[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

[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!

Or did you mean Hard difficulty? Oh, wait, that's only in FES, I think. I don't know much about that, except that the costs for summoning Personas from the Compendium are about tripled, which has me thinking "no, thank you."

The art book that came with the first printing has has little outfit concept sketches and the page for the main character looks like there is a female outfit as well as the male one. The book does not explain this. Was there a "play as girl" option at one point? Cause that would have been awesome, but made the S-link stuff more complicated to plan out.

I don't doubt that's exactly what happened. The protag's supposed to be pretty malleable so that you can properly RP him, so it makes sense that they'd allow a female stand-in for the player. But then you consider how many thousands of lines of dialogue, both written and voiced, would have to be doubled up... it probably wasn't feasible. I do like how they let you rename your character, and in the voice-acted lines everyone just refers to you as "him."

[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.

True, but then we wouldn't have her in the party being all badass.

>Or did you mean Hard difficulty? Oh, wait, that's only in FES, I think. I don't know much about that, except that the costs for summoning Personas from the Compendium are about tripled, which has me thinking "no, thank you."

Nah, I'm on easy, or normal or something. I wanna beat it! Although I head that the Answer gets very hard. I also heard it's not that great. Eh, I was after the main game enhancements anyway.

>I don't doubt that's exactly what happened. The protag's supposed to be pretty malleable so that you can properly RP him, so it makes sense that they'd allow a female stand-in for the player. But then you consider how many thousands of lines of dialogue, both written and voiced, would have to be doubled up... it probably wasn't feasible. I do like how they let you rename your character, and in the voice-acted lines everyone just refers to you as "him."

I bet they concidered it. They took enough pains dodging your name that they could easily take a few more to dodge a gender. The tricky bit is the S-links. I guess the easy thing is to make everyone bisexual, but thats a little silly. So I guess it might have been too much trouble to come up with romantic and platonic S-link plots for all of the characters. (plus they would have to come up with plots for the boys in SEES, and that would mess with Junpai's main game plot. Unless his link would open up post "you know what".) I know some people complained that you couldn't get really far with a girl unless it was romantic. Anyway, this is all specualtion and wishes. Hopefully they at least allow you to do Romance seperate from S-Link in the next game. I actually have taken no girl past friends, due to worries over jellousy.

[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...