Atlus Persona 5

[Avellion]

I have always hesitated to crank up the difficulty in Persona 3 & 4 because I'm always terrified that I'm not leveling fast enough and that I'll end up in an impossible situation because I'm a complete storyfag.
I suppose keeping a save after the defeat of the previous boss could somewhat prevent that problem should this happen.

It's irrelevant. JRPGs are only geared towards a simple strategy of hit the enemy's weakness/use buffs on your dudes and pray that the enemy doesn't have an instalkill spell. Oh, and grind like a drone.

Positioning, picking and combining traits in party level progression...these things are unknown. The grind is all that matters.

Considering all characters save for Yukiko and Teddie LOSE their weaknesses, this is even more so the case. For better or worse, party composition did not matter a lot in Persona 4. Cant say for Persona 3, the horror stories "Worst JRPG evar!", "Oh god this game is an abomination", "I question anyone who likes this piece of trash", made me steer clear from it.

 

[TheGreatOne]

Positioning doesn't necessarily increase strategic depth, though often it's a case of RTwP being a flawed system (and designers being lazy). I guess it's easier to create more complicated boss patterns when you don't have to factor in movement in design. But positioning is present in all SRPGs, and some regular JRPGs also use it (like BOF V). And I don't see how speccing/equiping your party is a part of the combat system. That's essentially what you do in SMT anyways: you fuse and mix demons so you can counter bosses attack patterns and abuse their weaknesses. Sometimes you have to make long term commitments like in CRPG speccing (what spells you choose for your characters in Nocturne/Persona as you can only have 8 at a time and never re-gain a lost ability) where as you can changes things on the fly to prepare for each individual battle in other cases (changing skills, passive resistances/immunities, auto skills and demon set ups between battles in DeSu/DDS)

 

[Avellion]

Positioning doesn't necessarily increase strategic depth, though often it's a case of RTwP being a flawed system (and designers being lazy). I guess it's easier to create more complicated boss patterns when you don't have to factor in movement in design. But positioning is present in all SRPGs, and some regular JRPGs also use it (like BOF V). And I don't see how speccing/equiping your party is a part of the combat system. That's essentially what you do in SMT anyways: you fuse and mix demons so you can counter bosses attack patterns and abuse their weaknesses. Sometimes you have to make long term commitments like in CRPG speccing (what spells you choose for your characters in Nocturne/Persona as you can only have 8 at a time and never re-gain a lost ability) where as you can changes things on the fly to prepare for each individual battle in other cases (changing skills, passive resistances/immunities, auto skills and demon set ups between battles in DeSu/DDS)

While speccing is usually not part of the combat system, equipping can be if the game lets you change equipment mid combat.

Persona 4, does let you change equipment mid combat, in fact, Persona did more so that than pretty much any other JRPG I have ever played... changed "equipment" pretty much every turn. It is a shame about the rest of your party members though.

 

[Jasede]

It's a fallacy to believe that "more complexity" equals a better or more challenging game. Picking the correct traits and party members is critically important in 3 and 4 on the Expert difficulty (aimed at experienced jRPG players) and grinding is next to futile as prices in stores are so high that one would have to be utterly insane to consider grinding for gold a viable option. XP gain also stops once you pass a certain level or slows down drastically, making grind even more of a non-option. I can't help but think you don't know what you're talking about.

P3 may well have been more challenging than Nocturne, though they are both very difficult (when compared to other games) - they both require item usage, maintaining a good party, evolving personas to the right traits and passing them on, tailoring your strategy to the boss, and so on and so on.

I am not sure where you heard horror stories about P3; while ripe with flaws it offers an excellent combat system and great boss fights which should please everyone who enjoys turn-based combat and planning strategies.

All my words only apply for Expert difficulty as I find games are always balanced around the hardest one. (That is the one designers play the most, after all. Good ones, anyway.)

 

[TheGreatOne]

Original P3 hasn't got the right kind of difficulty though, as you can't control your party members.

 

[Niektory]

I played P4 on hard and regretted it because it added HP bloat making bosses into huge sponges. There was one that took me over an hour to kill. An hour repeating the same commands over and over again, so fun! Not to mention damage bloat forcing you to grind to not get one-shotted. And grinding gets old really fast in this game.

 

[Raghar]

Original P3 hasn't got the right kind of difficulty though, as you can't control your party members.

I like when you can't control party members in P3 FES.

(they changed that in PSP version)

 

[Duraframe300]

Having now finished Golden I'm kind of hoping they will someday come out with a definitive version of Persona 3.

At the moment having so many things split up between FES and Portable kind of sucks.

 

[Morality Games]

Having now finished Golden I'm kind of hoping they will someday come out with a definitive version of Persona 3.

At the moment having so many things split up between FES and Portable kind of sucks.

If it were anyone else I would say there is no chance, but since it is Atlus...

 

[Perkel]

I fully expect Atlus instead of making it more interesting via for example creating more exploration, non linearity or even some adventure stuff in how you tackle obstacles to go fully NIS with Persona5 and add more levels to randomly generated dungeons and some shit mechanic that will change 0 in long run.

 

[Martius]

Fans of 3 and 4 are supposed to feel "right in home" so I doubt many things will change. I would love to see better dungeons since its obvious weak point in comparison to other Atlus and MegaTen games.

 

[TheGreatOne]

Well if P3->P4 is any indication, they're likely (hopefully) going in the direction of more themed and well structured dungeons. P3 was generic dungeon crawling, P4 was generic dungeon crawling in areas that visually symbolized who ever person you were pursuing/trying to save. It's very unlikely that we'll get Nocturne level difficulty with dark rooms, teleporters and traps that make you fall to a lower level, but it would be such incline if P5 dungeons were designed like later Nocturne dungeons and visually themed like in P4. Though Nocturne dungeons were visually way more impressive than P4 dungeons, but given the success of the series, it's reasonable to expect that Atlus will try to improve the visuals since it's a PS3/PS4 title.

 

[Caim]

I wonder what they're going to do with the Personas themselves. Golden made the good call to allow the player to choose which skills a fused Persona inherits, but will they keep this, expand on it or just do away with the four-skills-max thing and allow a Persona to know all the skills it learns natuarlly?

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Apparently this game will be shown tomorrow at the PSX in Las Vegas:

Tweet from a SCEA employee:

 

[Martius]

Lets just hope it will be anything more than trailer shown during Tokyo Game Show.

 

[Corporate_Jew_Master]

Info released yet?

 

[Martius]

No, sony even just started. They are showing new Uncharted right now.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Well it's definitely there. Today or tomorrow should be the gameplay premiere.

 

[Martius]

So far there was just confirmation that its coming to NA (no shit..). Of course no word about release in Europe.

 

[taxalot]

Aren't most if every PS3 games not region locked ?

 

[Martius]

It have option for that but most devs are not using it. Atlus for example region locked Persona 4 Arena. I hope they are not even thinking about using it now. Anyway their recent games had pretty decent European released, maybe Sega will take care of it fast or other company like NIS.

 

[TheGreatOne]

Actually Persona 4 Arena was the first PS3 game to include on disc region locking if I recall correctly. So 99% of PS3 games should be region free. Atlus just likes going the extra mile for being a dick.

 

[taxalot]

But then they region locked it because they intended to sell a European version. There is pretty much no point in doing it otherwise.

 

[Martius]

Not really. They just wanted to stop Japanese people from importing USA copies. That was pretty much their only excuse. I think Europe got Arena something like one year after USA?

 

[Crooked Bee]

Atlus should seriously just start porting their games to PC. That's where the dungeon crawler genre originated, and that's where it needs end up.

Especially now that Valkyria Chronicles has been so successful, and Squeenix's back catalogue PC sales have been so strong.