OMG RPG

Actually, they HAVE announced how Persona 4 Persona summoning works. They did it way back when the game was first announced in fact. You have cards with the Persona on them that each member of the team destroys in their own specific way, be it slashing, crushing or in one case, drop-kicking. The symbolic suicide in Persona 3 was exclusive to that. The various other Persona games generally have you obtain the power of Persona during a plot event and keep it as such.

Damn. I was hoping for something involving C4 charges shaped like animals, ala CaddyShack.

This could have been a insightful entry if it had the benefit of five or ten minutes of research on Wikipedia rather than just reading the Penny-Arcade strip and posting a video.

Thanks for the opinion Shining, but for game announcements I tend to vote for the "lets get talking about it" tack rather than what you expected. There is by no means a moritorium on Persona 4 posts simply because I posted a 3 line snippet to let people know that the game is coming to the US in December. If you aren't interested in hearing about RPG news in the format we're posting it here, perhaps you should look for your RPG news elsewhere.

It's not that there's anything wrong with inviting discussion. I think it's more that most people who would normally want to discuss Persona 4 might be turned off from doing due to a lack of taste displayed in those three lines.

To kick off conversation, you might have asked "What aspects of the human psyche do you think it will explore?" or even something basic like "What mythologies would you like to see represented?" Instead, you basically reduced something that many people treasure deeply to its least interesting and most gimmicky feature.

I don't have an attachment to Persona myself but I know how this post would make me feel if I did (read: alienated and insulted). Even if all you want to do is lead a discussion, you still need to present at least a passing knowledge of the thing to make sure that the people you're inviting feel welcome there. Otherwise it just feels like you're making fun of the thing they care about.

I fail to see the insult here. People who have truly played these games, people who enjoy Shin Mega Tensei would see this as a joke. I mean seriously the stuff they put you through in the game is borderline cthulu-like in nature. If this post insults you then perhaps you have been playing the wrong game all these years. As for me I am getting my trauma kit ready, a tub of chocolate ice cream, and a therapist on standby. Bring it!

I think that's a bit unfair to say that your usual posts are that way. When Diablo 3 was announced, your initial announcement post included a fairly detailed description of what exactly made up the game's introduction. Here, it's a one-line sentence going "This game will be released in Decmeber" and ignoring any relevent facts about it, including information that can and will be found quite easily with a five-second search. I mean, the game is due out in Japan this week, and almost all of the basic gameplay features and character information has been released via various magazine scans and information. A brief summary of the concept and backstory would have been fine, but instead your post included an outright lie. "No word yet on what sort of detestable things they'll make us do to ourselves to unlock our personas, but self-multilation is not out of the question" which is quite unclear with ten seconds of research.

It's pretty insulting indeed, actually. Persona and SMT games in general tend to be very intelligent and thought provoking and use their symbolism in very intelligent ways indeed, especially when compared to games like, say, Xenosaga, which toss in random references just to have random references.

This is akin to referencing, say, Schindler's List as "the movie where that guy freaks out over not selling his watch or something." Yes, that scene exists in the movie, but by explaining it that way, you've proven that you've either never seen the movie or what actually was occurring onscreen flew over your head so far as to be laughable.

I don't particularly care about the content. I care about the derision it shows FOR the subject matter. Maybe Mandifesto is right and I should avoid the website, but I've generally found the other OMG-(x) websites to be quite readable and, am quite obviously, an avid RPG fan. I would prefer to see this website improve instead of abandoning it, and by that regard, I plan to offer constructive critcism wherever possible. I would hope instead of attempting to drive readers away, you might realize that posting ten posts on a western RPG announcement and then one informative line and two offensive lines about a Japanese RPG announcement might not be the best way to handle things.

Really, ImpAtom? Comparing Persona 3 to Schindler's List, are we? I wonder how many RPG fans were put to death in internment camps for their love of the Persona series? Oddly enough, I cant seem to find that specific holocaust in the history books.

..It's a movie about the Holocaust, Arturis. They made it in 1993. If you'd read a history book while looking for the actual Holocaust, you'd discover that it ended in 1945, almost fifty years too late for anyone to go to the camps for liking it. I've certainly never heard about any List-fan purges, myself, though please enlighten me if there's been some pogrom against people who like Spielberg.

What ImpAtom was trying to do is make a comparison between two media works that are similar for two reasons: they're both somewhat controversial, and shallow people continually refuse to display understanding of the metaphor behind some things in both. What you did is much like the original post did for Persona 3, which is kind of instructive. In taking one item out of a fairly long and somewhat complex piece and completely misunderstanding both its significance, and therefore his point, by not actually attempting to (or simply being unable to) understand the whole thing, you've shown your ignorance about the overarching idea. It's basically the same as Persona 3 and the Evokers.