is nothing problematic or hateful in these games. You are the people who create hate about people who did not have done or said anything wrong. Persona games are about tolerance and respect. Everything in Catherine: Full Body was about that by the way. Pretty easy to understand even for a child.

Ban me, please, I don't want to talk with crazy people. I thought it was a better place than Resetera.
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This (now banned) person already got quote bombed, but I'll add that it never ceases to bewilder me when we occasionally get people on here who seriously think this place exists to be "Era without the woke". How'd you misread the vibe that badly, lmao...
 
Ah yes, there is absolutelly nothing wrong with Hashino and stuff like this is totally okay (thank you twitter, I didn't know about this interview yet). This also shows, that a lot of problems are more on his side and less on the whole Persona team, at least regarding the female characters in his games. He should have let them cook.

 
Aurc said:
This (now banned) person already got quote bombed, but I'll add that it never ceases to bewilder me when we occasionally get people on here who seriously think this place exists to be "Era without the woke". How'd you misread the vibe that badly, lmao...
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Ironically, wasn't Famiboards built on a foundation at some level that Era wasn't woke enough? šŸ˜‹
 
Donkusei said:
The problem is: no, there is nothing problematic or hateful in these games. You are the people who create hate about people who did not have done or said anything wrong. Persona games are about tolerance and respect. Everything in Catherine: Full Body was about that by the way. Pretty easy to understand even for a child.

Ban me, please, I don't want to talk with crazy people. I thought it was a better place than Resetera.
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I know you've been quote bombed already, but let me say that you and people like you can piss off forever into the sun.
 
Hashino has literally gone on record saying "I've never been able to be friends with a woman" and people will still act like it's a coincidence that all the projects he contributes to are deeply misogynistic.
 
KarmaDesires said:
But is a work of fiction obliged to be morally correct and non-hypocrital? Writers don't necessarily agree with with the actions of their characters, they are or could be exploring emotions that intrigue them.
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There's a difference between characters being hypocritical for the sake of story and characters being hypocritical because they are poorly written. Persona 5 wants to tell a story about positions of power being grossly abused, but it also wants to be otaku-pandering trash for the sake of $$$, so it ends up being a faux-liberal mess. That's how you get the infamous example of Ann being this cautionary tale about predators in the school system while also being the game's fanservice icon. To say nothing about the recurring examples of queerphobia in this series.
 
Donkusei said:
Ban me, please, I don't want to talk with crazy people. I thought it was a better place than Resetera.
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Chud outs themselves and begs to permanently be removed from the forum, no effort from the staff required. A fine present for Pride month!

Paxie said:
There's a difference between characters being hypocritical for the sake of story and characters being hypocritical because they are poorly written. Persona 5 wants to tell a story about positions of power being grossly abused, but it also wants to be otaku-pandering trash for the sake of $$$, so it ends up being a faux-liberal mess. That's how you get the infamous example of Ann being this cautionary tale about predators in the school system while also being the game's fanservice icon. To say nothing about the recurring examples of queerphobia in this series.
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Yes, exactly. Persona 4 for example is supposed to be about "accepting your true self"... unless you're queer. The constant gay jokes thrown at Kanji by Yosuke (including one where he talks about how he's scared Kanji will rape him in his sleep) directly contradict the main point of the game, and it's not Hashino working through and trying to explore his own homophobic thoughts, it's literally just what he finds funny. Yosuke is positioned as a sort of "everyman" character, and the player is supposed to agree with his views, hence why they're never questioned or treated with any seriousness by the game.

I post this mainly for the benefit of those who are unfamiliar with, or simply never realized how deeply Hashino hates queer people, but I think it's pretty easy to understand.
 
Donkusei said:
The problem is: no, there is nothing problematic or hateful in these games. You are the people who create hate about people who did not have done or said anything wrong. Persona games are about tolerance and respect. Everything in Catherine: Full Body was about that by the way. Pretty easy to understand even for a child.

Ban me, please, I don't want to talk with crazy people. I thought it was a better place than Resetera.
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pack-watch-rip-bozo.gif
 
Clov said:
Chud outs themselves and begs to permanently be removed from the forum, no effort from the staff required. A fine present for Pride month!



Yes, exactly. Persona 4 for example is supposed to be about "accepting your true self"... unless you're queer. The constant gay jokes thrown at Kanji by Yosuke (including one where he talks about how he's scared Kanji will rape him in his sleep) directly contradict the main point of the game, and it's not Hashino working through and trying to explore his own homophobic thoughts, it's literally just what he finds funny. Yosuke is positioned as a sort of "everyman" character, and the player is supposed to agree with his views, hence why they're never questioned or treated with any seriousness by the game.

I post this mainly for the benefit of those who are unfamiliar with, or simply never realized how deeply Hashino hates queer people, but I think it's pretty easy to understand.
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Yeah, Kanji's and Naoto's entire arc in P4 is literally "you can be whoever you are as long as you're not queer" and we have clowns here telling us Persona games are about tolerance.
 
Leo said:
Yeah, Kanji's and Naoto's entire arc in P4 is literally "you can be whoever you are as long as you're not queer" and we have clowns here telling us Persona games are about tolerance.
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Persona 4 is proof you can sell literal hate speech to liberals as long as you dress it up in enough rainbows and ~good vibes~.

Tbh that whole debacle is one of the main reasons I'm more outspoken about Hashino's work. For whatever reason he seems to get a pass moreso than other creators because he also likes to ride these otherwise positive messages and ideas, despite a lot of those messages being surrounded by so much nastiness that undermine them. I get the appeal of the games he works on (the style, the gameplay loop, the characters), and like I don't want to begrudge anybody who wants to reclaim parts of them as a problematic fave or whatever. It's just very jarring the level of basic criticism his scripts manage to dodge, especially in places that claim to be more friendly and thoughtful to women/LGBTQ. I would challenge more people into Persona/Catherine to really think about the ways in which the writing conflicts, fails, or gets downright gross and pandering as a result of his really skewed and harmful worldview. Then ask is that worth celebrating at the expense of those it's alienating or exploiting?

That's why I'm approaching this one at best cautiously. His writing is typically pretty gross in a way that ruins otherwise pretty cool looking things and it really bums me out. It bums me out even more to see the pretty cool looking things are worth so much that it pushes out 4 games worth of consistently terrible writing at the expense of others. Maybe I'm wrong and this is the one where things change, which would make me pretty happy to see. I just think it would be really foolish to expect anything otherwise after the last 15 or so years of this same old shit.
 
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BotenAnna said:
Persona 4 is proof you can sell literal hate speech to liberals as long as you dress it up in enough rainbows and ~good vibes~.

Tbh that whole debacle is one of the main reasons I'm more outspoken about Hashino's work. For whatever reason he seems to get a pass moreso than other creators because he also likes to ride these otherwise positive messages and ideas, despite a lot of those messages being surrounded by so much nastiness that undermine them. I get the appeal of the games he works on (the style, the gameplay loop, the characters), and like I don't want to begrudge anybody who wants to reclaim parts of them as a problematic fave or whatever. It's just very jarring the level of basic criticism his scripts manage to dodge, especially in places that claim to be more friendly and thoughtful to women/LGBTQ. I would challenge more people into Persona/Catherine to really think about the ways in which the writing conflicts, fails, or gets downright gross and pandering as a result of his really skewed and harmful worldview. Then ask is that worth celebrating at the expense of those it's alienating or exploiting?

That's why I'm approaching this one at best cautiously. His writing is typically pretty gross in a way that ruins otherwise pretty cool looking things and it really bums me out. It bums me out even more to see the pretty cool looking things are worth so much that it pushes out 4 games worth of consistently terrible writing at the expense of others. Maybe I'm wrong and this is the one where thing's change, which would make me pretty happy to see. I just think it would be really foolish to expect anything otherwise after the last 15 or so years of this same old shit.
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Most people havenā€™t played P4 since probably Golden over a decade ago, so I think a lot of it is people just not remembering what the game is like with how it characterizes queerness. It was also just very typical in that era to have jokes at queer peopleā€™s expenses, looking at popular comedy movies from that era like Hangover, Wedding Crashers, etc. That isnā€™t to say itā€™s more ā€œokayā€ because P4 came out 15 years ago, but general lack of understand back then + nostalgia + forgetfulness makes up for a killer combo.

Obviously itā€™s still something Hashino indulges in but 4 is definitely the worst on this topic in Persona (I havenā€™t played Catherine so canā€™t weigh in on it). But I think the majority of cishet people just donā€™t think about the nasty subtext in a RPG they havenā€™t played in years and only remember the good vibes.
 
Mekanos said:
Most people havenā€™t played P4 since probably Golden over a decade ago, so I think a lot of it is people just not remembering what the game is like with how it characterizes queerness. It was also just very typical in that era to have jokes at queer peopleā€™s expenses, looking at popular comedy movies from that era like Hangover, Wedding Crashers, etc. That isnā€™t to say itā€™s more ā€œokayā€ because P4 came out 15 years ago, but general lack of understand back then + nostalgia + forgetfulness makes up for a killer combo.
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The perception among fans of the series hasn't widely shifted even with the most recent rerelease earlier this year. Around October last year a chunk of Persona Twitter harassed a trans streamer because she considered dropping P4G after playing through Kanji's arc. For some it isn't just a "lack of understand back then" or forgetfulness; it's willful ignorance today.
 
BotenAnna said:
Well maybe they should start thinking about that stuff.
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You and I both know most cishet people don't think about this stuff at all lol

MondoMega said:
The perception among fans of the series hasn't widely shifted even with the most recent rerelease earlier this year. Around October last year a chunk of Persona Twitter harassed a trans streamer because she considered dropping P4G after playing through Kanji's arc. For some it isn't just a "lack of understand back then" or forgetfulness; it's willful ignorance today.
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There's always going to be shitheads playing and talking about these games, that's nothing new. But for most people they are going to be too tied up in their memories and experiences with the original game to approach the cognitive dissonance. Also as a queer person I default to the notion that most cishet people don't know or care about this stuff even if they proclaim they do, so that's nothing new there.
 
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Leo said:
Yeah, Kanji's and Naoto's entire arc in P4 is literally "you can be whoever you are as long as you're not queer" and we have clowns here telling us Persona games are about tolerance.
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It's funny, I remember when Persona 4 first came out, there was a lot of LGBT people who identified with Kanji and Naoto. Then, when P4G and the re-releases of P4G came out, a lot of people coming to the realization that the game was actually really homophobic and transphobic because

1. In the four years between release and re-release, a lot better LGBT content was released, lessoning the need for problamatic faves.
2. Many people reading the dialogue and realizing that the narrative and script wanted to make fun of gays and transfolk.
3. Golden adding SO MUCH HETERONORMATIVE CIS SHIT

God Person 4 sucks so much. Persona 5 isn't better but like...Jesus is P4 such a goddamn slap to the face.

Though I guess, the SMT series as a whole has problems. There is Toki form IV Apocalypse, the weird implication that you're going to Adam and Eve the world with your surragate mother in II, just...a lot of problamatic stuff all around.
 
If there's something positive that I can say about P4 is that, while the LGBT content is handled pretty poorly, at least that wasn't the main theme of the game.

In P5 though, the main theme is all about rebelling against the injustices of society and that idea is betrayed pretty much from the frikking beginning.
 
Comic Obsessed said:
If there's something positive that I can say about P4 is that, while the LGBT content is handled pretty poorly, at least that wasn't the main theme of the game.

In P5 though, the main theme is all about rebelling against the injustices of society and that idea is betrayed pretty much from the frikking beginning.
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I disagree, itā€™s a lot more in your face in P4, with two dungeons (Kanji and Naoto) having full on queer panic themes.
 
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So... just a personal side note from me, in honour of the season: stop calling it homophobia and transphobia. They're not scared of queers, they're engaged in hateful acts and dialogue. Racism, I'm led to understand, used to be referred to as a "phobia" prior to someone coining the more appropriate phrases of racism and white supremacy. I recommend "cishet supremacy", personally.

The weird part about these positions is that it's hype poison and it keeps happening. Even leaving out their growth markets in the West, in Japan (and Asia on the whole, really), you'll see commentary against these awful narrative traits in Atlus' work (less so on the cishet supremacy front and more on the misogyny front, but you will see both), with that commentary growing more and more as time goes on. So the maintenance of those traits in their work aren't doing Atlus any damn favours and should be addressed quite rapidly.

I know that some folks would only be happy if they pushed Hashino out of Atlus and they're within their right to want that, but, as has been pointed out by @Mendinso and others, this is a culture issue within Atlus as a whole. That in mind, I personally wouldn't be against Sega stepping in and overruling Atlus creatively on these topics along with some mandatory inclusivity education at Atlus to see if that sticks, at least as a first attempt.
 
ILikeFeet said:
I expect P6 to be made on UE5

and maybe the game can have some proper shadows
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You think U5? Interesting, that would make mataphor their last game on their engine (seems like the p5 engine).

But yeah, I've seen better shadows in pokemon lol.
 
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This game looks terrible, but it looks terrible in a way that suggests more a lack of programming skill than aiming at weak hardware so I would guess that's why it's not coming to Switch.

FyXGD1HacAA35ve.png
 
Hauke_von_Arding said:
Ah yes, there is absolutelly nothing wrong with Hashino and stuff like this is totally okay (thank you twitter, I didn't know about this interview yet). This also shows, that a lot of problems are more on his side and less on the whole Persona team, at least regarding the female characters in his games. He should have let them cook.

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Huh. Well now.

Shame. I mean fine, from an aesthetic point of view she is easy on the eyes (first knee jerk reaction from some straight dude, have to admit) I get why, but now Iā€™m so interested in how she looked in the original designs.

Her story in P5 was one of my favorites, because she was more than meets the eye. I would have loved if they would have gone all out. Would be even more interesting.
 
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Ozzie said:
Metaphor is coming to all platforms including PS4 except for Switch.
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RIP to everyone who thought the PS4 was going to be phased out by 2025 šŸ˜‚

ILikeFeet said:
I expect P6 to be made on UE5
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I think it'll be Unreal Engine based for sure. But I'd be more inclined to believe it's going to be UE4 since that's what 3R is running on. Atlus is traditionally very slow to migrate to new stacks and hardware, so I can't see them making the upgrade just yet. And given how stylistic their games are I'm not entirely sure they need UE5.
 
shoptroll said:
RIP to everyone who thought the PS4 was going to be phased out by 2025 šŸ˜‚


I think it'll be Unreal Engine based for sure. But I'd be more inclined to believe it's going to be UE4 since that's what 3R is running on. Atlus is traditionally very slow to migrate to new stacks and hardware, so I can't see them making the upgrade just yet. And given how stylistic their games are I'm not entirely sure they need UE5.
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I expect UE5 because of timing. I think P6 hit the ground running relatively recently, which would allow them to move up to UE5 before anything in danger of breaking came to fruition. and style wouldn't be the reason for moving to UE5 but to take advantage of new features that could make their development easier. UE4 won't be getting support anymore so if their work is yet minimal, it might be in their interest to move up
 
I really love the look of this. I'm glad it wasn't just canned, something I assumed considering how long it has been. 2024 looking fantastic and this is a big highlight for me.
 
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I dunno, I think the art is pretty hideous and that's usually what carries Hashino's games.
 
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