My Ideas: The Distrubing Freudian Elements Not Included

All it took was one vision.

Earlier this year, I played Persona 3, which managed to inspire me creatively more than any game this year, at least until Megaman 9. Like Symphony of the Night and Final Fantasy Tactics in the generation before it, I made two conclusions after playing it. One, it was a seminal, exceptional game among the most fascinating I've ever played. Two, I could do better. I could, at the very least, try. Persona 3 combined two of the most addicting game genres; the self-improvement, dating game and the semi-random dungeon crawl. By alternating the two and making the success in one essential to improvement in the other, it increases the desire for the one you miss. The game's time limit loomed over continuously. You had a month of game-time to prepare for each inevitable boss and less than a year of game-time to not only beat the game, but maximize the relationships with as many people as possible.

But the game always defied both your assumptions about how much time you have and suspension of disbelief. In most of the game, you could improve relations both when people call you, asking you to hang out on weekends, but for months on end, near the end of the game, this option vanishes. Other times, you get even less of a warning; your month-long plan could be ruined when your dorm-mates force you into summer school, for example. Meanwhile, while your friends are perfectly free to call you whenever the game allows it, you can never call them. As for the relationships themselves, they were too primitive at best and frustrating at worst. The game encourages you to "max out" as many relationships as possible, except five of those relationships are with women you date, meaning you have to basically cheat your way through multiple girlfriends at a time to actually succeed, which is made even sleazier when three of them are dorm-mates and members of your party.

Apocryphal Junction was an attempt to create my own, semi-Westernized interpretation of the same concept. The first thing that had to go was the Persona series' use of mythological creatures, from demons to gods, as allies. I'm already hitting too close to home for my comfort; I couldn't steal that as well. I started working with other themed monsters while still maintaining my original plan to make monster relations the same as human ones. "Date a succubus" was part of the original concept, after all. I eventually decided on the four elementals (earth, fire, water, and air) and combined with a completely different origin than mythology. Instead, psychology ruled the world of this game, and creatures were a combination of one or more of the above elements and the four conflicting identifications of the Myers-Briggs test, which I had recently tried out myself at the time.

The game took place in a typical small town in America with the secret that parts of it (and all of the high school) actually inhabited the alternate plane of reality called Apocryphal Junction, an amalgam of many other planes absorbed into a much larger community. The Earth is being considered as a candidate towards joining this united society, which the characters and many other factions have to decide about. There is no guarantee that it's a good thing. As for the high school, its rooms are actually no physically connected. Instead, they are scattered across the other dimension, so leaving school from various rooms will get you to different locations in the Junction. This serves as one of the ways that having better relations will improve your abilities, as it gives you access to other rooms in the school after hours. Similar, having friends and/or lovers from the Junction with appropriate powers will let them help you travel faster; a friend with wings will let you fly over obstacles, for example.

The original concept was good, but it didn't pop. That didn't happen until I had a dream about a much older, harsher school located on a land mass separated from the area by chasms. From what I remember, the dream's school was built like an ancient building, with thick stone walls and noisy pipes everywhere. It even had an indoor pool that looked like something out of an ancient castle or mad scientist's lair. I won't even discuss the bathrooms.

The strange thing is that the school/castle was full of anachronisms. It had strange mechanical bridges it always was struggling to use and connect to the world, but it also had an anime club! It even had a strange underground tunnel to a modern mall. Now this was a mystery that needed solving. Why was this school separated from the real world and yet connected to Anachronism Junction? What did its administrators know and want from its students?

The game Anachronism Junction will use a real-time system. Instead of using a complex schedule, you watch minutes and hours pass as soon as school ends, and you can only accomplish as much as you can get to in time. This returns to the use of school power and alliances to move faster, and the dangerous terrain in both worlds makes the travel much more dangerous.

At the very least, that's all I got so far. A game this ambitious requires something a little more, but the sense is there. At the very least, I'd much rather explore this one than Cataclysm by now. But as always, suggestions are welcome. Oh, and I also have made a decision. Barring disaster or a much busier new job (I'll talk about that later,) I'll at least restart this thing on a weekly basis, even if the posts get more personal.