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ASenileAnimal
Dec 21, 2017

Morpheus posted:

My biggest complaint with the dungeons is that they are very formulaic. There are three things to collect to get to the final door, every single time (I mean, maybe this changes but I'm through three dungeons and this has been the case). P5 had some real variety to the nature of the palaces and what you had to do to progress, so that part has been kind of disappointing.

i just finished the 3rd one and i think ill be ok with the dungeons being kinda the same if it means i never have to do the rat hallways from shidos palace ever again. man that was tedious.

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ImpAtom
May 24, 2007

Combos are important to the game but they are important because of what their basic effects are, which becomes a lot more relevant as you level up characters. Haru's tornado (as mentioned above) is absolutely fantastic as a default Psy move as long as you've got some levels in her and her final learned combat skill gives her infinite ammo for her triangle attack which is fuckin' busted. Ryuji can do fantastic melee damage but he needs to power up a bit to make it worthwhile and it should be in conjunction with his actual spells.

This is most critical for Joker who has a unique set of skills for every Persona in the game. Which is actually pretty cool because it means otherwise forgettable Persona can have distinct uses. All the spells used by combos are weaker than their regular versions but that doesn't stop a buff or heal from being useful.

thebardyspoon
Jun 30, 2005
So I'm on the 6th dungeon now and (spoilers for the 4th and 5th ones)it's a shame that they're both short due to being more "plot" dungeons, I think the spooky lab could have been cool if they'd made it a bit more visually interesting and then had more of the Phantom Thieves getting freaked out, for some reason the "Makoto is a super badass who is scared of supernatural stuff" bit makes me laugh quite a lot. Then the old timey Japanese village dungeon is also a relatively cool theme that is truncated quite a bit whereas the previous 3 were kinda dull "oh the city around the castle is warped a bit to fit the monarch" things that were all quite similar. Wish they'd differentiated them more or extended the parts where you go inside the castle a bit for them and made each one pretty different to the others.

Unlucky7
Jul 11, 2006

Fallen Rib
I think I will try to get back on P5R to see if I can shake this. In Vanilla P5 I got as far as shortly before the Hawaii trip. I just need to get as far as the base game ending (December?) and not necessarily the Royal additional content, right?

fadam
Apr 23, 2008

My face when Futaba makes a reference to videogames:

History Comes Inside!
Nov 20, 2004




Unlucky7 posted:

I think I will try to get back on P5R to see if I can shake this. In Vanilla P5 I got as far as shortly before the Hawaii trip. I just need to get as far as the base game ending (December?) and not necessarily the Royal additional content, right?

The royal content is irrelevant to strikers, and the base game final dungeon is December. Then you get a couple of epilogue story events to take you through to the ending.

fadam
Apr 23, 2008

ImpAtom posted:

Combos are important to the game but they are important because of what their basic effects are, which becomes a lot more relevant as you level up characters. Haru's tornado (as mentioned above) is absolutely fantastic as a default Psy move as long as you've got some levels in her and her final learned combat skill gives her infinite ammo for her triangle attack which is fuckin' busted. Ryuji can do fantastic melee damage but he needs to power up a bit to make it worthwhile and it should be in conjunction with his actual spells.

This is most critical for Joker who has a unique set of skills for every Persona in the game. Which is actually pretty cool because it means otherwise forgettable Persona can have distinct uses. All the spells used by combos are weaker than their regular versions but that doesn't stop a buff or heal from being useful.

So what am I missing: with Hua Po Joker's C4 shoots out a Maragi, but it doesn't seem to break fire shields for me even though actually casting it does.

YoshiOfYellow
Aug 21, 2015

Voted #1 Babysitter in Mushroom Kingdom

I will say though, regarding my earlier gripe. It plays very well into the 2nd dungeon's Monarch and stuff to feel intensely contrived and tedious. Plus everyone rips on it constantly.

What I'm saying is that game is still good.

bobjr
Oct 16, 2012

Roose is loose.
🐓🐓🐓✊🪧

Sophie seems to just wreck the second jail boss, but overall it just felt a lot easier than the first boss.

Mechafunkzilla
Sep 11, 2006

If you want a vision of the future...

fadam posted:

So what am I missing: with Hua Po Joker's C4 shoots out a Maragi, but it doesn't seem to break fire shields for me even though actually casting it does.

It's a less damaging version of the move, so it might take a few of them to get all the way through a shield.

fadam
Apr 23, 2008

I have a brain problem where I always play games on the hardest difficulty possible but hard mode in this game is so miserable. The damage you intake is fine and feels fair considering how cheap healing items are, but the damage you output is miserable. You spend all of your character’s SP to break a boss’ shield one time (I wish I knew why my combo attacks didn’t do shield damage) and then you just have to slowly whittle down the remaining ~70% of their health bar.

Mechafunkzilla posted:

It's a less damaging version of the move, so it might take a few of them to get all the way through a shield.

Unless the number is over 20 idk, I basically did nothing but C4 and never saw it even dent the shield bar. What difficulty are you on?

Harrow
Jun 30, 2012

Unlucky7 posted:

I think I will try to get back on P5R to see if I can shake this. In Vanilla P5 I got as far as shortly before the Hawaii trip. I just need to get as far as the base game ending (December?) and not necessarily the Royal additional content, right?

That's correct, though honestly the Royal content is so good I think it's worth the extra month or so of in-game time to experience it.

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters

YoshiOfYellow posted:

I will say though, regarding my earlier gripe. It plays very well into the 2nd dungeon's Monarch and stuff to feel intensely contrived and tedious. Plus everyone rips on it constantly.

What I'm saying is that game is still good.

The best part of the second dungeon is Joker getting way into the 'lore' of it, and Ryuji being like "you're, uh, really into this stuff aren't you."

Unlucky7
Jul 11, 2006

Fallen Rib

Harrow posted:

That's correct, though honestly the Royal content is so good I think it's worth the extra month or so of in-game time to experience it.

Well, I also heard that going from the Royal ending to Strikers is a little weird, character wise.

Harrow
Jun 30, 2012

Unlucky7 posted:

Well, I also heard that going from the Royal ending to Strikers is a little weird, character wise.

Eh, it's not so bad. To keep it spoiler-light: the new party members from Royal's third semester aren't in Strikers, but there are easy handwave reasons for both not to show up. Strikers was definitely written to follow vanilla P5 but it doesn't wildly contradict Royal, either.

You could think of both Royal's third semester and Strikers as two different sequel OVAs that don't reference each other but in the long run they'll probably both be considered canon.

Harrow fucked around with this message at 02:11 on Feb 23, 2021

Item Getter
Dec 14, 2015

Morpheus posted:

My biggest complaint with the dungeons is that they are very formulaic. There are three things to collect to get to the final door, every single time (I mean, maybe this changes but I'm through three dungeons and this has been the case). P5 had some real variety to the nature of the palaces and what you had to do to progress, so that part has been kind of disappointing.

This is sort of not true for the rest of the game in the sense that the "full size" dungeons follow this formula, and many of the other dungeons are considerably shorter but also more straightforward.

YoshiOfYellow
Aug 21, 2015

Voted #1 Babysitter in Mushroom Kingdom

My insistence on maining Yusuke paid off with the 2nd dungeon boss. My boy was designed to eviscerate that fool. Which makes sense really given the boss.

Also a neat thing I've learned: Once he's gotten his 4th Master Art that can proc Freeze with his repeated strike specials, he can damage enemy shield gauges when that procs if they're ice weak. Pretty nifty feature.

Fojar38
Sep 2, 2011


Sorry I meant to say I hope that the police use maximum force and kill or maim a bunch of innocent people, thus paving a way for a proletarian uprising and socialist utopia


also here's a stupid take
---------------------------->

Unlucky7 posted:

Well, I also heard that going from the Royal ending to Strikers is a little weird, character wise.

You don't need to play through Royal's extra semester but you 110% should because it's some of the best video game writing ever IMO

Fojar38
Sep 2, 2011


Sorry I meant to say I hope that the police use maximum force and kill or maim a bunch of innocent people, thus paving a way for a proletarian uprising and socialist utopia


also here's a stupid take
---------------------------->
Also hot take: this game is actually pretty easy by action game standards even on hard.

ApplesandOranges
Jun 22, 2012

Thankee kindly.
Some quick, spoilery thoughts as I'm starting up the third dungeon:

The first dungeon is pretty good, they do a decent job of ramping up Alice as a threat. Though I was slightly disappointed at her leaning into maniacal villain so quickly in real life, instead of 'her subconscious is rude but her real life likes the treatment but has no idea why people are going crazy for her'. Atmosphere is solid, Ann leans into the head role nicely without overpowering it.

I've seen enough teasers to know Zenkichi is playable, so I'm vaguely curious to see how he gets there. At least his genuine reactions to the Metaverse are funny.

Second dungeon feels... kinda eh? Yusuke takes too much of a central role here I think with some chiming in by Futaba. The villain isn't really that threatening, he only has one town under his 'control' and the height of his own threat just seems to be 'very rude, wants to pick up women'. A book doesn't seem that prolific of a slave-making tool compared to Alice's fashion or an actual mayor, so I dunno. Plus if his writing is actually trash, then... I dunno, the industry isn't really that kind. There's no indication of how his actual writing looks before Prince of Nightmares, so if it's the same kind of hashed together anime tropes then I'm not really buying the 'work hard and you'll be good eventually' story they were trying to sell. Sometimes some people aren't meant to write.

I'm immediately cottoning onto the lady scientist as 'yup, you're evil'. Zenkichi immediately dismissing her as a non-threat, her reaction to Sophie, and her request to see her code. Nothing good is coming from this.

Also, thank you for no perv scene during the bath. Heck, you can even compliment Ryuji on his abs. Keep this up.

With the first two dungeons mirroring the central characters from P5, it's nice to see Haru being the central character going into the third dungeon. I was critical of Haru in P5, but she flows much bettter here in P5S. Her jokes land better ('I'm very handy with an axe' and 'I'm sorry, we just have no trust in the police' and 'My name is Beauty Thief!' are all good). I'll see how this goes.


Also, the music is all very good. The town themes for the second and third towns are both legitimately good, and I like the remix of Last Surprise well enough (though I still prefer Take Over as a general battle theme for this game).

ApplesandOranges fucked around with this message at 08:30 on Feb 23, 2021

Infinity Gaia
Feb 27, 2011

a storm is coming...

The best part about the second dungeon is playing into the narrative every time you fight a miniboss, much to Ryuji's chagrin.

YoshiOfYellow
Aug 21, 2015

Voted #1 Babysitter in Mushroom Kingdom

ApplesandOranges posted:

Some quick, spoilery thoughts as I'm starting up the third dungeon:

The first dungeon is pretty good, they do a decent job of ramping up Alice as a threat. Though I was slightly disappointed at her leaning into maniacal villain so quickly in real life, instead of 'her subconscious is rude but her real life likes the treatment but has no idea why people are going crazy for her'. Atmosphere is solid, Ann leans into the head role nicely without overpowering it.

I've seen enough teasers to know Zenkichi is playable, so I'm vaguely curious to see how he gets there. At least his genuine reactions to the Metaverse are funny.

Second dungeon feels... kinda eh? Yusuke takes too much of a central role here I think with some chiming in by Futaba. The villain isn't really that threatening, he only has one town under his 'control' and the height of his own threat just seems to be 'very rude, wants to pick up women'. A book doesn't seem that prolific of a slave-making tool compared to Alice's fashion or an actual mayor, so I dunno. Plus if his writing is actually trash, then... I dunno, the industry isn't really that kind. There's no indication of how his actual writing looks before Prince of Nightmares, so if it's the same kind of hashed together anime tropes then I'm not really buying the 'work hard and you'll be good eventually' story they were trying to sell. Sometimes some people aren't meant to write.

I'm immediately cottoning onto the lady scientist as 'yup, you're evil'. Zenkichi immediately dismissing her as a non-threat, her reaction to Sophie, and her request to see her code. Nothing good is coming from this.

Also, thank you for no perv scene during the bath. Heck, you can even compliment Ryuji on his abs. Keep this up.

With the first two dungeons mirroring the central characters from P5, it's nice to see Haru being the central character going into the third dungeon. I was critical of Haru in P5, but she flows much bettter here in P5S. Her jokes land better ('I'm very handy with an axe' and 'I'm sorry, we just have no trust in the police' and 'My name is Beauty Thief!' are all good). I'll see how this goes.


Also, the music is all very good. The town themes for the second and third towns are both legitimately good, and I like the remix of Last Surprise well enough (though I still prefer Take Over as a general battle theme for this game).

For the 2nd dungeon: They don't really go into but I imagine after countless hours of working his rear end off and immediately getting disqualified in numerous contests he got desperate and started lifting poo poo from elsewhere. Futaba makes a comment that if any of the original source fans caught wind of the lifted stuff they'd immediately riot over it, which emphasizes that hardly anyone was actually paying any real attention to his book and it only got any recognition for the name attached to it and that it won an award. He doesn't really lose it until he learns of the deception, seemingly around the time that EMMA is released and he figures out how it works. At that point even if it was fake recognition he was just glad to be getting any recognition that wasn't just based on his name. I agree it's not as strong as Alice's story though, perhaps because a lot of it is a bit fuzzy and glossed over.

I do like how Yusuke responded to it. He really got to properly shine as a more serious character outside his usual "weird artist friend" schtick, which is always nice to see more of. I admit I'm massively biased though since he's my favorite.

YoshiOfYellow
Aug 21, 2015

Voted #1 Babysitter in Mushroom Kingdom

Actually minor correction to my previous post.

I recall one of the party making a quick comment before the warden fight saying that maybe the lovely editors were responsible for the rampant plagiarism in the book. It certainly tracks with their desire to ride Natsume's name to riches. Presumably they doctored up his writing massively to give some believable merit to his rigged award.

Pennfalath
Sep 10, 2011

Why are these teenagers not at home studying their Latin vocabulary?
Some slight middle of jail 2 mechanics spoilers about making money:

Oh wow, with two bond points in extortionist (more money after battle) and one in treasure enemies (forgot the name), I got 40k yen from one treasure enemy fight back in the main crossing section of the first jail!

ApplesandOranges
Jun 22, 2012

Thankee kindly.

YoshiOfYellow posted:

Actually minor correction to my previous post.

I recall one of the party making a quick comment before the warden fight saying that maybe the lovely editors were responsible for the rampant plagiarism in the book. It certainly tracks with their desire to ride Natsume's name to riches. Presumably they doctored up his writing massively to give some believable merit to his rigged award.

Eh, I don't buy that because his Jail is his cognition and it reflects the book, so he must have read the final product and believed he wrote it. Even if they doctored the work that got him the award, it just means that either he stopped actually trying after that and rattled off a bunch of cliches, or his writing genuinely is at that level, which explains why he keeps getting immediately rejected. Like, if he really was as hardworking as all that and was getting actual feedback, he'd see some actual improvement and probably at least advance a bit further in his competitions.

Anyway, moving towards the end of the third dungeon and I'm starting to get a hang of combat, but gosh I'm not sure why but the mini-bosses range from 'ridiculously easy, just blast them with weaknesses' to 'wow how are you so bulky'. I'm liking controlling most of the party, though the physical people are still generally easier for me than the mages. Ryuji is also ridiculously tanky, I'm not sure if he's ever been KO'd.

Mechafunkzilla
Sep 11, 2006

If you want a vision of the future...
Do any of the non-element status effects (dizzy, fear, rage, forget, brainwash etc.) work on bosses/minibosses?

ApplesandOranges
Jun 22, 2012

Thankee kindly.

Mechafunkzilla posted:

Do any of the non-element status effects (dizzy, fear, rage, forget, brainwash etc.) work on bosses/minibosses?

I'm going with 'some of them'. I believe the second boss is vulnerable to Freeze, and I know I've landed some statuses like Fear/etc. on some minibosses. It'll probably very much vary and I expect them to be completely useless for bosses soon.

Mechafunkzilla
Sep 11, 2006

If you want a vision of the future...

fadam posted:

I have a brain problem where I always play games on the hardest difficulty possible but hard mode in this game is so miserable. The damage you intake is fine and feels fair considering how cheap healing items are, but the damage you output is miserable. You spend all of your character’s SP to break a boss’ shield one time (I wish I knew why my combo attacks didn’t do shield damage) and then you just have to slowly whittle down the remaining ~70% of their health bar.


Unless the number is over 20 idk, I basically did nothing but C4 and never saw it even dent the shield bar. What difficulty are you on?

I know I've done it with Haru against named enemies on normal but her C3 hits about a million times so maybe that's a special case.

DrManiac
Feb 29, 2012

Are any of the bond perks good enough that I should immediately focus on them?

ApplesandOranges
Jun 22, 2012

Thankee kindly.
Increased Bond exp is an obvious return, but as far as mechanical benefits go, increased effect of healing items is honestly really nice since it affects both HP and SP gained.

DrManiac
Feb 29, 2012

Also I just remembered that one of the original plans for persona 5’s plot was going to have it be a road trip. I wonder if strikers is testing the waters for something like that for the next game.

ASenileAnimal
Dec 21, 2017

lol theres a boss in the 5th jail weak to gun attacks that you can beat by just hitting the triangle button over and over with joker

Stroth
Mar 31, 2007

All Problems Solved

ApplesandOranges posted:

Also, thank you for no perv scene during the bath. Heck, you can even compliment Ryuji on his abs. Keep this up.

I was honestly kinda shocked there. A Persona game gets the chance to perv on the girls and be homophobic in the same scene and passes up on both? Wow.

Stroth fucked around with this message at 22:55 on Feb 23, 2021

psychoJ
Feb 24, 2011

Smart and cool, handsome, wealthy and so sexy

ApplesandOranges posted:

Also, thank you for no perv scene during the bath. Heck, you can even compliment Ryuji on his abs. Keep this up.

There is unfortunately another hot springs scene later on that kind of rehashes the scene from Persona 3, where the guys are accused of being pervs over a misunderstanding. no homophobia though!

edit: oh i guess it was a scene in persona 4 as well. lol

psychoJ fucked around with this message at 00:37 on Feb 24, 2021

shrike82
Jun 11, 2005

playing the game at 1440P with proper AA, 60FPS, and near-instantaneous loadtimes is amazing - especially compared with the Japanese switch version at launch
i hope they do PC releases day-and-date moving forward

Tae
Oct 24, 2010

Hello? Can you hear me? ...Perhaps if I shout? AAAAAAAAAH!
Man the 1st dungeon is way more involved than I expected.

Infinity Gaia
Feb 27, 2011

a storm is coming...

psychoJ posted:

There is unfortunately another hot springs scene later on that kind of rehashes the scene from Persona 3, where the guys are accused of being pervs over a misunderstanding. no homophobia though!

edit: oh i guess it was a scene in persona 4 as well. lol


Unfortunately it seems like Japan loves that trope far too much. It's in absolutely loving everything, either played straight or subverted in some way. I'm usually against talking broadly about Japan when it comes to stuff that happens in media, but this genuinely seems to be a much beloved trope over there.

ZepiaEltnamOberon
Oct 25, 2010

I Failed At Anime 2022
How is the game on Steam? I've been considering buying this game but I'm not sure if I want to buy it on Steam, PS4, or Switch.

shrike82 posted:

playing the game at 1440P with proper AA, 60FPS, and near-instantaneous loadtimes is amazing - especially compared with the Japanese switch version at launch
i hope they do PC releases day-and-date moving forward

Oh wait maybe this answers my question.

ImpAtom
May 24, 2007

Infinity Gaia posted:

Unfortunately it seems like Japan loves that trope far too much. It's in absolutely loving everything, either played straight or subverted in some way. I'm usually against talking broadly about Japan when it comes to stuff that happens in media, but this genuinely seems to be a much beloved trope over there.

I mean "guys peeping on/being mistaken for peeping on girls" is not exclusively a Japanese source of comedy. It still shows up pretty regularly in western media too. Frigging Disney shows have those jokes. It has started to fade away as people have realize how creepy it is but "girl's locker room" is as is the 'accidentally walking in on bathing" jokes. It's shown up in Dishonored, Wonder Woman, Game of Thrones, a bunch of recent stuff.

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Namnesor
Jun 29, 2005

Dante's allowance - $100

ZepiaEltnamOberon posted:

How is the game on Steam? I've been considering buying this game but I'm not sure if I want to buy it on Steam, PS4, or Switch.


Oh wait maybe this answers my question.

I have a fairly modest computer by today's standards (i5-7600, GTX1070, 16GB RAM) and I'm running the game at 1080p with the resolution scaling cranked to 2.0 (and further still some anti-aliasing supersampling options in the nVidia Control Panel) and I have a rock solid 60fps at all times, not a single drop or hitch whatsoever.

Namnesor fucked around with this message at 02:45 on Feb 24, 2021

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