The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Yo. Catherine. Katherine. Many, many blocks, and pushing them. It was a game I was certainly looking forward to! I preordered it! I bought it new, something I hadn’t really done since Portal 2. The idea of having the main conflict in the game being known vs unknown, exciting vs expected… it seemed like the Persona 4 team was the dudes to do it.

Basically, I really wanted to like Catherine, and it let me down.

I’m just going to talk flat-out, and a lot of the game is ruined if it’s spoiled, so, you know. Don’t read on if you don’t want to be spoiled.

There’s not a lot of super-huge problems with the game. I actually don’t have a problem with the block-pushing puzzle sequences, for the most part. It is interesting enough, as a puzzle game, to keep my interest. Sure, there are issues. Checkpoints are a bit too sparse on some stages. The “boss fights” can be overwhelmingly frustrating sometimes, as the puzzles themselves can be hard enough without having someone constantly attacking you. But seriously, for the most part, it’s designed well enough. You could hang a full game on that gameplay, no problem.

Similarly, there’s no huge problems with the stuff outside the puzzle elements. While Vincent is very much an Anime Protagonist, as opposed to a real person like you’d hope, his story, given that it’s a bit unrealistic (I’m not talking about the magic part of the story, just his character) but not out of place for an Anime Character, is alright. I found it interesting that they painted both Catherine and Katherine as fairly terrible people. I very quickly came to loathe both characters, which shed an interesting light on the decision of who to back, certainly. In the end, I backed Katherine, because while I hated her, Vincent obviously liked her enough to stick with her this long, and it seemed stupid to drop it now. In any case, when you have control, and are texting and making decisions, it’s pretty neat. The texting system, while maybe a little cumbersome to use, sets a good tone, and that’s obviously more important to the game. The strange “Golden Playhouse” framing narrative worked for me, too. I’d watch another “episode” of Golden Playhouse.

However, the game doesn’t learn some lessons from the Personas that came before. One of the reasons I loved Persona 3 and 4 so much is that it was constantly flipping you between the two modes: life sim, and dungeon crawl. If you were tired of life sim, it would be about the time to go back to the dungeon, and when you were tired of dungeon, it would be about the time you were out of supplies and needed to go back to the life sim anyway. It kept me really engaged with the story, because it broke it up with entertaining combat and things of that nature in a way that seemed natural.
Catherine just doesn’t do this. You have very small segments of story, and then very long segments of block puzzles. I enjoyed the block puzzles, but after doing like 2 levels, I was pretty done with them and wanted to get back to the plot. Most of the time, though, you’d have four or five to do in a row before you could get back to story bits. That really felt like a bad plan.

Also, the story just isn’t dynamic enough. This is a fairly short game, one where you are supposed to make decisions. However, the only decisions that really matter are those you make on the climb to the last boss, from what I understand. Other than that, as long as your meter is on one side or the other that you’re gunning for, you can do whatever you want. Vincent’s decisions don’t affect the story until the last few. Things like Vincent trying to break up with Catherine happen even if you’re trying to side with her. It’s kind of stupid. Playing through, trying to be with Katherine, I didn’t notice. The story was very much structured for me to be making those decisions. If I had been going the other way, though, I’d be a bit annoyed. I had assumed that, since the block puzzles are so generic, they could make a story that had crazy branching paths, but they really didn’t. It’s a huge, huge missed opportunity, and it certainly doesn’t make me want to go back to the game again.

I guess I should be selfish and talk about the one story bit I want to talk about: Erica. The reveal that she’s an MtF transsexual at the end threw me for a loop, but it was kind of nice, too. Toby was a whiny bitch about losing his virginity to her, which was stupid, and made me want to punch him. You fucked her, so obviously there wasn’t any REAL reason for you to be complaining, asshole! But before I got too mad at the game, and not just at the character, I thought back to how she was treated throughout the story. Everyone who was not Toby knew of her past, since they all went to school together, but they still treated her like a woman and a friend. Though no longer “one of the guys” she certainly wasn’t pushed away from their social circle. They respected her as she was. Sure, they tried to keep Toby from dating her so the stupid complaining that happened wouldn’t happen, because they knew he’d be disappointed, but they didn’t treat her as a lesser person or a freak. She was a friend, but just one that it would be pretty weird to date, so they didn’t want their other friend to get involved in all that. In the end, I suppose that’s a pretty good portrayal.

All that aside though, in the end, I just didn’t feel any sparkle from this game. It’s not even a rough gem. It just feels rough. It’s a shame that a game which is doing its best to treat topics like sexuality and relationships with respect just doesn’t have the gameplay to back it up. It seems rushed and incomplete. If you’re vaguely interested in it, rent it. I wouldn’t recommend anyone else buy the game, certainly. It’s just not that good.