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Persona 3 is indeed one hell of a slog. As already noted the dungeon crawling and battles are mind-numbing, the social links with a couple of exceptions kind of suck and even the voice acting (what goddamned plebian did they drag off the street to play Fuuka) is very poor by SMT/Persona standards. But guys, that goddamned ending. Best boss music, best ending, best credits song. True to form they force you through a pointlessly long and difficult boss battle to get over the last hurdle but it's totally worth it. Memories of You 
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Jan 14, 2022 15:27
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Feels Villeneuve posted:The idea of stuff like having to manage the links and having backsliding links seems cool except as it turns out people don't actually find that enjoyable generally because they just want to hang out with their anime friendos. I liked it tbh, but I can see why it didn't appeal to people Then again, the social stuff is a big part of the reason that I enjoy the persona games. So making that more engaging and require more planning is fun to me Shame about the actual content of the social links though in P3. Oof
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Jan 14, 2022 18:51
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Deltasquid posted:Don't play persona 3. It's just not a good time if you're coming from P4 and especially P5. I went to from P4 to P3P and it was fine. They keep a lot of the same quality of life improvements including being able to control party members directly and not having to date everyone you have asocial link with.
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Jan 14, 2022 23:18
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P3 had a different vibe, more horror-y with the comatose people and evokers. I think you're supposed to be a little unsure about the MC and their intentions for most of the game. A lot of the social links have a more negative tone and let you really indulge the bad behaviors of the other person to get closer to them. Back when I was an edgy teen that was all part of what made it cool though.
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Jan 14, 2022 23:47
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Yeah, fwiw I still feel like P3 most strongly executes it's themes in the main plot. For it's many, many flaws the main plot and general tone of the game is the best of the 3 I've played so far But it's certainly the hardest to go back to from a mechanical perspective. Also the final boss is very thematic and flavorful, but I would never wish playing it on anyone. The ole classic charm into diarahan and an instant kill landing in the final phase ensured that
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Jan 15, 2022 15:30
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It's not just the mechanics, it's that the first 80% of the game are just straight up boring. There's no plot to speak of, the characters are by design entirely reactive instead of proactive, and the only gameplay to speak of is the same tower with virtually (what feels like) endless floors you have to mop up. There's some good moments but it's dragged down by 25 out of 31 days of every month being straight up filler until the month of October, when the writers finally decided they were going to go somewhere with the story.
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Jan 15, 2022 18:46
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It's like, you get to Shinji's death and you think "oh gently caress, the endgame must be starting!" And then you sit through three more months of drudgery.
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Jan 15, 2022 18:52
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Deltasquid posted:It's not just the mechanics, it's that the first 80% of the game are just straight up boring. There's no plot to speak of, the characters are by design entirely reactive instead of proactive, and the only gameplay to speak of is the same tower with virtually (what feels like) endless floors you have to mop up. That’s exactly my problem with P3’s plot. For most of the game, there almost isn’t one. Sure, you get new members and fight a boss each month, but it mostly just keeps on moving along without making big changes. It doesn’t help that the bosses have no real character of their own, so they come off as little more than any other Shadow you fight. Hell, the mandatory floor bosses in Tartarus are more threatening than nearly all of them. It takes so long for anything climatic to happen. Maybe if Strega were more active or at least any sort of meaningful threat, we could have had something going on to fill the plot void before the latter third of the game. P4 has a lot of downtime, but at least they used it to build the team dynamic with group events or just the characters having to proactively investigate a target. Geostomp fucked around with this message at 19:05 on Jan 15, 2022 |
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Jan 15, 2022 19:01
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Which isn't to say that you can't tell compelling stories with reactive protagonists, but it means you need to find a different source of narrative propulsion and momentum. P3 just doesn't seem to have any real point it's making with the reactivity of its cast, probably because they had the idea to structure the entire game around the concept of the calendar year and they felt the need to integrate that into the plot heavily with the full moons. But because those dates are both pre-set and a fixed period of time apart, it really hamstrings the narrative because now a ton of it has to be explicitly structured around waiting for the next full moon. P4 and P5 also were built around waiting, but the characters in those games at least had the opportunity to investigate leads and discuss targets and do other things besides wait.
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Jan 15, 2022 19:06
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Geostomp posted:That’s exactly my problem with P3’s plot. For most of the game, there almost isn’t one. Sure, you get new members and fight a boss each month, but it mostly just keeps on moving along without making big changes. It doesn’t help that the bosses have no real character of their own, so they come off as little more than any other Shadow you fight. Hell, the mandatory floor bosses in Tartarus are more threatening than nearly all of them. The biggest tell about P3's story for me is that when you do eventually, three or four months in, find out what your goal is and how to stop the Dark Hour... it's just to keep doing the things you've already been doing for months.
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Jan 15, 2022 19:08
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Arist posted:The biggest tell about P3's story for me is that when you do eventually, three or four months in, find out what your goal is and how to stop the Dark Hour... it's just to keep doing the things you've already been doing for months. The one that really got me was much later. You defeated the last Full Moon Shadow and learn that it was all a trick by you group mentor to manipulate you for power. Not only that, but he’s behind Strega as well. All the characters we knew were dancing on his strings! What happens when the villain reveals himself? He dies in the same cutscene. Then our group goes right back to the same old grind. But, oh no, Strega has been organizing a death cult to worship Nyx the whole time! How will we resolve this dangerous turn of events?! We basically ignore it until the final day and have pitifully easy one-on-four boss battles with them before moving on. We have months of downtime drudgery when we had so much potential for intrigue and new gameplay that could have filled it. That’s why I say P3 had a good premise, good atmosphere, and good individual characterization, but not a good overall plot. I’m not even going to touch the Answer for plot or especially gameplay.
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Jan 15, 2022 19:33
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Arist posted:Which isn't to say that you can't tell compelling stories with reactive protagonists, but it means you need to find a different source of narrative propulsion and momentum. P3 just doesn't seem to have any real point it's making with the reactivity of its cast, probably because they had the idea to structure the entire game around the concept of the calendar year and they felt the need to integrate that into the plot heavily with the full moons. But because those dates are both pre-set and a fixed period of time apart, it really hamstrings the narrative because now a ton of it has to be explicitly structured around waiting for the next full moon. A big part of it is the feeling of control where in P4 and P5 you normally take down the dungeons as soon as you can but have control over the time. And another big part is that in both P4 and P5 the bosses have personality; in P4 they're even the dark side of the friends you are going to make (IMO a superb choice). And in P5 the dungeons have actual personality and setpieces and aren't procedurally generated. In P3 the monthly cycle feels like a job.
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Jan 16, 2022 04:00
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If P3 had party member social links and used the enforced timing of major plot beats (such as they are) for the full moon shadow fights to integrate s-links better with the main story, that'd be great! It just uh doesn't work like that.
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Jan 16, 2022 05:34
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I know it'd maybe get annoying, but I kind of hope the next game enforces the deadlines in a manner similar to the Sae palace. Something to avoid stuff like "Futaba is in a coma for a month" because you blitz every part of the palace in one go.
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Jan 16, 2022 13:14
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The biggest advantage P3 has over subsequent entries in the series is that Koromaru doesn't talk.
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Jan 16, 2022 16:51
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the idea of your dungeon crawling being a thing you have to manage alongside your social life to the extent that it's basically just a job is actually kind of the whole appeal of Persona 3, i just wish they had stuck with it a bit more, though obviously what they did became much more successful
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Jan 16, 2022 16:53
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StandardVC10 posted:The biggest advantage P3 has over subsequent entries in the series is that Koromaru doesn't talk. Never had Koromaru in my party because it upset me every time he got attacked and made a sad dog noise 
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Jan 16, 2022 20:38
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Man, the FeMC music in P3P is so good.
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Jan 18, 2022 01:13
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Feels Villeneuve posted:the idea of your dungeon crawling being a thing you have to manage alongside your social life to the extent that it's basically just a job is actually kind of the whole appeal of Persona 3, i just wish they had stuck with it a bit more, though obviously what they did became much more successful I mean the problem with P3 is that you don't need to dungeon crawl, you just need to get strong enough to handle the full moon shadow. The dungeon crawling is just how you accomplish that.
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Jan 18, 2022 01:25
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The non dungeon crawling part of P3 being extremely vestigial feels like the issue more than anything. They probably should've swapped the difficulty of some of the Tartarus bosses with the arcana shadows, but I guess atlus was worried about people getting stuck.
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Jan 18, 2022 03:21
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mastajake posted:Man, the FeMC music in P3P is so good. I prefer Mass Destruction but I prefer some of the other new music https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=800PLmKprqc She does have different school music too, doesn't she? I thought so but I can't recall for certain NikkolasKing fucked around with this message at 03:32 on Jan 18, 2022 |
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Jan 18, 2022 03:29
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Sun is her only track that really doesn't work. Losing changing seasons is some nonsense
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Jan 18, 2022 03:42
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I'm in kind of a weird place with persona 5 at the moment. I'm on the third palace. Im really enjoying the story and all the little slice of life bits / confidant stories that happen on the side, but knowing that it's pretty tough to experience them all on a first play through is making me resent having to stretch a palace over multiple days and lose time. Its not like the game is particularly difficult even on high - pretty much the only difference between them is how quickly I run out of sp and how much longer fights take. I've already dropped to easy to mitigate having to spend so much time prepping for a palace, but I'm right at the end of this one out of sp, and I'm annoyed I have to go back to the real world when there may or may not only be a little bit more to find the route to the treasure. It feels like playing on a higher difficulty just takes story away from you and ensures you'll likely miss things. So my question is, how much does the 'story' difficulty gently caress up the flow of the rest of the game? I don't want to one shot bosses that have a ton of interesting phases - 3x exp seems massive, and I still want to experience as much of the game as it has to offer.
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Jan 23, 2022 18:41
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Persona 5 is actually pretty lenient in terms of experiencing the confidant plot lines. To the point that multiple first timers managed it blind with no guide and no optimisation. I wouldn’t worry too heavily about potentially missing stuff. Saying that, Story mode absolutely will completely ruin any tension in the combat for any bosses. Dropping it down to normal would probably be good enough if you’re in the third palace. It gets easier, not harder, to do palaces in one go as you gain increased access to SP recovery and stronger combat options. If this is vanilla Persona 5, then you can focus on Death and Temperence to solve your issues pretty easily. Temperence eventually lets you do stuff in the evenings on days you do palace/mementos (but not actual bosses). Death has extremely potent SP recovery equipment. As for if you’re doing Persona 5 Royal. The new three part collectibles in each palace also comes with hefty SP recovery. Also you get upgrades for baton pass that include SP recovery.
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Jan 23, 2022 18:50
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Lord_Magmar posted:If this is vanilla Persona 5, then you can focus on Death and Temperence to solve your issues pretty easily. Temperence eventually lets you do stuff in the evenings on days you do palace/mementos (but not actual bosses). Death has extremely potent SP recovery equipment. It is vanilla, and that sounds super useful. If I could make coffee after the cat has decided I am too tired to see people it would make the game so much better. It's a weird difficulty balance because you're pressured to juggle losing evenings on making supplies and then don't get to see if you cut it too fine or not until about 5/6 hours of game play later. That's literally the only difference in level of challenge the game brings to the table. If sp items were more abundant & couldn't be used in battle, but moves used a shitload more sp (or the pool was lower), maybe it would balance the difficulty around each moment to moment fight, instead of this guessing game where you need to prep for anywhere between 20 and 30 fights back to back. Although it sounds like this is only an issue in the early game, so I'll stick with it as it.
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Jan 23, 2022 19:21
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cubicle gangster posted:I'm in kind of a weird place with persona 5 at the moment. I'm on the third palace. Which Persona 5 are you playing? Vanilla or Royal. Either way the difficulty doesn't change anything except the combat difficulty at all so it won't gently caress up the flow of the rest of the game, and the boss fights are almost all heavily telegraphed. In vanilla there's a not-terribly-secret solution to preparing and keeping your SP up; buy between one and four SP Adhesive 3s from Dr. Takemi. They're 100,000 yen when you unlock the ability to buy them at rank 5, and half that at rank 7. Joker definitely wants one and possibly the rest of your party. This works in Royal, but is nowhere near as worth it because you start to be able to recover SP from Baton Passes and also recover SP whenever you find a Will Seed. Also in P5R (but not in vanilla P5) set the difficulty all the way up to Merciless for that x3 multiplier for weakness/technical damage, and hand out elemental amulets to your party members for more sweeps that involve baton passing to all your party members. You get 1.2x XP and money in P5r but only 0.4x in the base game. Oh, and Mementos is drastically improved and turned from a monotonous grindfest into a gleeful vehicular homicide spree (in part thanks to the changes in Chariot Rank 7 in P5R. Also stating the obvious make sure to prioritise Yoshida as you can only do him on Sundays and he isn't there late on in the game. In Royal you also need to prioritise Akechi, Maruki[spoiler], and [spoiler]Yoshizawa. There are also two confidants who effectively give you extra time (in both versions); "Becky" and Fortune.
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Jan 23, 2022 19:36
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both times I played Royal, I wound up basically running out of activities near the end of the game. also SP is not an issue in Royal because the Mementos enhancement that gives you bonus items also applies to the SP item drops which are a rare drop in the ticket machines at the very start of each level (if the ticket machine glows yellow in your thief eye, it has SP items) which means you can pretty easily net something absurd like 10x high end SP items.
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Jan 23, 2022 19:50
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The what machine.... Lmao have I been missing that this whole time
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Jan 23, 2022 19:59
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If you save and then exit the dungeon then your navi will tell you how far you are from the end in fairly vague terms
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Jan 23, 2022 19:59
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CharlieFoxtrot posted:The what machine.... Lmao have I been missing that this whole time rarely a ticket machine (it looks like an ATM in the wall) will be breakable on the platform at the start of each Mementos level (I forgot if it was at the start of each floor, or just the first level of each section) and has SP items. If you have the item bonus it's multiplied by that so you can get like 10x Snuff Souls.
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Jan 23, 2022 20:04
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Sapozhnik posted:If you save and then exit the dungeon then your navi will tell you how far you are from the end in fairly vague terms You can talk to your party in a safe room and this will also come up Feels Villeneuve posted:rarely a ticket machine (it looks like an ATM in the wall) will be breakable on the platform at the start of each Mementos level (I forgot if it was at the start of each floor, or just the first level of each section) and has SP items. If you have the item bonus it's multiplied by that so you can get like 10x Snuff Souls. Oh I deffo missed this lol
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Jan 23, 2022 20:45
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CharlieFoxtrot posted:Oh I deffo missed this lol
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Jan 23, 2022 21:01
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In general, it’s best to keep exploring a Palace until you get to a story miniboss. Those usually mark the halfway point, so do them and, if you’re really hurting for SP, get to the closest safe room and leave. It gets a lot easier to just blitz the Palace in one day later on, but the deadlines are very generous, so don’t feel too pressured on your first play through. You probably won’t get all the Confidants the first time, but that’s not too horrible. For a Confidant that you should absolutely prioritize, go for Hifumi Togo. She opens up around the third Palace and gives you some quality of life abilities that, honestly, have no business even being optional. Like being able to swap party members in battle or escape an ambush. For a Confidant safe to put on the back burner, Ohya isn’t particularly interesting of a plot and her ability is practically useless for anyone marginally competent in the game’s stealth.
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Jan 23, 2022 21:11
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Really appreciate all the posts & responses! I picked up my save tonight where I was half way through the third palace with no sp and figured, gently caress it lets see how far I can go. Then I remembered you can run away from fights, so I just stealthed/ran away from everything and got to the treasure with barely any more sp drained. Security ended up at 80% so it was a little twitchy, but lol what a ridiculous solution. I do appreciate how flexible this game is, even though that makes me really anxious and feel like I'm missing things at times.
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Jan 24, 2022 06:41
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Feels Villeneuve posted:rarely a ticket machine (it looks like an ATM in the wall) will be breakable on the platform at the start of each Mementos level (I forgot if it was at the start of each floor, or just the first level of each section) and has SP items. If you have the item bonus it's multiplied by that so you can get like 10x Snuff Souls. Is that only in Royal or was it in the original game too?
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Jan 24, 2022 07:21
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Item Getter posted:Is that only in Royal or was it in the original game too? Pretty sure it's Royal only. Vanilla mementos were really just the same randomly generated hallways over and over.
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Jan 24, 2022 14:00
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Chieves posted:Pretty sure it's Royal only. Vanilla mementos were really just the same randomly generated hallways over and over. The items were there in vanilla, they just weren’t as useful because it was 1 snuff soul instead of 10.
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Jan 24, 2022 14:11
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"hey this guy called me. He wiped our debt, apologized, and turned himself into the police, does this mean what we did worked?" Dumb as gently caress idiot cat: "hmm inconclusive"
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Jan 25, 2022 06:01
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Playing through royal and its excellent, like all the tweaks and additions from the original. Just formally met gymnast girl and she seems like a real go getter. Jesus Christ these characters are so much more fun to be around than the ones in 4. Love my gang of weirdos Without going into too much detail is that one weird bit of a later s-link sorted yeah we took nude pics of our daughter and sold them on the dark web but you made us feel bad about it. bing bong relationship +1
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Jan 25, 2022 08:45
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I booted Royal up again just to play tycoon with my anime friends and god Tycoon is so fun, sometimes I get a little annoyed by the dialogue but then I listen to myself say even dumber poo poo out loud to my cats when Sumi gets another revolution and i excuse it
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Jan 25, 2022 09:05
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