Title: Persona Quest: Another Calling
Author: Crimson Moon
Rating: T
Genre: general
Status: WIP
Fandom: Persona
Words: 180k
Links: https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/persona-quest-another-calling.32026/

This is an original quest set in the far future of Persona. The world on 2076 is a scary place of teenagers, hidden shadow shenanigans and a teenager thrust into a new highschool where he has to fight wolves and monsters.

The quest sticks a little bit too hard to persona conventions that don't always translate perfectly to the quest format.

However.

The characters are great. They're well fleshed out and unique. This actually feels like the gradual discovery you feel when playing a Persona game.

I cannot recommend this enough.

5/5

 

Pretty good and the writers keeps improving. There's a marked increase of quality and it's very good at reproducing the Persona feel. 5/5 out from me.

 

Can someone read this without much knowledge of Persona?

 

Yes. It eases you gently into it.

 

I couldn't get into this. Stuck it out for maybe 50k words but couldn't go any further. The writing is stilted, characters erratic, and the quest format bugged me the whole way through. I found it unusually more intrusive than normal, and felt like it was having a massive impact on the quality of writing - not just the formatting, but the piecemeal, miserly description and boring dialogue.

On the plus side, some of the trappings of worldbuilding we see in the background are captured relatively well, and it goes at a decent pace to set the reader up for introduction into the 'other world' of fantasy which unfolds through the story. If the author had taken a little more care and changed up some minor details, this could have been a mediocre original novel rather than a mediocre quest.

3/5

 

Unlike what I see to be the majority opinion of a lot of people on this site, I really do enjoy quests - with a talented writer it allows them to make the story incredibly engaging and play with the preconceptions of the audience and the strong emphasis on characterisation that most quests follow is pretty appealing to me. With that said - I don't think this should have been a quest at all.

All the choices offered fall into one of two categories: either one side is clearly a far better choice than the other, or the choice doesn't change anything at all, which is a pretty big peeve of mine when it comes to quests. The writing gets better as the quest develops but still isn't anything to write home about by the later stages while the start is pretty awkward to read. There are certainly some good ideas here but I would rather see this rewritten as a normal fanfic rather than a quest and with a structure properly laid out beforehand.

3/5

 

I've read this up to the newest chapter and I must say that I was disappointed. Despite what posts above say, I didn't see any significant rise in quality, it seemed to stay on pretty much on the same level, which wasn't high.

The story takes place in the year 2076, which we basically only know because we were told so, and because of the references to the old Personas. But aside from that it could be just as well set five years or so ago and not fifty in the future. Characters use everyday tech less than we use today, and there are no signs of any real progress since now. It seems that it was moved there so the author could have the police setting without pre-existing characters interfering and haven't put any more thought into it.

Speaking of the characters, I have many problems with them. The first is the protagonist - his thoughts compromising almost exclusively from anger and wanting to hit things make anything but interesting. The supporting cast is a mixed bag, but too many are just a bunch of cliches put together - even by the standards of Hoshinosonas. There is also another problem - expies of preexisting Persona characters. Kurai is Ikitsuki except (probably) good, and Ichinose is Mitsuru except bad. They are not even social link characters, but they are important enough for this to be annoying. There are some interesting characters too, of course, like Watanabe with her mysteries, or Genji with his yet unexplored change.

Regarding social links, there is this weird thing where I feel like the story was planned by the two separate people. On one hand, you have Lovers slink actually rooted in the cart meaning, on the other Devil is assigned to the character who should have Strength and Strength is assigned to the character who should have Devil. And for some reason, Aeon is marked as the 21st major arcana when it's 20th. On one hand, there is a reference to mainline with Magatsushi, on the other ESP think that Sheol is the closest thing to Hell. On one hand, the beginning brings a lot of references to Satomisonas, Nyarlothep presence included, on the other, it's full-on Hoshinosona from then on, with nothing from the three first games mentioned.

Onto the quest aspect. I must admit that I'm not really knowledgeable about them, with Matou Shinji series being the only one I've actually read more than snippets (and I find "playing" them frustrating, it annoys me when other people vote differently than me). Still, what I like about Matou Shinji, and what I think is the strength of quests, is the possibility of derailing plot in various different directions. Yet in Another Calling, it feels like the only choices that actually mattered to the story were your initial background, the decision on committing betrayal, and dealing with Ichonose. That's not a lot for 180k words of fic. The life sim part feels soulless, with most of the slink events feeling like fillers. It's not an inherent fault of going day-by-day, Persona 3 Remix proves that you can do that and still keep things interesting. It's just the author not having much of idea what to do with them. With the railroaded plot and fillery daily life, I must agree with earlier posters - the fic would work better as normal fic and not quest.

Let's go into writing for a moment. It's serviceable, but it has some major problems. Firstly the combat is pretty bad. The descriptions are too chaotic and don't really make the fights seem exciting. Secondly there is the problem of eschewing characters description in favour of using pics of existing characters from anime and games. Thirdly, there is a matter of weeabooism. I don't like them in translations, I like them even less in fiction that is originally written in English, and I despise them when translator or author is inconsistent in using them. And unfortuantely, the third is very much the case here.

Before I finish, few more things in regards to the story. And here we are coming back to the lack of originality in terms of franchise. We fight embodiment of Seven Deadly Sins like in Persona 5 and the human antagonists' goal seem to be very P3-like so far. Which is weird, because the author seems to really take the popular alignment theory to heart. For those who don't know it, it states that Persona 1 and 2s were about fighting against chaos, 3 and 4 against neutrality and 5 is about fighting against law and so will be 6. With how numerous are the references to law and how it's set against the protag you would think that human antagonists would also represent it, yet from the brief scenes, we've seen they seem to want the end of everything. Well, we will see. Or rather those will continue to read it will, because I don't really feel compelled to.

4/10