It was easier for me to walk away from Persona 3 than I expected. The game about nine friends and a dog—which celebrates its tenth anniversary in the States this year—follows a similar arc to most role-playing games. That means the gang of plucky young people ultimately saves the world. Yet its 21st century characters and setting made Persona 3 far more relatable and endearing to me than the high-flying heroes of Final Fantasy or Chrono Trigger. It helps, too, that this was the series' first game to sport a now-signature blend of dating sim and turn-based dungeon crawling.

Playing Persona 3, I felt I was experiencing the first game designed to let me take my time. Whether that meant meeting up with a friend for kendo practice or hanging out with a couple of elderly used booksellers, there was nearly always something more digestible, recognizable, and less world-shatteringly urgent to do than fighting gods and monsters. It's the kind of stuff that let me inhabit a game's world for a bit rather than simply tour through it. Tearing up specters and saving the Earth from supernatural threats is fun, but it’s a bit harder to relate to in a way that feels like my real life.

By the end of the game, I was nearly as attached to the city of Iwatodai and its inhabitants as I've ever been to a real place. The downside is that this made it that much harder to eventually say goodbye to those virtual sights I saw and friends I made along the way. What made that goodbye easier was a special, quiet message before the closing credits—one that reminds me how to accept the end of comfort and friendship even today.

The one, true ending

Sure, it was a heart-wrenching lesson. The weight of time spent with people—even fictional ones—makes us feel comfortable around them. Dependent, even. When that comfort is gone, especially after taking 80+ hours of gameplay to get acclimated to it, it feels like one of the best, most reliable parts of your life is missing. You wonder what the hell you even did with yourself without that routine.

That's how it felt for me nearly finishing Persona 3 a decade ago, anyway. Yet Persona 3's ending does something that I've seen replicated, but never quite matched, in its sequels. It made me feel good about that loss and the anxiety over what to do next that came with it.

Spoiler warning for a decade-old game. Reader beware.

Persona 3’s main campaign (titled “The Journey” in the game’s 2008 re-release) is a true, unequivocal ending. At least it is for the protagonist, who dies at the game’s conclusion. The final boss fight with that world-eating monster drained him of his strength, leaving him just enough to reach graduation before expiring.

All those relationships I forged—concretely represented as “Social Links” in the game’s mechanics and lore—all those days I spent studying, dating, eating out, or staying in… they were all ultimately terminated in a gradual fade-out followed by a gentle swirl of music and credits.

I no longer knew what to do with my life now that the game I relied on to ceaselessly soak up my free time for weeks was suddenly finished. More than that, though, I knew the fictitious connections I forged were canonically over, as well. They couldn’t continue without the protagonist—without me. There wasn’t even any wiggle room to imagine the specific story moving forward without me in some fan-fictional future.

This realization caused me to lose it a bit at first. I felt emptied out in the same way I did after bittersweet finales from games like Shadow of the Colossus and Final Fantasy X before. These were games that filled the vacuum of childhood free time with escapism, but also structure, objectives, and familiarity. I put a lot of myself (perhaps too much) into vicarious, fantastical stories. When those stories ended, I cried. I got quiet. I tried to force myself to find some other pillar on which my day-to-day life could lean.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized Persona 3 specifically told me not to do that.

Ripples in the water

During the conclusion, the protagonist (a mostly silent tool that let me embody my vision of that virtual school life) lies in the arms of a teammate who helped him save the world. In the distance, you can hear the rest of his close-knit squad rushing to see him, having just recalled his existence after their memories had been wiped by the final boss.

It’s only after it’s clear that his friends remember him—after a fight in which it seemed certain they wouldn't—that the protagonist calmly drifts to his final "sleep." The protagonist doesn't melodramatically rage and wail at the approaching end—one that's as real for the player as the character, if in different ways. Instead, he just peacefully drifts away in calm acceptance after being assured that, yes, he has impacted those friends and their lives.

Growing up and now continuing to live in a college town, my own friendships have been fleeting. Those I grew up with have mostly moved on. Those I met later went back to where they came from. I've heard others talk about lifelong friends they've known since grade school. My mom, for instance, still vacations with her childhood neighbor every year.

By contrast, I hear my oldest childhood friend lives in New York these days. The kid who lived across the street from me, who used to play "ditch" with me and my brother (it's, uh, like hide-and-seek but at night), got a job in California. My besty throughout high school and college, who introduced me to my favorite authors and dated my first girlfriend's best friend... just sort of disappeared one day.

I didn't quite understand it at the time, but a decade later I see that Persona 3 prepared me for the pain these transient relationships would bring later in life. The comfort of routine and familiarity are a big part of friendship. Relying on an engrossing game can be as comforting as someone who is always there for you. And the end of a really resonant video game can feel a lot like the end of a friendship; in both, it’s like a pillar your life is built on is suddenly missing.

That resulting distress doesn't make the hours, days, or years you spent with absent friends (or absent games) any less of a tangible part of your life. My now-absent childhood friends might be gone, but the authors they introduced me to (which put me on the path toward writing for a living) or their crucially timed openness with me (which led me to recognize things like my own sexuality) are still with me. These aren't just memories. They're demonstrable elements of my everyday life that affect everything from how I think to how I earn my rent.

We are all connected

Perhaps it's a bit cheesy of Persona 3 to call its main campaign "The Journey," then. It might as well turn a character to the camera to say "It's the journey and not the destination, man." Yet its conclusion goes a bit deeper than that. There is no shining, permanent fixture marking the time the characters spent together. The player character himself is impermanent, just like me, just like all of us. But Persona 3 ends with the protagonist accepting the end only after learning that the sprawling, diffuse impact of his friendship will continue to affect his teammates long after he’s gone.

In real-life, it’s often hard to get that kind of succinct, dramatically timed assurance that I had the same kind of impact on my friends as they did on me. Sometimes social media helps by letting me peek in on a filtered few friends around the world. Sometimes it doesn't.

The end of Persona 3, however, was like a preemptive assurance of this basic, interconnected social fabric we’re all a part of. I watched as the game's protagonist—a version of me, in a way—was satisfied enough by their friends' affirmations to peacefully let his final ending wash over him. Today, I often look back at that solid, simple moment where a game showed me that, while the comfort of friendship may be fleeting, it's not wasted.