(no subject)
I'm finally finished with Persona 3, after spending 200 hours and playing through twice. Well, not with The Answer, but I need a break - I'm under the illusion that continuing the story is somewhat gratuitous, anyway. It was an unbelievably good game, though. Really, I can't believe how much it wrapped me up in its world; games just don't do that for me anymore. Particularly Japanese RPGs! My first love, surely, but Final Fantasy and all of its overproduced spiritual progeny have lost me as the years have gone on. I've been more for a good, challenging game of resource management as in Etrian Odyssey; or something that breaks through all the accumulated cruft of the genre and gets back to the core experience, like the old Dragon Quest games.
But man, Persona 3. It's not without its faults, for sure. Tartarus is repetitive; the battle system suffers from occasionally dipshitted AI and battles are overly reliant on getting the first hit in; the social interaction feels overly strict and perhaps even vaguely sociopathic; and even though the game presents you with a lot of choices to give you the feeling that you're influencing the story, they're really just thinly couched "But thou must" dialogues. Despite all that, it all comes together in that "better than the sum of its parts" sort of way. The characters are all anime cliches; but as you live with them for a year, they really grow on you. There isn't much epic globetrotting, and you're basically stuck going between the same several locations for the bulk of the game; but the limited number of NPCs gives the game an opportunity to actually infuse the random townspeople with personalities that reveal themselves through the course of the game. Tartarus is repetitive; but the Persona fusion system always gives you new things to collect and fuse together, and making yourself a team of badass deities is very satisfying. Your choices are often something of a contrivance; but, unless you're looking for the seams, it still works in granting you a certain feeling of freedom, which JRPGs have always struggled with, most of the time.
At the same time, it's smarter than most RPGs. This is not to say it's going to blow your mind if you aren't fifteen years old and your entire worldview developed around Playstation games; but it does make competent use allegory and symbolism, certainly miles above something like the Xeno games, and presents a story about growing up, coming to terms with mortality, and even occasionally tying social commentary in with its themes of growth and death. That, and I'm just a sucker for a good tarot allegory. I think it's a game where its creators really felt they had something to say, and even if it isn't always presented with subtlety and tact, it feels like what it was meant to be and what it was meant to say came out clearly and without the typical confusion of your average big budget RPG. Perhaps the relative low-budget feeling of the game worked to its advantage in that regard.
So yeah, it makes the entire genre from the Playstation era on look like a complete wash. Best RPG I've played in a decade, no shit.
Favorite girl: Elizabeth, there is just no contest. BOLDLY ACCEPT BOLDLY ACCEPT BOLDLY ACCEPT. I didn't beat her as BONUS SUPERBOSS because it was the usual tiresome exercise in exacting specifications and oppressive turn monitoring, along with having half the potential strategies arbitrarily prohibited, topped off with a mandatory 5-10 minute climb to fight her. But Elizabeth - my love for strange girls with pretty voices trumps everything else. I was initially down with Mitsuru - and she's cute, but a little predictable. I wound up liking Fuuka a lot, and despite being basically indifferent to her through the first play, I dug Yukari for her level 10 scene - nice to see a girl who knows what she wants, anyway. Aigis' level 10 was cute, too. I would have dropped them all for Liz, though. Elizabeth Uber Alles.
Favorite S.Link: Hermit, which I thought would be kind of annoying, but was really cute and spot on, and the epilogue scene is probably my favorite scene in the whole game.
Personas: I wound up basically powering through everything with Flauros, then Cu Chulainn, then Thor, then Melchizedek, and finally Michael on the first time through. It was nice, once I had the levels, to have Jesus and three flavours of Satan hanging around. I'm way too much of a pragmatist.
Other assorted comments: Thirteen fucking forms for the last boss, is that some kind of new record? I'm just happy they had some common decency and didn't decide to just say "fuck it" and do the whole Major Arcana; I already spent like two hours the first time through fighting the last boss. "Oh, it's midnight, but I'm so close to the end, it shouldn't take THAT long, should it?" Famous last words when you have an appointment the next day.
But man, Persona 3. It's not without its faults, for sure. Tartarus is repetitive; the battle system suffers from occasionally dipshitted AI and battles are overly reliant on getting the first hit in; the social interaction feels overly strict and perhaps even vaguely sociopathic; and even though the game presents you with a lot of choices to give you the feeling that you're influencing the story, they're really just thinly couched "But thou must" dialogues. Despite all that, it all comes together in that "better than the sum of its parts" sort of way. The characters are all anime cliches; but as you live with them for a year, they really grow on you. There isn't much epic globetrotting, and you're basically stuck going between the same several locations for the bulk of the game; but the limited number of NPCs gives the game an opportunity to actually infuse the random townspeople with personalities that reveal themselves through the course of the game. Tartarus is repetitive; but the Persona fusion system always gives you new things to collect and fuse together, and making yourself a team of badass deities is very satisfying. Your choices are often something of a contrivance; but, unless you're looking for the seams, it still works in granting you a certain feeling of freedom, which JRPGs have always struggled with, most of the time.
At the same time, it's smarter than most RPGs. This is not to say it's going to blow your mind if you aren't fifteen years old and your entire worldview developed around Playstation games; but it does make competent use allegory and symbolism, certainly miles above something like the Xeno games, and presents a story about growing up, coming to terms with mortality, and even occasionally tying social commentary in with its themes of growth and death. That, and I'm just a sucker for a good tarot allegory. I think it's a game where its creators really felt they had something to say, and even if it isn't always presented with subtlety and tact, it feels like what it was meant to be and what it was meant to say came out clearly and without the typical confusion of your average big budget RPG. Perhaps the relative low-budget feeling of the game worked to its advantage in that regard.
So yeah, it makes the entire genre from the Playstation era on look like a complete wash. Best RPG I've played in a decade, no shit.
Favorite girl: Elizabeth, there is just no contest. BOLDLY ACCEPT BOLDLY ACCEPT BOLDLY ACCEPT. I didn't beat her as BONUS SUPERBOSS because it was the usual tiresome exercise in exacting specifications and oppressive turn monitoring, along with having half the potential strategies arbitrarily prohibited, topped off with a mandatory 5-10 minute climb to fight her. But Elizabeth - my love for strange girls with pretty voices trumps everything else. I was initially down with Mitsuru - and she's cute, but a little predictable. I wound up liking Fuuka a lot, and despite being basically indifferent to her through the first play, I dug Yukari for her level 10 scene - nice to see a girl who knows what she wants, anyway. Aigis' level 10 was cute, too. I would have dropped them all for Liz, though. Elizabeth Uber Alles.
Favorite S.Link: Hermit, which I thought would be kind of annoying, but was really cute and spot on, and the epilogue scene is probably my favorite scene in the whole game.
Personas: I wound up basically powering through everything with Flauros, then Cu Chulainn, then Thor, then Melchizedek, and finally Michael on the first time through. It was nice, once I had the levels, to have Jesus and three flavours of Satan hanging around. I'm way too much of a pragmatist.
Other assorted comments: Thirteen fucking forms for the last boss, is that some kind of new record? I'm just happy they had some common decency and didn't decide to just say "fuck it" and do the whole Major Arcana; I already spent like two hours the first time through fighting the last boss. "Oh, it's midnight, but I'm so close to the end, it shouldn't take THAT long, should it?" Famous last words when you have an appointment the next day.