While waiting for my Internet to get repaired (again), I've been marathoning Persona 4, which features, as one of its much-vaunted improvements over Persona 3, branching Social Link options. The overall difference is fairly minor, largely in the conversation options and incidental dialogue; the Social Link results are the same regardless.

Now, if you've never played either Persona 3 or 4 before, the idea behind Social Links is that you meet someone, and then you get to know them better through further repeated meetings, until you form "an unbreakable bond" of Really Close Friendship (and for female characters, possibly something more). Along the way, you help solve some problem or other they are facing in their lives. All of this gives you nice bonuses that help you in battle, or at least the preparations before battle, but that's beside the point.

The branching routes in P4 mean that I get to Socially Link with either one of two choices for each of the school clubs. Back in P3, this didn't matter that much, because the game refused to be clear on which club the Social Link character belonged to until you actually chose yourself (insert Schroedinger's Cat experiment reference here); whatever your decision, you'll be dealing with the same person. In P4, however, you deal with different people. So if you pick the Basketball Team instead of the Soccer Team, you'd be interacting with Kou Ichijo, rather than Daisuke Nagase. The same goes for the Drama Club's Yumi Ozawa and the Symphonic Band's Ayane Matsunaga.

But what about the other, unpicked route?

As I've mentioned before, I have problems with this sort of thing, which I call Visual Novel Route Regret. Basically, all these characters have their problems and worries, some of them really serious, and the game often implies that they will never be free from their woes without your assistance. In P3, it was actually possible, if very difficult, to max out every Social Link in one play-through, and thus solve everyone's problems neatly. But in P4, with the branching, this is impossible, even if the actual game mechanic Social Link maxing is much easier.

And so I have to weigh the Seriousness of the characters' problems against each other. Is Kou's insecurity about being adopted more or less debilitating to his future prospects than Daisuke's inability to get over his old rejected crush? Both have let it affect their performance to the point of depression, so it's not a given that they'll be able to get over it themselves. The Cultural Clubs are a little easier to pick: Yumi's angst about her estranged but hospitalized father, leading to her nearly severing links with her mother, is probably more serious than Ayane's basic lack of confidence in herself. Sorry, Ayane, but Yumi's case is more likely to make her suicidal.

At least the Social Link problems in Persona 4 are not as drastic as in Persona 3, which is a bit of a relief. If you haven't been following a Max Social Link guide but know what is in store for the characters, it's hard to decide between helping Yukari get over her father's death-by-corporate-murder, or comforting Mitsuru after her father's death-by-actual-murder and her arranged marriage to an odious man she hates. Compared to that, Chie's search for a good reason to protect people is a little less world-shattering.

This is a bit of why I'm not very keen on playing the more Dramatic sorts of visual novels: the girls tend to have incredibly depressing (and often supernatural) backstories, which may very well lead to their deaths or spiritual discorporation or whatever. The viewpoint character may or may not know the reason why, in a given route epilogue scene, certain members of the old gang appear to be missing, but the experienced player knows. And that makes it all the more depressing.

On a vague tangent, I have this incredible urge to go write some lyrics for the Junes jingle.