Picture it: Sicily, 2023. A group of four ladies in their golden years are trying to experience life, love, and friendship. But then all of a sudden, they get connected in a cross-over with an RPG series! Imagine it isn’t actually Sicily but the internet, where the craziest crossover combinations can happen. This latest might be the only one to combine RPG elements with “The Golden Girls.” And by “might be the only one,” we mean it is very much the only one.
If you’ve ever seen “The Golden Girls,” you know one of the show’s core tenets is about friendship. The relationship between Dorothy, Blanche, Rose, and Sophia is the source of the program’s heart, comedy, and relevancy in pop-culture today. As it so happens, friendship is also a major theme in the “Persona” games. So what if someone took these two disparate intellectual properties and combined them into one entity? Well, you’d get “The Golden Girls Take Manhattan DX.”
According to the official website for the game, the project has been in development for years with a demo that was supposed to arrive back in the sumer of 2021. As that time period has come and gone though, the game has still been in progress at the hands of Joey Pagano and Chris Lindgren. Through all this time it’s now shaping up to ready for a holiday release in 2023 for PC and Mac. Now obviously, because the game is using “The Golden Girls” as part of the game without the consent of parent company, Disney, the creators can’t charge anything for the game without potentially getting in legal trouble. So if it does come out, it’s releasing for free.
The actual game play mechanics for this ambitious Miami crossover liberally take from the “Persona” series so if you’ve played one of them before, you’d know exactly what to expect. …Just, with digital representations of Bea Arthur, Betty White, Estelle Getty, and Rue McClanahan. For the uninitiated, the “Persona” titles have a unique gameplay loop that basically combines two kinds of styles. As you go from day to day in-game you spend some time doing normal things like going to school, spending time with friends, dating, etc. But the other time is spent going through odd, enemy filled dungeons in mostly traditional RPG fashion. What makes the series more interesting though is that the time you spend outside the dungeons with your friends can help make you more powerful in various ways when it comes to battling through monstrous foes. And friendship helping people through life is very much in-line with “The Golden Girls.” Just maybe not the dungeon crawling.
Right now there’s not a lot of plot detail on the website or in the trailer itself. We do see some clown enemies though. Dorothy had a run in with one back in the season two episode “A Piece of Cake.” Remember Mr. Ha Ha’s Hot Dog Hacienda? Now, we’re not sure if the clowns are a direct reference to that, but it would show some serious dedication to the source material if they are. And on the “Persona” side of things, you can see and hear the influence from that series quite well. Not only is the art style and calendar style progression plain as day, the music is spot-on with the work of series composer Shoji Meguro.
Fortunately, it looks like the tweet about the project has caught some attention, with various websites reporting on it. We just hope it doesn’t go the way of so many other fan projects like “Pokemon Uranium” or “AM2R” (Another Metroid 2 Remake). If we hear more about the game in the upcoming months, we’ll let you know. In the meantime, thanks for reading and thank you for being a friend.
