This has kind of been an ick of mine. When you attempt to look up a specific kind of persona game, for example persona 3, it aliases to megami tensei persona and thus all results are from the megami tensei persona tag. That brings the question if its possible to not automatically alias persona game tags to megami tensei persona? Posts would still have the megami tensei persona tag, but it will also show the game name in specific. So if I were to search persona 3, instead of it giving me results of all persona games it would only show results that have anything related to persona 3 in specific. Of course the megami tensei persona tag would still exist if you wanted to search for persona in general but for looking for a specific game in the series it would he a huge benefit.

yoav88 said:
So if I were to search persona 3, instead of it giving me results of all persona games it would only show results that have anything related to persona 3 in specific.

Beyond some specific characters, what separates the various Persona games and makes them visually distinguishable?

watsit said:
Beyond some specific characters, what separates the various Persona games and makes them visually distinguishable?

The settings, the art-style, sometimes the shadows are different.

watsit said:
Beyond some specific characters, what separates the various Persona games and makes them visually distinguishable?

... We tag the individual games in a franchise for everything else, unless you're suggesting we nuke

final_fantasy_xiv
final_fantasy_ix
final_fantasy_vii
final_fantasy_xi
final_fantasy_x
final_fantasy_tactics
final_fantasy_xii
final_fantasy_viii

down into just final_fantasy while we're at it because they've all got the same visual aesthetics. There is less connection between some of those games as SMT games to eachother, let alone Persona. Especially given we always go for the US-Region name for games, it seems fucking bizarre to use the JP one for Persona and then not bother dividing them beyond that.

votp said:
... We tag the individual games in a franchise for everything else, unless you're suggesting we nuke

No, we don't tag individual games in a franchise for "everything else". Some we do, some we don't, and annoyingly there's no clear guidelines as to when we do/should or don't/shouldn't.

votp said:
final_fantasy_xiv
final_fantasy_ix
final_fantasy_vii
final_fantasy_xi
final_fantasy_x
final_fantasy_tactics
final_fantasy_xii
final_fantasy_viii

Final Fantasy is a series where the games are notorious for being so different from their predecessors, they're less "sequels" and more "a game under the FF brand". Aside from the likes of X-2 or XIII-2 (where they have to sequelize the individual numbered sequels to make it clear that it's actually a sequel), they're almost entirely different games with some themes that carry over.

Compare to Pokemon where Red/Blue/Green/Yellow/Gold/Silver/Crystal/Diamond/Pearl/Platinum/Black/White/Black2/White2/etc/etc are all aliased to pokemon, despite the games featuring unique characters and locations. Even the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon spinoffs have Rescue Team, Explorers, Gates, and Super under the one Pokemon Mystery Dungeon tag. Monster Hunter is the same, where all the mainline games are under one tag. Mario Bros have some games aliased to the main tag (like super_mario_sunshine and super_mario_bros_2), and some implicating it (like super_mario_odyssey and super_mario_3d_world), with no obvious pattern as to why some are aliased and others implicate.

watsit said:
Final Fantasy is a series where the games are notorious for being so different from their predecessors, they're less "sequels" and more "a game under the FF brand". Aside from the likes of X-2 or XIII-2 (where they have to sequelize the individual numbered sequels to make it clear that it's actually a sequel), they're almost entirely different games with some themes that carry over.

Persona games have zero relation to eachother beyond taking place on Earth (Sometimes: See Persona 1 which takes place almost entirely in a different dimension). However, you asked this;

watsit said:
Beyond some specific characters, what separates the various Persona games and makes them visually distinguishable?

which is about visuals, not plot and setting details or gameplay elements, just visual differences. You'd be pretty hard-pressed to, visually, tell content from FF1-FF6, FFT, FF9, FF11&12, and FF14 apart, the same way as with FF7&8, 10, 13, or FF15 apart. That's before getting into stuff like Stranger of Paradise which blurs the tech/magic lines even further in terms of thematic and visual homogeneity.

The Persona games, in contrast, all have immediately recognisable differences in artistic stylings. Beyond each game after the original two branching off severely from the borrowed stylings of the SMT franchise, making the distinction between those two parts meaningful and recognisable, each individual game has a tangibly different artistic direction, from 3's tech-heavy military academy-esque theming, the the rural private investigator themes of 4, and the picaresque high society and cat burglar themes in 5. You can easily look at the groupings of images from the Final Fantasy games above and not know they're from different games, that mistake is extremely unlikely to take place between the Persona games, excluding crossover outliers like Arena and Q.

Beyond this, copyright tags have little/nothing to do with the TWYS system, the same as artist tags and metadata, and should not be treated as such.

votp said:
Persona games have zero relation to eachother beyond taking place on Earth (Sometimes: See Persona 1 which takes place almost entirely in a different dimension). However, you asked this;

which is about visuals, not plot and setting details or gameplay elements, just visual differences.

Because the visuals will be among the most important factor for being able to distinguish whether a given image depicts one game in a series over another. It's not the only one, but it is important in being able to tell whether a post is tagged with the correct game, so the more visually distinct they are, the more likely it will be they can be tagged correctly (given a specific version if it lacks one, or have its version fixed if it's the wrong one).

And in either case, I'm not saying yes or no to keeping them aliased together. I don't know the series well enough to make a determination of whether they should or shouldn't be, but it's good to get a base understanding of whether it would or wouldn't work well to separate them, hence the question. Having unique characters alone don't seem to play a factor in keeping games separate, as Pokemon and Monster Hunter do have unique characters in different games but are still aliased together, which is why I was digging for something more besides that.

Beyond that, I was countering your assertion that we keep the games in a series or franchise separate "for everything else", which we absolutely don't.

The discussion in this thread doesn't seem to match the work requested... or any practical tagging work.

And, uh, bringing up "art style" (or aesthetics or "visuals"???) as though it has much weight when tagging a franchise seems to betray inexperience. It almost never happens that the only element of a post biasing copyright tags is the art style. There's usually something more concrete, like a species, character, outfit, background objects, that belongs to one specific game or product. The one very notable exception for tagging art style that I've seen is tagging MLP for equines in the art style popularized by the show, but the depicted character(s) are neither MLP characters nor OCs. No cutie mark, no MLP lore stuff. The artist just wanted to draw a pony in the MLP (FiM) style. Even then, that should probably be tagged as earth pony without a cutie mark, which is a species from the show and gets the implication, something more tangible than art style. I could believe art using UI based on a specific Persona game, which again is something tangible.

As for the thread question, well, we know which characters come from which games, so that's not an issue. The Persona games seem to have very few recurring story characters (just cameos and references to past games?), and all those character tags could be implicated to individual Persona games.

I believe part of the problem with this franchise is recurring demons/personas (enemies/summons). Jack Frost, the franchise's and Atlus' mascot, has a fairly consistent design across many of the games. The MT wiki shows two major designs and one minor variation. The first Jack Frost is very different. The modern Jack Frost everyone knows seems to have "bells" and "no bells" versions, as well as the pin on its hat having a smiley face or not. Very difficult to assign Jack Frost art to a specific game. This seems a trend for the few demons I check. Some have distinct designs between products, some don't. The demons/personas should probably not be treated as belonging to a specific game, instead belonging to the franchise; otherwise, organizing them is a tremendous burden. Maybe tag the correct game separately if possible, just not through an implication.

I think the rest of the problem becomes apparent from merely taking a gander at the megami tensei persona wiki. The aliases. A metric fuckton of games and products, and that's only for the Persona product line, excluding SMT proper and whatever are Devil Children, Digital Devil, and Devil Survivor. Jack Frost's MT wiki seems to mention 42 games + products. A lot of this is very obscure, and no one wants to make heads or tales of that. The burden to research this and correctly tag posts is very high. Ideally, maybe, the games could get sorted into something like generations and fudge the details.

abadbird said:
I believe part of the problem with this franchise is recurring demons/personas (enemies/summons). Jack Frost, the franchise's and Atlus' mascot, has a fairly consistent design across many of the games. The MT wiki shows two major designs and one minor variation. The first Jack Frost is very different. The modern Jack Frost everyone knows seems to have "bells" and "no bells" versions, as well as the pin on its hat having a smiley face or not. Very difficult to assign Jack Frost art to a specific game. This seems a trend for the few demons I check. Some have distinct designs between products, some don't. The demons/personas should probably not be treated as belonging to a specific game, instead belonging to the franchise; otherwise, organizing them is a tremendous burden. Maybe tag the correct game separately if possible, just not through an implication.

Let's assume for a minute that an artwork has nothing but a jack frost on it, which game should we implicate it to? Certainly not megami tensei persona, but shin_megami_tensei_(series) since this character is basically this universe's equivalent to Pikachu.

This topiv is intended to give the unique characters, settings, visual flare, etc their own copyright tag depending which game they're from because each game is distinct enough.It would be asinine to try to implicate the demons to any given game, nobody is arguing for this. Obviously, not all the games should have their own tag, Persona Q and Q2 shouldn't for example.