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Atlus Persona 5

Matador

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Jun 14, 2016
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Optimist

Savant
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Joined
Jun 18, 2018
Messages
336
My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit.
I initially wanted to preface this post by saying that Thac0 is a lying bastard, but after re-reading the incriminating message I would have to rescind that statement.

I started playing P5 in April last year. Hard to believe how much my life changed since then! I put about ~90 hours in it back then, got super tired of it at the very end, promised to finish it in a while and that was it. Only with the release of P4 on PC I remembered I still haven’t finished P5, and since the aforementioned poster told me that I’m about 95% through the game, I finally decided to get through it yesterday. Assumed all that’s left is a multi-stage boss fight, but boy was I wrong – I ended up going to sleep when the sun was already going up. Turns out that five hours is indeed about five percent of one hundred! I lied down happy that I finally finished it, annoyed at the lost potential and tired of its anime bullshit.

Please, find attached a sample of super-spoilery anime bullshit.


Still – in one of the post in P4 Golden thread, I mentioned how I didn’t found P5 all that fun, and after these last few hours, I realized that ending up on this note would not be fair to the game. I am not sure what caused this change of heart (…because you know, you steal hearts in the game!) because this absolutely wasn’t something specific to these last few hours. I like doing write-ups on games I’m done with if only to gather my thoughts on them, so that’s what’ll follow – something between a three-years-late review, and sleep-deprived pretentious ramblings. Some spoilers probably ahead, but the spoiler for the spoilers would be that I don’t think you’d be playing this game for its story anyways.


Wake Up, Get Up, Get Up There


I enjoy a jRPG every now and then. I’m mostly interested in their mechanics – Japs have an uncanny skill of building fun, complex-ish gameplay systems. Some of them use it to do evil in form of skinner box mobile games, some are fighters for good, developing such shining examples of easy to learn, rewarding to master rulesets as Sengoku Rance, Fire Emblems, Kamidori Alchemy Meister, etc. I’m usually not a fan of their stories, and especially not of the overly dramatic and wordy dialogues, but I don’t mind them all that much. Fun mechanics are enough for me to enjoy the game – which I guess is the main reason of why my final impression of Persona 5 is positive. It was the first game from Atlus I ever picked up, and to be entirely honest it was entirely for the simp reason of its aesthetics promising something really special.

I know that Persona games didn’t historically have huge budgets, and it feels like the influx of money was used to train the biggest and most powerful anime story-san around, who then proceeded to bully the sweet and innocent mechanics-chan with some help from its heartless sister, onee-aesthetics. Still, the guilty pair has the power of grabbing you by your hair and helping you bop to more poppy parts of the soundtrack as you cream yourself looking at the stylized all-out-attack screens. Once you get tired of it though – you really get tired. I guess that was what happened to me.

PERR-US-ONA

The moment introductory clips stopped, and I got to the game itself I felt somewhat disappointed. I’ve seen the engine P5 uses (or at least some other, very similar engine) in action when my wife gave Tales of Berseria a try, and I’m not fond of it. I guess it’s good for animating anime-style graphics, but the general jerkiness and the fact that it can’t handle three dimensions gives a pretty poor starting impression when you use it for TPP visuals.

The chaps done what they could, though. Engine limitations are masked by beautifully drawn portraits and Tartakovsky-like style of “white and black on red” imagery. The way gameplay graphics meld into these screens lets them punch way above their budget. Got no eye-candy here, though, but that was not what I was looking for – so I wasn’t disappointed.

Music is pretty good! There are a few standout tracks (the usual – Rivers in the Desert, Beneath the Mask, Wake Up Get Up Get Out There), but most of the ambient is on the OK-ish level. Creators understood they have some auditory gold filigree to decorate the wooden carvings, but done the worst possible thing – used it wherever they could, so I got somewhat sick of the few poppy tracks while getting to the end. Still, after giving myself a year-long vacation from the game, coming back to the few good tunes felt good.

Also, hearing glorious samurai mangle the few English words in shoutouts was a constant source of joy.

Rivers in the Desert

Japan is the cyberpunk nation – style over substance. You see it in their games, in their cheesecakes (and other sweets), in their animation. People get excited about how stylish the game is – hell, I was there as well. Thing is, the style does not withstand the test of time. You don’t ever start feeling as much of a criminal mastermind, so it rings hollow. I wish you could do some real planning on the jobs that you take, do something like sending members of your team for side-jobs which would make then unavailable during exploration of a Palace but gave you some other boni, I wish you could stake-out the locations to gather some intel on them, or that the stealth was less important in combat and more important in the overall exploration.

This hollowness had the unfortunate side-effect of making all the dialogues that tried to make me feel like a smug, gentleman thief somewhat annoying, as I felt a huge disconnect between the game congratulating me on coming up with a master plan, and jumping from cover to cover to ambush another wandering monster. With the wide array of foes that Phantom Thieves try to change the hearts of, it seems like it’d be fun to at least attempt to formulate the jobs as various confidence schemes, break-ins, and hustles, but what you get is murderizing everything and moving forward while occasionally looking for some items. It would make as much sense if the whole thing was framed as anything else – a newspaper delivery guy trying to deliver his mail while trying to avoid rabid dogs, or policemen trying to get to the bottom of a case while avoiding criminals. The game is a shapeshifter, has no face to show, and if you take off the mask you reveal dark.

The game is entirely held up by something else.

Beneath the Mask

I was pretty lukewarm up until now, time to say something positive: combat system is extremely solid. The weakness mechanism makes sure that fights with randos usually turn into quick, one-sided slaughters, keeps you on your toes, and gives some nice challenges, especially on the hard difficulty. This alone could carry the game from start to finish. I think I’ve seen some people refer to this style of play as Pokemon on steroids – and I completely agree. The moment I stopped treating persona captures as something I have to figure out and started treating them like a Pokeball throw, my enjoyment of the game increased greatly. Persona proves you don’t need a bazillion modifiable stats to make you think about what you do about your character/ Persona lineup.

I enjoyed the initial parts of the game not only because the story is most interesting then, but also because it adds another issue to the mix – resource management. You probably won’t be able to complete first two castles in a single try (the second forces you out, but I’m not talking about this) – the limited amount of SP (mana) and the fact that it’s very difficult to retrieve it, make you really careful about using your special abilities. This becomes much less of an issue as the time goes on, and the final dungeons have infinite rejuvenation sites and that’s a shame. Figuring out whether you really need to drop a magic nuke on your enemies, or if maybe you can sacrifice some much easier recoverable health to attack physically/ withstand the enemy’s attack after wearing them down with regular attacks was a really fun part of the game.

If we’re talking about attack types – I’m on the fence about GUN. I mean, it’s super fun to use the power of the bullet to blast mythical creatures, and I giggled like an idiot when the final, godly boss pulled out a golden revolver, but I’m not sure what’s exactly the idea behind making it a separate damage type, limited by ammo, but also generated via some persona powers. I’d be much more comfortable with making it some kind of an “oh shit” button, with it allowing you to spew a few of almighty-type attacks if needed.

The rest of the mechanics are not so hot. Real-world is somewhat disjointed from the dungeonsphere. Social links help you out in combat, and you kind of need to balance your time between studying and hitting Mementos/ Castles, but it still feels like a VN with a loosely attached dungeon-delving module sometimes. There are a lot of wasted opportunities – the game really asks for mementos that’d work in another way. What I have in mind is something that would loosely correspond to real-world world map, where you could affect one plane by doing something on the other. It’d feel like a good idea to alter the training mechanics so that you could, say, use the experience you gained while fighting monsters to level up these knowledge/ smugness/ whatever stats while studying and use there attributes in the Metaverse in some way.

I ended up skipping most of the text, spending most of the days eating burgers, studying, and meeting with pals, with 2-3 visits to Metaverse per month – one to handle all the sidequests, and the rest to rush through the castle. The game still took me almost one hundred hours. For most of this time, I actually had fun.

Life will (not) Change

I’m not going to write a lot about Persona 5’s story. I got disenchanted pretty early on, but then jogged forward without really paying it all that much heed. The atmosphere of being a small fish in unfamiliar, big pond you feel at the beginning is top-tier, but it quickly dissolves as the bad guys move from being small-scale asshats to mafia bosses to evil gods. The exploding popularity meter at the end was my personal cherry on top.

I didn’t enjoy interacting with most of the characters as well. Out of your teammates Makoto was written pretty OK, and I actually found Yusuke endearing – not only because I hang out with socially-inept artists for quite a while, but also because his arc heavily hanged on him learning a bit of humility and trying to add some substance to his works. Ryuji was OK, but became a comic relief after the first third of the game; feels like he should’ve been offed somewhere to motivate the player back when he still cared for him. Anne was a moeblob, Morgana was a constant annoyance, Futaba was a bottle-pissing hikikomori, Haru was so forgettable that I actually forgot to raise any social links with her for a few weeks after she became available. They get their moments, but they’re few and far between. As for the secondary characters, there are three I’d like to mention – Sojiro and Yoshida were OK, but my personal favorite was Hifumi Togo. Her down to earth arc actually resonated with me, as we all probably had a few moments in our lives when we realized we aren’t as good as we’d like to be.

I initially planned to hook up with Makoto, because really, how can you not hook up with a school council president in an anime game, and Sae was p. hot, but due to attribute constraints I ended up with the perfect, Japanese waifu – Hifumi. Warpig would be proud (I hope).

Big Bang Burger March

Honestly, if I were to give the game a bad review after spending almost one hundred hours with it, I imagine it’d show me in a worse light than the game itself. It’s a surprisingly solid game under the layer of garnish you are likely to quickly discard.

These last few hours with it kind of made me want to play it again, as I got the jRPG itch recently – but I’m kind of torn on that. Persona 5: Royal is out, and while I hoped that it’s going to be an expansion pack, we all know how it ended. Awareness of its existence will make it feel like I’m not playing the full game going through P5 again, but on the other hand, I’m not going to buy Royal on principle. Thought about buying P4 – but since it seems like I’m not going to have all that much time for myself for the next few months, I think I’ll wait for SMT V and try that one out, as, from what I understand, the series has pretty similar mechanics.

Last time, with me: PERR-US-ONA!!!
 
Self-Ejected

Thac0

Time Mage
Patron
Joined
Apr 30, 2020
Messages
3,292
Location
Arborea
I'm very into cock and ball torture
I initially wanted to preface this post by saying that Thac0 is a lying bastard, but after re-reading the incriminating message I would have to rescind that statement.

I started playing P5 in April last year. Hard to believe how much my life changed since then! I put about ~90 hours in it back then, got super tired of it at the very end, promised to finish it in a while and that was it. Only with the release of P4 on PC I remembered I still haven’t finished P5, and since the aforementioned poster told me that I’m about 95% through the game, I finally decided to get through it yesterday. Assumed all that’s left is a multi-stage boss fight, but boy was I wrong – I ended up going to sleep when the sun was already going up. Turns out that five hours is indeed about five percent of one hundred! I lied down happy that I finally finished it, annoyed at the lost potential and tired of its anime bullshit.

Please, find attached a sample of super-spoilery anime bullshit.


Still – in one of the post in P4 Golden thread, I mentioned how I didn’t found P5 all that fun, and after these last few hours, I realized that ending up on this note would not be fair to the game. I am not sure what caused this change of heart (…because you know, you steal hearts in the game!) because this absolutely wasn’t something specific to these last few hours. I like doing write-ups on games I’m done with if only to gather my thoughts on them, so that’s what’ll follow – something between a three-years-late review, and sleep-deprived pretentious ramblings. Some spoilers probably ahead, but the spoiler for the spoilers would be that I don’t think you’d be playing this game for its story anyways.


Wake Up, Get Up, Get Up There


I enjoy a jRPG every now and then. I’m mostly interested in their mechanics – Japs have an uncanny skill of building fun, complex-ish gameplay systems. Some of them use it to do evil in form of skinner box mobile games, some are fighters for good, developing such shining examples of easy to learn, rewarding to master rulesets as Sengoku Rance, Fire Emblems, Kamidori Alchemy Meister, etc. I’m usually not a fan of their stories, and especially not of the overly dramatic and wordy dialogues, but I don’t mind them all that much. Fun mechanics are enough for me to enjoy the game – which I guess is the main reason of why my final impression of Persona 5 is positive. It was the first game from Atlus I ever picked up, and to be entirely honest it was entirely for the simp reason of its aesthetics promising something really special.

I know that Persona games didn’t historically have huge budgets, and it feels like the influx of money was used to train the biggest and most powerful anime story-san around, who then proceeded to bully the sweet and innocent mechanics-chan with some help from its heartless sister, onee-aesthetics. Still, the guilty pair has the power of grabbing you by your hair and helping you bop to more poppy parts of the soundtrack as you cream yourself looking at the stylized all-out-attack screens. Once you get tired of it though – you really get tired. I guess that was what happened to me.

PERR-US-ONA

The moment introductory clips stopped, and I got to the game itself I felt somewhat disappointed. I’ve seen the engine P5 uses (or at least some other, very similar engine) in action when my wife gave Tales of Berseria a try, and I’m not fond of it. I guess it’s good for animating anime-style graphics, but the general jerkiness and the fact that it can’t handle three dimensions gives a pretty poor starting impression when you use it for TPP visuals.

The chaps done what they could, though. Engine limitations are masked by beautifully drawn portraits and Tartakovsky-like style of “white and black on red” imagery. The way gameplay graphics meld into these screens lets them punch way above their budget. Got no eye-candy here, though, but that was not what I was looking for – so I wasn’t disappointed.

Music is pretty good! There are a few standout tracks (the usual – Rivers in the Desert, Beneath the Mask, Wake Up Get Up Get Out There), but most of the ambient is on the OK-ish level. Creators understood they have some auditory gold filigree to decorate the wooden carvings, but done the worst possible thing – used it wherever they could, so I got somewhat sick of the few poppy tracks while getting to the end. Still, after giving myself a year-long vacation from the game, coming back to the few good tunes felt good.

Also, hearing glorious samurai mangle the few English words in shoutouts was a constant source of joy.

Rivers in the Desert

Japan is the cyberpunk nation – style over substance. You see it in their games, in their cheesecakes (and other sweets), in their animation. People get excited about how stylish the game is – hell, I was there as well. Thing is, the style does not withstand the test of time. You don’t ever start feeling as much of a criminal mastermind, so it rings hollow. I wish you could do some real planning on the jobs that you take, do something like sending members of your team for side-jobs which would make then unavailable during exploration of a Palace but gave you some other boni, I wish you could stake-out the locations to gather some intel on them, or that the stealth was less important in combat and more important in the overall exploration.

This hollowness had the unfortunate side-effect of making all the dialogues that tried to make me feel like a smug, gentleman thief somewhat annoying, as I felt a huge disconnect between the game congratulating me on coming up with a master plan, and jumping from cover to cover to ambush another wandering monster. With the wide array of foes that Phantom Thieves try to change the hearts of, it seems like it’d be fun to at least attempt to formulate the jobs as various confidence schemes, break-ins, and hustles, but what you get is murderizing everything and moving forward while occasionally looking for some items. It would make as much sense if the whole thing was framed as anything else – a newspaper delivery guy trying to deliver his mail while trying to avoid rabid dogs, or policemen trying to get to the bottom of a case while avoiding criminals. The game is a shapeshifter, has no face to show, and if you take off the mask you reveal dark.

The game is entirely held up by something else.

Beneath the Mask

I was pretty lukewarm up until now, time to say something positive: combat system is extremely solid. The weakness mechanism makes sure that fights with randos usually turn into quick, one-sided slaughters, keeps you on your toes, and gives some nice challenges, especially on the hard difficulty. This alone could carry the game from start to finish. I think I’ve seen some people refer to this style of play as Pokemon on steroids – and I completely agree. The moment I stopped treating persona captures as something I have to figure out and started treating them like a Pokeball throw, my enjoyment of the game increased greatly. Persona proves you don’t need a bazillion modifiable stats to make you think about what you do about your character/ Persona lineup.

I enjoyed the initial parts of the game not only because the story is most interesting then, but also because it adds another issue to the mix – resource management. You probably won’t be able to complete first two castles in a single try (the second forces you out, but I’m not talking about this) – the limited amount of SP (mana) and the fact that it’s very difficult to retrieve it, make you really careful about using your special abilities. This becomes much less of an issue as the time goes on, and the final dungeons have infinite rejuvenation sites and that’s a shame. Figuring out whether you really need to drop a magic nuke on your enemies, or if maybe you can sacrifice some much easier recoverable health to attack physically/ withstand the enemy’s attack after wearing them down with regular attacks was a really fun part of the game.

If we’re talking about attack types – I’m on the fence about GUN. I mean, it’s super fun to use the power of the bullet to blast mythical creatures, and I giggled like an idiot when the final, godly boss pulled out a golden revolver, but I’m not sure what’s exactly the idea behind making it a separate damage type, limited by ammo, but also generated via some persona powers. I’d be much more comfortable with making it some kind of an “oh shit” button, with it allowing you to spew a few of almighty-type attacks if needed.

The rest of the mechanics are not so hot. Real-world is somewhat disjointed from the dungeonsphere. Social links help you out in combat, and you kind of need to balance your time between studying and hitting Mementos/ Castles, but it still feels like a VN with a loosely attached dungeon-delving module sometimes. There are a lot of wasted opportunities – the game really asks for mementos that’d work in another way. What I have in mind is something that would loosely correspond to real-world world map, where you could affect one plane by doing something on the other. It’d feel like a good idea to alter the training mechanics so that you could, say, use the experience you gained while fighting monsters to level up these knowledge/ smugness/ whatever stats while studying and use there attributes in the Metaverse in some way.

I ended up skipping most of the text, spending most of the days eating burgers, studying, and meeting with pals, with 2-3 visits to Metaverse per month – one to handle all the sidequests, and the rest to rush through the castle. The game still took me almost one hundred hours. For most of this time, I actually had fun.

Life will (not) Change

I’m not going to write a lot about Persona 5’s story. I got disenchanted pretty early on, but then jogged forward without really paying it all that much heed. The atmosphere of being a small fish in unfamiliar, big pond you feel at the beginning is top-tier, but it quickly dissolves as the bad guys move from being small-scale asshats to mafia bosses to evil gods. The exploding popularity meter at the end was my personal cherry on top.

I didn’t enjoy interacting with most of the characters as well. Out of your teammates Makoto was written pretty OK, and I actually found Yusuke endearing – not only because I hang out with socially-inept artists for quite a while, but also because his arc heavily hanged on him learning a bit of humility and trying to add some substance to his works. Ryuji was OK, but became a comic relief after the first third of the game; feels like he should’ve been offed somewhere to motivate the player back when he still cared for him. Anne was a moeblob, Morgana was a constant annoyance, Futaba was a bottle-pissing hikikomori, Haru was so forgettable that I actually forgot to raise any social links with her for a few weeks after she became available. They get their moments, but they’re few and far between. As for the secondary characters, there are three I’d like to mention – Sojiro and Yoshida were OK, but my personal favorite was Hifumi Togo. Her down to earth arc actually resonated with me, as we all probably had a few moments in our lives when we realized we aren’t as good as we’d like to be.

I initially planned to hook up with Makoto, because really, how can you not hook up with a school council president in an anime game, and Sae was p. hot, but due to attribute constraints I ended up with the perfect, Japanese waifu – Hifumi. Warpig would be proud (I hope).

Big Bang Burger March

Honestly, if I were to give the game a bad review after spending almost one hundred hours with it, I imagine it’d show me in a worse light than the game itself. It’s a surprisingly solid game under the layer of garnish you are likely to quickly discard.

These last few hours with it kind of made me want to play it again, as I got the jRPG itch recently – but I’m kind of torn on that. Persona 5: Royal is out, and while I hoped that it’s going to be an expansion pack, we all know how it ended. Awareness of its existence will make it feel like I’m not playing the full game going through P5 again, but on the other hand, I’m not going to buy Royal on principle. Thought about buying P4 – but since it seems like I’m not going to have all that much time for myself for the next few months, I think I’ll wait for SMT V and try that one out, as, from what I understand, the series has pretty similar mechanics.

Last time, with me: PERR-US-ONA!!!

M8 you have developed a serious case of Stockholm, rambling about how shit the game it and how dreadfull the last 5 hours were while talking about how you want to replay it lol.

here is an interesting video about the all out attack animation that nails what you are trying to describe here:
Persona 5 is a trickster. Its all smoke and mirrors at the end, and all parts of the game are technically and conceptually very barebones, but the game is always deceiving your senses, blinding you with its strengths and drawing your eye away from its weaknesses.

I didnt beat P5 in a single setting, I played it over the course of year with a few weeks pause between long sessions. Total playtime slightly sub 80h, and from the point where you were presumably at from your description I didnt took more than 3 hours to kill the last boss. That felt like the best way to experience the game, especially the later middle can become tiresome.
Also I heavily disagree with Japan having a style over substance culture, that is a very shallow take. Japanese media is not derived from greek theatre, like most of the media in the west in its structure. It follows its own development from different roots, namely now being rooted in Rakugo, Noh and Kabuki (which all have their own roots going further back). Japan has a culture of control, a culture of conflict and a culture of breaking those iron rules, but this goes too far off topic.

But when you call P5 specifically shallow and not the entirety of the Japanese culture I agree, but keep in mind you are playing a console game at first and a light hearted spinoff made for the mainstream from a much more hardcore game. Japan has no consumer PC market, or at least hasnt had one for gaming up to now. Only now they are recognising the PC as a valid platform to develop for. Console rpgs are naturally more simple than PCrpgs due to the lesser options of interfacing and the more start and stop play mentality.
 

Optimist

Savant
Patron
Joined
Jun 18, 2018
Messages
336
My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit.
M8 you have developed a serious case of Stockholm, rambling about how shit the game it and how dreadfull the last 5 hours were while talking about how you want to replay it lol.

I didn't like some of the non-core systems, but as I mentioned - I think a lot of the mechanics were super solid. The last five hours weren't dreadful either, blasting the end boss with a sin-gun made me chuckle, but there was quite a lot of combat in there as well, and as much as I complained about a bunch of the characters not doing anything for me, walking around the game world for the last time and saying goodbyes was a pleasurable experience.

I didnt beat P5 in a single setting, I played it over the course of year with a few weeks pause between long sessions. Total playtime slightly sub 80h, and from the point where you were presumably at from your description I didnt took more than 3 hours to kill the last boss. That felt like the best way to experience the game, especially the later middle can become tiresome.

Sounds like the best way to experience the game.

Also I heavily disagree with Japan having a style over substance culture, that is a very shallow take. Japanese media is not derived from greek theatre, like most of the media in the west in its structure. It follows its own development from different roots, namely now being rooted in Rakugo, Noh and Kabuki (which all have their own roots going further back). Japan has a culture of control, a culture of conflict and a culture of breaking those iron rules, but this goes too far off topic.

Dude, the examples I gave were anime, vidya, and pastries. I'm joshing around.

But when you call P5 specifically shallow and not the entirety of the Japanese culture I agree, but keep in mind you are playing a console game at first and a light hearted spinoff made for the mainstream from a much more hardcore game. Japan has no consumer PC market, or at least hasnt had one for gaming up to now. Only now they are recognising the PC as a valid platform to develop for. Console rpgs are naturally more simple than PCrpgs due to the lesser options of interfacing and the more start and stop play mentality.

The more hardcore game being SMT, I presume? I'll be happy to take a look at the new installment once it comes out.

And again - I'm not calling the entirety of the game shallow, I'm calling its stylistics shallow.
 
Self-Ejected

Thac0

Time Mage
Patron
Joined
Apr 30, 2020
Messages
3,292
Location
Arborea
I'm very into cock and ball torture
I didn't like some of the non-core systems, but as I mentioned - I think a lot of the mechanics were super solid. The last five hours weren't dreadful either, blasting the end boss with a sin-gun made me chuckle, but there was quite a lot of combat in there as well, and as much as I complained about a bunch of the characters not doing anything for me, walking around the game world for the last time and saying goodbyes was a pleasurable experience.

I once dropped FFX in the last room before the boss when I was much younger, not knowing that I was almost done. The ending was dragging and I just put it aside for a few weeks, then my savegames died. Replaying years later I found out how close to the end I was, and seeing that the game actually had a decent ending made me appreciate it much more. JRPGs rely on their endings a lot more than WRPGs, ironically while being much longer to beat usually.

The more hardcore game being SMT, I presume? I'll be happy to take a look at the new installment once it comes out.

Yep! The massive difference between SMT and Persona is that SMT does not care about characters as much, and if it even gives you companions they are not nearly as fleshed out. Instead of an ensemble of waifus and husbandos you fill your entire team with shadows, which you can swap around and freely fusion, allowing you a much greater degree of control over which abilities are in your party. You main character becomes even stronger than a perfectly fused demon, since you can decide his base stats on level up, and you can transfer almost any skill you like from your demons onto him. So it has a much less character focussed story and one that usually jerks itself off over life and control, much much deeper combat and no subsystems besides the usual JRPG standard.
 

GhostCow

Balanced Gamer
Patron
Joined
Jan 2, 2020
Messages
3,994
Kasumi's everything

but only the fake Kasumi when she's pretending to be Kasumi. Her real personality and the glasses don't do it for me
 

Silva

Arcane
Joined
Jul 17, 2005
Messages
4,778
Location
Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
Playing Royal now and the improvements really make it a better, more open game, both on the social and dungeon levels. I only wish we could set the original introduction cinematic back ("get up, stand up, get out there").

Anyway, I'm posting to say I'm at Madarame arc again and man, Yusuke is such a great NPC companion. He should totally be inducted on the Hall of Fame of companions with Morte and the likes. His drama is so relatable and his personality so endearing. I wanted to fuck him and I'm a cis male.

Edit: BTW, is it possible to date him??
 

GarlandExCon

Arcane
Joined
May 19, 2014
Messages
6,957
Playing Royal now and the improvements really make it a better, more open game, both on the social and dungeon levels. I only wish we could set the original introduction cinematic back ("get up, stand up, get out there").

Anyway, I'm posting to say I'm at Madarame arc again and man, Yusuke is such a great NPC companion. He should totally be inducted on the Hall of Fame of companions with Morte and the likes. His drama is so relatable and his personality so endearing. I wanted to fuck him and I'm a cis male.

Edit: BTW, is it possible to date him??

This isn't Gay Blade bro
 

GhostCow

Balanced Gamer
Patron
Joined
Jan 2, 2020
Messages
3,994
the glasses don't do it for me

Burn the heretic !
kookpy.png

3ypi60.png
 

Silva

Arcane
Joined
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It occurred to me that the actual jungian archetypes are the Tarot types (Fool, Chariot, erc), and the monsters/personas are cultural masks of those as seen by different world folklores. That's why they change into masks when you collect them.

Makes sense?


Edit: BTW, this vid is very good if you're into JungIan psychology.

 

Silva

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Does Royal get harder in endgame and/or 3rd semester? I thought the first couple palaces fairly challenging on Hard, but now the difficulty dropped so much the game became super boring, Mementos e Palace normal enemies feeling like busywork. I suspect that's due to Royal giving more options to manage SP, and the new mechanics like Showtime and boosted Baton Pass that make normal fights brainless. I'm having to resort to self-imposed challenges like no-DLC personas or letting companions on auto during fights, to have some resemblance of fun.

A pity, as every other change was for the better (well most actually, I hate the pointless cell phone talk after every confident encounter) . If the game doesn't get harder later/on 3rd semester, don't know if I'll have the strenght to continue.
 

Silva

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Has anyone tried letting the AI handle the party companions (Act Freely on Tactics menu) ? I'm trying this now on Royal as a way to make it harder and I'm liking it. Combats become more strategical as you must really mind your personas strengths and how they cover your party gaps. The AI is surprisingly smart and even better than me with some technicals, but they are more wasteful with SP and dont use buff/debuff as efficiently.

All in all, I'm finding it refreshing and making the game a little harder, which was my goal anyway. I didn't try it on bosses yet, though. I'll update you faggots when I do.
 
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Abu Antar

Turn-based Poster
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Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is. Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
^I'd never do that myself. Full party control was when I could finally say that Persona 3 is a good game.
 

Sentinel

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I did use party AI but in Persona 4 by the final stages of the game cause all the recycled enemies were getting on my nerves and I just wanted to get the game over and done with. Party makes (often better) decisions much faster which made battles go by quicker.
 

Silva

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For those who want a challenge in Royal, reposting this from Reddit...


- - -

Disclaimer: I'm coming from an original P5 playthrough on Hard, and finishing Shido palace now on Royal, I can safely say it's difficulty is broken, and that it needed a couple playtest cycles more. The game is simply too bloated with player-side improvements, making it too easy no matter the setting. For some players who like to be challenged and feel a sense of accomplishment from gameplay, this may pose a problem. Since Atlus won't be releasing any more updates, and the game doesn't support fan mods (well, at least until it comes to PC some day) I propose we put suggestions here for interesting self-imposed measures to make the game more of a challenge and attempting to approach what the original P5 was on Hard. So without further ado, here are mine (please, feel free to add more of your own, or critique those points)

- Difficulty setting: HARD. (since Merciless actually makes it easy to abuse Technicals - Exception: Okumura boss, which is broken and should be played on Merciless to become manageable).

- Dungeons related:

1. Do NOT use Jose's upgrades in Mementos, except money for late game fusing if you wish.
2. Do NOT seek Palaces' Will Seeds.
3. Do NOT use DLC personas except to fuse original game ones you like.
4. Do NOT use DLC gear/items.
5. Do NOT use "Direct Commands" on Tactics, except on Bosses.
6. Do NOT use Alarm on Velvet Room. Shut it down immediately upon entering it.
7. Do NOT use challenges in Velvet Room.
8. Do NOT add resistances to personas in Velvet room. If you want to strenghten them, do it the old P5 way of sacrificing another one for it.

- Social related:

1. Do NOT use "time efficient" Confidant abilities like Kawakami's (maid) and Chihaya's (fortune teller). Royal is already easier with confidants, and this breaks the system.
3. Do NOT use high tier SP adhesives from Takemi (doctor).
4. Do NOT raise Ohyo (reporter) confidant past the first couple abilities. The revamped dungeon stealth is too easy to abuse and her abilities break the system, letting you ambush everyone to your hearts content. OBS: if you absolutely NEED to upgrade her for her final persona, do it but impose yourself some rule like "I can only ambush Red and Yellow shadows, the weaker ones I must always face head on" or similar.
5. Do NOT raise Stats at home after Palace incursions, only after Mementos ones. Royal makes it too easy to raise stats.

Of course, these won't make the game perfect, as an actual update would be needed for it. But this can make the game more interesting for those of us who like to be challenged. Thoughts?

- - -

Tl;dr: Ignore everything new in this edition. :negative:
 
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Silva

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I did use party AI but in Persona 4 by the final stages of the game cause all the recycled enemies were getting on my nerves and I just wanted to get the game over and done with. Party makes (often better) decisions much faster which made battles go by quicker.
Updating to say it's the only way to play Royal for me, as the game is easier than default P5 and thus controlling each party member banalizes it. But watch out: on bosses it's necessary to go back to full control, as they have nuances (like timed events) that the AI can't take advantage of.

BTW, I'm on Shido palace now (gawd those mouse sections are horrible) and I've found the Okumura arc (Haru) more interesting now. Don't know if Royal improved something or not. Also, I didn't remember how good Sae palace and story arc is. I think it's the 2nd best in the game behind only Kamoshida.
 

GhostCow

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Seriously though. I played P5 on an emulator, borrowed a PS4 and bought P5R, and would be willing to buy it and play it again on PC.
 

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