The Man Who Built Inaba

Persona 4 Golden is one of the best games ever made—I’ll defend that without qualifiers. You play a transfer student dropped into the quiet rural town of Inaba, fall in with a group of teenagers, and end up investigating murders that happen inside a television. Between dungeon runs you go to school, build relationships, work part-time jobs. The mundane and the mythological share the same calendar. It sounds like a lot because it is, and it never stops working.

Persona 5 came out not long ago and the critics fell over themselves. Tokyo, stylish thieves, a completely different energy. I haven’t started it yet. I’m waiting until I have the mental space to give it what it deserves. You don’t half-ass these games.

The person responsible for both—along with the maddening puzzle-nightmare Catherine and the underrated Digital Devil Saga—is Katsura Hashino. The YouTube channel Toco Toco TV sat down with him in Shibuya for one of their unhurried creator portraits, the kind where you watch someone exist in a city and talk about what they actually think about. Hashino talks about people, about stories, about building worlds. Watching it, you understand why those games feel the way they do—like they were made by someone who cares about the humans in them, not just the systems.