[Late to the Party] Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 FES (The Journey)

[sabrecat]

SabreCat:

This thing is the main reason I haven't updated in nearly a month. It's a genius PS2 title plagued by some really infuriating design choices. Read on!

Premise: Upon transferring to a new school, a high school junior discovers the extraordinary power to summon mythic figures to do battle. He joins a secret school club of people with

Comments

[kmbrown6]

Given you don't have to do all of the requests. It's just if you are trying to stay on top of levels to beat the bosses, you might as well look for some items as well. Or mess with persona fusion, or whatever. But one should feel free to blow that shadow shard BS off though. (Altough I didn't cause I'm OCD like that) I really got to the point where I run the NPCs though the dungon and just stay back to let them do their thing and level up, and I only jumped in if I needed to get loot or something. Anyway, I'm sure quests were many many hours of my playtime. I guess if you really played your cards right (HA! Cards!) you could zip through the dungeons stuff. But the quests kinda teach you to play the game

[sabrecat]

Given you don't have to do all of the requests.

Yeah, there were many reasons my game took 118 hours, one of which was surely that I did too much unnecessary crap. (Another was that I didn't really try using the "Rush" command until the last month or so.) But as I said, I'm a sucker: I see a reward cycle and I dive right in. Maybe I have a touch of an addictive personality? -.-;

You get to know Fuka's lines pretty well after a bit of dungeon delving.

Ha! Ha! So very true. I was sad when she subbed in for Mitsuru, as I liked Mitsuru's voice actress so much better.

Hard: The game is balls hard,

I didn't find it to be too bad, probably because of my tendency to overlevel for everything. That said, there were probably about half a dozen bosses that presented serious difficulty spikes, requiring multiple tries. Hilariously, the boss fight I remember having most trouble with was a pitched battle against a table. Yay for Shadows' goofy creature designs

[kmbrown6]

>Ha! Ha! So very true. I was sad when she subbed in for Mitsuru, as I liked Mitsuru's voice actress so much better

[oberon_the_fool]

I also was really miffed that once you'd started dating one girl, you basically couldn't spend time with any others. You should be able to play the field romantically if you want, and you should also be able to have female friends between whom there is no (or no pursued) romantic interest.

[sabrecat]

You can play the field, actually, you just have to be careful about it. Spending time with another girl once you've become "serious" with one just accelerates the usual timer that causes them to get mad at you for not spending enough time with them. So if you alternate dates among two or three of them, you're generally safe!

As for pursuing a platonic friendship, though, that would be a cool option. They could even tie it into the mechanics somehow, that one "flavor" of relationship gives different benefits than another with the same person! But then the already enormous amount of dialogue to write/translate for the S.Links would multiply...