Last night The Boyfriend, who is as enthusiastic about video games as I am about YA, brought home a new (for him) PlayStation 2 game — just as I was about to settle in and watch one of my favorite 90s classics, Empire Records.
But it turned out that Persona 3 by Shin Megami Tensei is every bit as fascinating as a movie, considering how many cut scenes there are. (For the uninitiated, a cut scene is where you don’t actually get to play, but you just have to watch the screen; essentially it’s where much of the story-telling is done in a video game.)
Now, this game came out in August of last year, and is actually the fourth in a series of role-playing games in the Persona series.
But I hadn’t seen it until last night. And as I watched the first forty-five minutes, I thought, “This seems really, really familiar.”
Description: a Japanese video game with beautiful anime graphics in which there is a “Dark Hour” at midnight every night. In the game, normal humans become sarcophagi (!!!) for the duration of the dark hour, but others remain in human form. And then some of them have “potential” … or a unique ability.
Sound familiar? At all?
If not, you haven’t read the Midnighters trilogy by Scott Westerfeld. In which case, go buy The Secret Hour right this very second. Seriously. Stop reading this blog. Turn off your computer. Get thee to a store. Or, you know, order it online. Just get the book.
Persona 3 features a character named Yukari, a hot Japanese schoolgirl who wears shorter skirts than Britney Spears ever dreamed of. Yukari just happens to carry a dagger under her skirt. And she has a gun strapped to her thigh. This girl has the coolest accessories of any video game character I’ve ever seen.
Umm. The point is, there are four high school students, all of whom have special abilities to fight creatures called “Shadows” — I kid you not — that come out during the dark hour. These things look sort of like spiders or maybe … hmm. They’re a bit wormy, and … OMG.
This is where the similarities end. Because some time after midnight, the heroes of this particular game turn into weirdo TRANSFORMERS-like creatures.
Sigh. A video game version of the Midnighters trilogy would have been so much funner.
from Amazon.com right now.