Tag: psychology

Final Thoughts (for now) on Persona 5 Royal

Can your heart be stolen? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

I recently finally finished Persona 5 Royal. Technically, I had to go through the first part twice seeing as I got a bad ending the first time. Why? I didn’t focus enough on relationships. That has to be done to make sure you get a good ending. Quite counter-intuitive for a JRPG.

The Persona series is made by a company called Atlus. This is my first step into the game. Why start here? This is the one I had heard the most about and when a friend gave me a gift card, this is the one that was on sale at the time. Fortunately, it’s like Final Fantasy in that all the games are stand-alone. You don’t need to have played the others.

The story starts with you being a teenage boy on probation for a crime that you were wrongfully accused of and having a kind coffeeshop owner take you in and give you an attic room. You go to school and see a guy who you learn is the volleyball coach being quite nasty with some of the students. You also meet a friend who tells you about the coach.

Not too much later, it’s still your first day and you suddenly find yourself in this dark castle with your new friend. The coach is there and he’s not just a coach, but he’s a king, and you and your friend are hostages. It is in this situation that you find that you awake to your persona, which is where the mask comes off in the game and you see who you really are. That is where you enter into combat and through another friend you meet in the metaverse, a humanoid type cat, you learn more about this world.

The goal of the game then becomes finding people who are criminals and have highly distorted desires. Their view of themselves becomes so distorted that it becomes a palace. Your goal is make a route to the treasure at the heart of the palace, but before it can be stolen from them, you have to send them a calling card in the real world. After that, the final battle with that person’s shadow begins and when an appointed time has past, they have a change of heart and confess their sins and accept what comes their way.

Put all of this on hold.

So first off, the music I find in it to be simply incredible. I can easily put the main battle theme on extended and just keep listening. It is that catchy. A player really gets jazzed up with excitement when a battle starts.

Overall also, it’s not much of a challenge, though granted I was playing on normal difficulty. The mechanics aren’t too over the top to learn. It’s gentle in how it guides you.

As someone on the spectrum, the way relationships work I find incredible. As you build relationships with characters, including party members, you start to form bonds and you get abilities that can be used to help you on your quest. Answer the way the person prefers and you build up your bond better with them. As someone on the spectrum, I found this engaging. For instance, I learned when I talk to a female in the game, focus on how she feels when I choose a response before giving “advice” to help her. It was a joy to me to see the indication I had given the correct response and now in the real world, I often think about how I interact with people I know and can picture my own relationship with them improving.

Speaking of the characters, they are all really fleshed-out. You see a close-up of their face when you communicate with them and you get to know them and their stories. Finishing the game can be like wrapping up an adventure with some friends. I also liked interacting with the therapist figure. In some ways, it would be like my own counseling sessions.

There is a lot of psychology and philosophy and even theology in this game. Jungian thought plays a big role and the personas come from pop culture and religion. There are even Christian figures. If that is a problem to you, i understand. I just came to understand this is how some people see things and I want to understand their view.

Now to go back and get to the best part of all, the story. The more I played, I was in the mood of “I want to see what happens next.” There were so many flashbacks that too place that I thought “I can’t believe I didn’t notice that then.” The story is by far the biggest draw. I even used a skill from building up bonds to have battles finish automatically for me just so I could get more of the story. It’s that good.

Yet now I am wondering “Why can’t Christians make games like this?” We have a story to tell as well. We need Christian game developers to rise up and tell that story in a way that the world can enjoy. We need a new C.S. Lewis who has a heart for games.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

Why I Am Enjoying Persona 5 Royal Edition

What makes this game so appealing? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

A short while back, a friend of mine gave me a $30 gift card to the Nintendo Eshop. (Anyone wanting to repeat his gift is welcome to!) One of the games I bought was Persona 5 Royal that was on sale. I have come to know it as a popular RPG series so I wanted to give it a shot.

I’m quite glad I did.

So firstly, with RPG styles, it’s one of my favorites. Turn-based. I get to think out my strategy and see how everything works together. That being said, it has to be more than just a turn-based game to get my notice and to get to this blog.

So some minor spoilers, but it’s just for the first level. You start out in a point in the story that I have yet to get to, and then the game is a flashback of when you arrived at an academy in Japan with a reputation, apparently undeserved, of a delinquent. As you are at your school though, you find yourself in a different world of sorts.

It is like a castle and the king is of all people, the volleyball coach at the school. You meet a character in the castle who becomes an ally and soon meet others who wind up in the castle with you. What you learn is that these are worlds that are based on the cognitive perceptions of people with really distorted views of the world and especially themselves.

Turns out, this volleyball coach is actually abusive to the students and likes to take advantage of the female students. Yes. This is really deep stuff going on. The first mission then is to go into his palace, which is the name of the cognitive dwellings these people have, and steal his treasure, which should lead to him confessing his sins in the real world.

The psychological side of it all is quite fascinating and I understand it borrows a lot from Jung. I haven’t read Jung, but I did just find his complete works on Kindle for less than a dollar so I’m going to take care of that. The game involves characters facing up to reality as it is and embracing their “personas”. Your main character is the only one who can embrace multiple personas and switch between them and even fuse and sacrifice them later on for different effects, including all-new personas.

The battle is not the only part that matters. As I am going through the game, I have to build up other attributes, namely guts, kindness, charm, proficiency, and knowledge. Not only that, I have to build up relationships with various people in the world and the more I do that, the more my skills in the “metaverse”, as the cognitive world is called, and other such places improves.

As someone on the spectrum, I am finding this fascinating as a prompt will pop up asking what I want to say at a certain time and I am given various options. It’s a really easy way to learn to converse seeing as I have all the time in the world to think. I have to try to think how each person I talk to will respond to what I say. The goal is to build up the relationships after all.

I have yet to finish so if you have, please do not give me spoilers on it. I am quite enjoying it now and that is leaving me thinking about my own relationships in the real world. I can see the people I know in my own life and think about improving my bonds with them. Odds are whenever I finish reading the work of Jung, I will come back and visit this some more as well.

So if you like RPGs and you want something with a psychological and philosophical style to it, give the Persona series a try. You also don’t have to play previous games to understand later ones. This one is the first I have played and I am understanding it just fine.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

Book Plunge: The Mind of the Spirit

What do I think of Craig Keener’s book published by Baker Academic? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

You can find many books on the thought of Paul, but how many books can you find on the thinking of Paul? We can say that we know what it is that he thought, but what about what he said about how to think? That is a topic that has been neglected largely, but thanks to the work of Craig Keener, we now have a dense scholarly work on the subject.

Keener looks at passages mainly in the undisputed Pauline epistles, though there is a brief look at Colossians 3:1-2. In these passages, Keener examines the way the ancients saw thinking and how Paul would fit in with them. The goal is to walk away with a renewed interest in proper thinking and especially in this case, proper Christian thinking.

There are also numerous excursuses throughout the book so you can see what is thought about a certain topic in the ancient world. There’s also a look at what the ancients thought about the soul. In addition, you will find a section stating advice for counselors and others on how to use the material.

Keener doesn’t leave any stone unturned. He is incredibly thorough seeking to cover every minutiae of a subject that he writes about. You will find a long section on Romans 7 for instance and whether it describes Paul’s own thoughts about a struggle against sin or something else.

The advice given to counselors is also good. Keener wants this book to be able to help people with psychological problems. It could be used also to help all of us as we all need to have some renewed thinking. None of us thinks entirely the way we should.

Keener also points out that it’s too easy for people on one side to lower people on the other. In some circles in Christian thinking, it is thought that not having an education is in fact a virtue. That means you’re more prone to just believe what the Bible says without man’s ideas getting in the way. On the other end, it’s easy for those on the more intellectual side to look at the behavior of more emotional people and reduce it to emotionalism. The more emotional thinking can be in danger of a religion based on impulses without content. The more logical thinker can be in danger of a religion with content, but no passion.

The truth is, we need both. That’s one reason I’m happy to be married to a woman who is more emotional than I am. We can better balance each other out that way and frankly, sometimes, her way of looking at something is much simpler and can see a small detail I’ve overlooked.

In recommending changes I would have liked to have seen, Keener does end with a section on advice to counselors and pastors and such, but I think it would have been good to end each section with a little statement on application. Many times, I was getting a lot of content, but no application. Something on each section I think could have further helped the process along.

While the excursuses were also interesting, they could be seen as distracting too. Does it matter to a counselor to know about dying and rising gods? For me as an apologist, it definitely matters, but I wonder if that could have made a counselor more hesitant.

Still, I did enjoy the reading and I think Keener would definitely agree with me on one aspect of all the work he’s done. Easier said than done. We can know a lot more about how to think better, but the school of hard knocks can make it hard to pass the exam. Hopefully we’ll all learn to improve more.

In Christ,
Nick Peters