Atlus Persona 3 is a bad game that could have been nice

[Crooked Bee]

Entire Persona series is bad.


(Sorry Hirato )

 

[Hirato]

It's okay bee-chan. They're terrible dungeon crawlers, so I forgive you.

 

[Crooked Bee]

It's okay bee-chan. They're terrible dungeon crawlers, so I forgive you.

But are they any good at anything? (Really!)

 

[Corporate_Jew_Master]

Then you clearly didn't play the game right.

Did you name your character Cock and have little brown waifus call you Cock-kun and Cock-chan?

Did you call said little brown waifus fat and ruin their lives?

Clearly, you played the visual novel disguised as a game JRPG wrong.

 

[Crooked Bee]

Haha, I usually play JRPGs for their mechanics so whatever Obviously I'm playing them wrong!

 

[Corporate_Jew_Master]

Haha, I usually play JRPGs for their mechanics so whatever Obviously I'm playing them wrong!

Don't really consider the Persona series JRPGs, only games with more focus on social sim shit rather than gameplay.

Nocturne, Vagrant Story, heck, even Xenogears CD1 compared to Persona, are JRPGs.

 

[SCO]

Bah, a visual novel is just a genre trying (and mostly failing) to 'gamifify' narrative by adding lame minigames, branching and resource management (in this case, time). The problems of the series seem to have more to do with unrelenting dungeon crawling and 90h+ gametimes than anything else, although they probably took that piece wholesale from megami tensei. Granted persona series narrative is a series of bizarre rube goldberg contraptions that appear out of thin air, thinly attached to some vaguely psychological or meta theme; which mostly doesn't happen on the shin meganami tensei series which have rather simple primal faction oriented plots.

Besides, P2 was absolutely a JRPG. A JRPG that sucked especially hard because it was so JRPG that it was more JRPG than the competition.

 

[oljebox]

So ... SCO is disappointed that a JRPG has grind and anime trappings.



Now that I think about it, I realise the game wouldn't work without the grind. It's the white noise from which all the other stuff rises. If there were no white noise, we wouldn't find the rest of the game so compelling. The Social Links stuff only works because of the tedium that is everything else.

Thanks for making the thread, SCO. It gave me the opportunity to finally make sense of Persona.

 

[SCO]

I actually took up the time to read that P3 had 'bloob-ed' up the enemies instead of using random encounters before deciding to play it. Joke's on me i guess. Didn't stop playing either. I kind of agree about the 'white noise' theory.

Oh, i didn't mention that going up to a 'new section' of the dungeon you were presented to... mostly models of the same enemies texture switched, with a different color mask ( their arcanas, in the fucked up tarot interpretation of the game )

 

[Hirato]

It's okay bee-chan. They're terrible dungeon crawlers, so I forgive you.

But are they any good at anything? (Really!)

Writing, characters, and art direction are pretty good, which is why we called it the ultimate storyfag JRPG in my let's play.
I'm a bit of a storyfag myself, but the dungeon crawling mechanics are so terrible, even that is barely enough to let me retain interest to push through to the good parts.

I had a brief stint of SMT:Nocturne last year, in which I played up to the final dungeon - True Demon Route - on hard difficulty.
It was just so much better, I even wrote a large rant about it in my LP: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...truth-in-persona-4.68074/page-20#post-2242914

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Why are you screaming murder about noncontrollable characters? Have you ever been in real combat? You can give them some reasonable directions, and that's enough.

It's enough, as in you can finish the game...but not really enjoyable. Party members waste their turn doing useless bullshit, thus fucking you over even though you've been playing competently.

See also: last time Marcus turned the Chosen One into a stain on the floor with his minigun.

 

[SCO]

I didn't mention how i loved some of the spell descriptions. For example:
auto-rajukaja : applies rajukaja at the beginning of combat.

Well, no shit Atlus.

 

[ghostdog]

The problem is the grinding. Since they didn't want to focus on dungeon design, they should have reduced it to a minimum.

 

[oljebox]

The problem is the grinding. Since they didn't want to focus on dungeon design, they should have reduced it to a minimum.

But then you'd realise how shitty the rest of the game is, too.

 

[Fat Dragon]

What I recall most fondly about Persona 3 is that the game automatically assumes you want to bone all the female npcs, so in their social links the protagonist does exactly that with zero shame. You don't even get the good old "let's just be friends" option as a way to decline, even if you're already with another girl. He just talks up one girl, does his duty, then immediately dumps her for another. They changed this in Persona 4, I believe.

 

[Corporate_Jew_Master]

They changed this in Persona 4, I believe.

FEMINISM DECLINE OF WEST CIVILIZATION

They went even more social sim on P4, true, but they also had better dungeons. (still nothing great) It also had dirty whores Adachi.

Tried to restart P3 two days ago and gave up after I reached the first school exam. The grind is truly horrible.

Climb 20 floors to reach checkpoints. Gather generalised loot and farm generalised monsters.

Reach checkpoint, fight mini boss. It is either piss easy or requires MORE grinding. Or you simply need a bit of luck aka Mitsuru not casting Marin Karin repeatedly when it has 0% chance of succeeding.

Game would be 100% better if you got give Fuka an electric shock every time she speaks through the intercom/radio/vox/warpcraft telepathic communitcation until she learns not to. You could at least filter the SENPAI SENPAI bitch on P4 but Fuka has 10x more annoying voice.

It would also be better if it was moddable. For example, Cleve Edition:

Spoiler

 

[Cool name]

auto-rajukaja : applies rajukaja at the beginning of combat.

As far as I am concerned someone who comes across that name and doesn't immediately know it is a defense buff applied automatically at the start of every fight doesn't deserve to be playing a MegaTen game to begin with.

 

[SCO]

auto-rajukaja : applies rajukaja at the beginning of combat.

As far as I am concerned someone who comes across that name and doesn't immediately know it is a defense buff applied automatically at the start of every fight doesn't deserve to be playing a MegaTen game to begin with.

My point exactly. The description is reduntant when it could have been useful thank you for supporting my point. You could suggest to the fine Atlus devs a 'hardcore' mode without spell any descriptions at all, would be functionally identical for this single one. I'm sure they'd approve, fucking spergs that they are.

 

[Cool name]

The description is reduntant when it could have been useful thank you for supporting my point.

I was neither supporting nor going against your point, it was just a random comment. I don't see the point of having descriptions at all when the spell names themselves are descriptive. No matter how 'useful' they make them they will always be redundant.

 

[SCO]

See, i am a product of my times, and my times are decadent. Requiring me to memorize a spell description from a spell that is not often immediately accessible isssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnoying.

edit: Although the pattern is obvious enough once you memorize the prefixes obviously. Mata attack, raja defense and some other shit for hit-chance that is never worth it. Or was it suffixes? Don't know, don't care.

 

[Cool name]

I think it's kind of cute. It works wonders into making the player feel part of that world, kind of a 'wink wink' moment when you read something like 'maragidyne', 'mepatra', or 'mediarama' and just naturally know what they mean. It's a very childish thingie but I like it.

 

[SCO]

Electricity, wind and uh, mass healing. Lame obscurantism, bring out your glottal-stop invented languages. Klingon runic spells, now that sounds badass*.



*not a actual opinion

 

[Cool name]

It's actually the strong mass fire spell variety, mass dispel, and medium mass healing. Electricity is Zio, Wind is Garu.

SCO is no true Megatenist.

 

[SCO]

A pox on your house!

 

[SCO]

I've been playing Devil Survivor 2, because, why not start with the last, fuck it, and wtf atlus, couldn't you fit a tactical jrpg system like this on persona. Was it too much effort for your carefully designed 90h grids required to support the spaced out character phases or something?

Also, the requirement of the protag level for fusing demons is annoying as always.... i always do the samething: solo some battles in a level up quick scheme. Game doesn't care, doesn't give a shit. So the rule only exists to prevent people fusing Lucifer midway through the game. Is this a bad thing somehow? Atlus, maybe you'd prefer to make your combinations yet more random rule lawyered instead? No? Slightly more absurd prices on the compendium? Level fucking scaling demons?