|
PsychoInternetHawk posted:Just for once though, I'd like an SMT game in which the neutral ending is also the bad one, and where waffling around and basking in your own indecisive moral hubris results in far worse outcomes than an aligned path. Don't have the stones to make a real choice? Enjoy watching everything go to poo poo from your high horse, dickbag. Some people (and by "some people" I mean "Law fanboys") would argue that the Neutral ending of Strange Journey qualifies.
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2014 19:40
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 2, 2024 10:16 |
|
|
Dark_Tzitzimine posted:And then is made into a happy ending on Overclocked How, if you don't mind me asking? That ending was pretty dang bleak.
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2014 19:55
|
|
|
Fungah! posted:How, if you don't mind me asking? That ending was pretty dang bleak. I'm assuming than you didn't play Overclocked On the 8th day the guys realize how much they screwed up and search how fix it, they go to the devas and they agree to get Take-Mikazuchi to replace Jikouten and to recover Jikouten's sword so the Devas are able to rebuild the barrier around Tokyo and avoid a demon infestation. If you fail one of those tasks the world is still screwed, but if you finish them both the barrier is sealed and the demons are eradicated eventually, allowing for mankind lo live relying only on its own power, free from the influence of God or the Demons
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2014 20:28
|
|
|
Dark_Tzitzimine posted:I'm assuming than you didn't play Overclocked On the 8th day the guys realize how much they screwed up and search how fix it, they go to the devas and they agree to get Take-Mikazuchi to replace Jikouten and to recover Jikouten's sword so the Devas are able to rebuild the barrier around Tokyo and avoid a demon infestation. In other words, Japan Saves the Universe, as per SMT tradition.
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2014 21:02
|
|
|
DeSu1 was comparatively less bad until Overclocked, yes. It's why it's best to ignore it that little extension. Similarly to how you should put down Strange Journey after Ouroboros. The only alignment faction which has never had an ending the story sold overall as "good" is Law. Chaos gets two, in SMT NINE and Nocturne. Neutral has bad endings, but mostly what happens is a split between "Realistically Bad Neutral" and "Perfect Neutral Where Everything Falls Into Place". hubris.height posted:If you're going to invoke those characters you cannot give them any driving forces except to go full left or full right. Says who? Tallgeese fucked around with this message at 21:47 on Mar 2, 2014 |
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2014 21:38
|
|
|
Tallgeese posted:The only alignment faction which has never had an ending the story sold overall as "good" is Law. Chaos gets two, in SMT NINE and Nocturne. Neutral has bad endings, but mostly what happens is a split between "Realistically Bad Neutral" and "Perfect Neutral Where Everything Falls Into Place". All of the endings in Raidou 2 are pretty good endings, but granted they aren't all that different from each other. This is especially obvious in Chaos and Neutral being virtually identical.
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2014 21:49
|
|
|
Strange Quark posted:All of the endings in Raidou 2 are pretty good endings, but granted they aren't all that different from each other. This is especially obvious in Chaos and Neutral being virtually identical. I could never pick Law, I just couldn't got the heart togently caress over the bug people by killing Dahn  Also, gently caress the notion of tradition over freedom 
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2014 21:51
|
|
|
Dark_Tzitzimine posted:I could never pick Law, I just couldn't got the heart togently caress over the bug people by killing Dahn On the other hand, one great boss theme only ever plays on the Law ending, so it's something of a Catch-22
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2014 21:54
|
|
|
Strange Quark posted:All of the endings in Raidou 2 are pretty good endings, but granted they aren't all that different from each other. This is especially obvious in Chaos and Neutral being virtually identical. Well yeah, that's why I didn't really count them. Chaos and Neutral in Raidou 2 differ by exactly one line. It's quite lazy, really. Much like the alignment writing in general. Frankly, it should be obvious something is wrong when people who've played the series before actually worry about getting anything but Neutral for reasons aside from gameplay. Why bother even letting you have the, uh, "choice" at that point?
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2014 22:00
|
|
|
Law and Chaos, by their nature, are extremes but extremes that people will agree with none the less. I am sure there are unambiguously people out there who agree with the idea of total freedom without any limits or total control and perfect safety. Christ, there's people who agree with the villain in Metal Gear Rising and that is a guy who literally steals children's brains. Neutral is rarely considered an unambiguously good ending. It is in SMT4, oddly enough, but in most of the other games the ending isn't "you've won forever, hooray" but "You've reasserted the status quo. Man, God is gonna be pissed at you." Devil Survivor, Nocturne, SMT2, and so-on all end with the basic concept that you've won but it is a temporary victory for yourself as opposed to for the world. Neutrality is the essence of not making a decision. (This doesn't always pan out. SMT4's ending, as I said, is straight-up You Win, Good Jorb and a few of the other games have come close to that.) Neutrality tends to get defined as "the good ending" because it has the hardest bosses and the most obvious happy ending for your character (and sometimes not even then) but rarely is it a final ending. It is the definition of prolonging the status quo in almost all cases. A real break from the status quo involves something a permanent status quo change which True Neutral rarely embodies. You win, everyone with a name is happy, and there is largely an implication this poo poo is going to happen again at some point. Ideally a status quo break should be Ideal Happy Ending either because you are sacrificing things in exchange for it. (This is part of why DS:O's endings are all far worse than DS1's because you get to nullify the innate downsides of whatever you chose.)
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2014 22:32
|
|
|
Tallgeese posted:DeSu1 was comparatively less bad until Overclocked, yes. It's why it's best to ignore it that little extension. Similarly to how you should put down Strange Journey after Ouroboros. However, it makes the Naoya ending significantly better, and really that's the only one that matters
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2014 23:01
|
|
|
Yeah, I didn't even realize the "chaos" ending in Devil Survivor was just that. Tokyo goes back to normal, you're waging war against god in another dimension, and everyone's happy. Devil Survivor 2's "neutral" endings weren't all bad either. One of them did the status quo thing, but the other two both had interesting complications.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2014 01:01
|
|
|
I've been playing Assassin's Creed lately and the Templars and Assassins are starting to remind me of Law vs Chaos a bit, mostly because their endgames are basically control / freedom. There is probably a terrible fanfic out there for this idea.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2014 06:15
|
|
|
Light Gun Man posted:I've been playing Assassin's Creed lately and the Templars and Assassins are starting to remind me of Law vs Chaos a bit, mostly because their endgames are basically control / freedom. There is probably a terrible fanfic out there for this idea. It's similar, which just goes to show that SMT had this poo poo down first and did it best even then. The best SMT games are the ones that do a variety on the Law/Chaos poo poo, like Nocturne. The Raidou games do it pretty interestingly, and I really like Devil Survivor's spin as well. It's only the mainline SMTs and, say, Strange Journey, that really suffer from the very black/white moralities presented in SMTIV.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2014 06:40
|
|
|
Control vs Freedom is a pretty basic concept for a story. The problem is generally that the only real reasonable way to tell that story is for it to be a "the truth lies in the middle" narrative because too much control and too much freedom are both pretty lovely things. (Which is something Assassin's Creed kind of glosses over a lot of the time and the Assassins in general being weird and contradictory because their actual stated creed doesn't really work for a faction of good guys.)
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2014 09:42
|
|
|
Chaos/Law tends to end up pretty stupid. The only game offhand I can think of that's done it well is Tactics Ogre. Started playing P3P again after beating P4G and I'm bummed it doesn't hold up as well as I'd hoped. It still has a better plot (P4 runs entirely upon every main character being a moron from start to finish) but the characters are just so much worse. It does make me hopeful for another big leap in quality for Persona 5 though.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2014 12:51
|
|
|
Manatee Cannon posted:Chaos/Law tends to end up pretty stupid. The only game offhand I can think of that's done it well is Tactics Ogre. The original Thief games are basically structured around the same divide and kept a pretty compelling narrative. The Pagans, Hammerites and Keepers are your chaos, law and neutral, and the villains of the three games are logical extremes of each philosophy. The ending even mirrors what people were saying about SMT neutral being a slightly hopeless return to the status quo.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2014 14:38
|
|
|
I say that if you're going to invoke the ultimate law character, literally God, and also invoke the ultimate Chaos character, literally Lucifer, you cannot have them be compromising figures. They are in an established mythos of a world religion of being very much pure law and pure chaos (though, within their mythos they are defined as Good and Evil). It defies convention to use a character that is established in a world religion to be one way and then give them motivations that create compromises. Its just bad storytelling, you certainly can do it, but I do not believe that it would improve your story line in the least. I just don't see where one can disagree on this. You just don't include them in the story line if you don't want uncompromising characters. I can see an argument for the minor demons and servants and wondering why the go full left or full right, but I think its just a case of following orders ImpAtom posted:Control vs Freedom is a pretty basic concept for a story. The problem is generally that the only real reasonable way to tell that story is for it to be a "the truth lies in the middle" narrative because too much control and too much freedom are both pretty lovely things. I agree, but I also am a fan of neutral route in every game, so... That said, I do like that the ending to SMT I that is canon is the Neutral route and that it ends up being, 'yeah well things were gonna get hosed again eventually you should've seen this coming'.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2014 15:07
|
|
|
It's kind of ridiculous that most SMT games eventually boil down to a single human / small group of humans somehow managing to fend off or otherwise heavily effect massive otherworldly invasions. God wants to freeze all of creation into an eternal state of prayer for the sake of order and Lucifer wants to burn everywhere into Mad Max + demons survival of the fittest hellscape? gently caress that, I'm an age 15-20something Japanese guy who is good with computers I'll fix this poo poo. Edit: and then eventually the computers part became optional.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2014 17:44
|
|
|
Yeah that's kinda what happens in every JRPG ever. Guess what? With enough elbow grease and a little control over superpowerful demons, you can kinda do anything.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2014 17:51
|
|
|
Light Gun Man posted:It's kind of ridiculous that most SMT games eventually boil down to a single human / small group of humans somehow managing to fend off or otherwise heavily effect massive otherworldly invasions. God wants to freeze all of creation into an eternal state of prayer for the sake of order and Lucifer wants to burn everywhere into Mad Max + demons survival of the fittest hellscape? gently caress that, I'm an age 15-20something Japanese guy who is good with computers I'll fix this poo poo. At least they handwaved it with Nocturne and the legend of the 'Demi-fiend', still can't find an explanation on why happened in Japan or if the rest of the world blinked out of existance or become another vortex world. Shame than Dante's become a non-entity (as any major demon) when you recruit him, it would've been interesting to see them reacting to the plot.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2014 18:32
|
|
|
Dark_Tzitzimine posted:At least they handwaved it with Nocturne and the legend of the 'Demi-fiend', still can't find an explanation on why happened in Japan or if the rest of the world blinked out of existance or become another vortex world. Eh, by the time you recruit him, the game's mostly over, and he was just a cameo anyway. For being a fairly small insertion in the overall game (just tied into something much larger). He really doesn't quite fit into the SMT fold, he's too...cocky.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2014 19:15
|
|
|
There's a lot of cocky characters in the SMT series, even in the mainline stuff. Dante fits just fine in SMT, especially considering he's far more low-key in Nocturne than DMC3 and 4 which came later.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2014 19:19
|
|
|
I really never understood those complains about Dante don't fitting Megaten. As a demon hunter he's custom tailored to mix with the setting, him being genre savy opens the potential for some really interesting interaction with any major demon you could face (or any demon user really) and his attitude isn't worse that character like Nemissa, Jimenez, Walter, Navarre, Kaido or even Ryoji (heck, Dante and Yu could made a great team) There's also the fact than Dante has been always characterizated like being a westerner (or the japanese idea of one at least) bringing another perspective to the series. In any case, my complaint was more about how the demons being sentient is such a big part of the franchise but outside of some really big names all of them become non-entities when you got to recruit them. I know it would be really hard and too time consuming but it would be nice if some of them were considered optional party members and the plot reacted accordingly.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2014 19:30
|
|
|
Sex_Ferguson posted:There's a lot of cocky characters in the SMT series, even in the mainline stuff. Dante fits just fine in SMT, especially considering he's far more low-key in Nocturne than DMC3 and 4 which came later. Cocky characters are one thing, but the "oh, I'm such a badass" attitude is just what seems really out of place to me. Even though it doesn't change the game very much at all, having Raidou in his place in the SMT maniacs special edition just feels so much more appropriate.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2014 20:51
|
|
|
It's not a mainline SMT I know but that's one thing I liked about P3's ending. It wasn't the typical "the power of love will let us defeat Nyx easily" anime nonsense. It was a lot closer to a "might as well die with our boots on" where even up until the fight you had no real idea what the plan was or even what Nyx was really.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2014 20:54
|
|
|
Maybe I'm just easy to please, but I've always given Dante's cameo a pass because of his battle theme. Nocturne really hit it out of the park musically. It's probably better than any of the modern Persona soundtracks, at least in terms of rockin' battle themes... at least until next week when I inevitably change my mind about this again.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2014 21:01
|
|
|
Dark_Tzitzimine posted:I'm assuming than you didn't play Overclocked On the 8th day the guys realize how much they screwed up and search how fix it, they go to the devas and they agree to get Take-Mikazuchi to replace Jikouten and to recover Jikouten's sword so the Devas are able to rebuild the barrier around Tokyo and avoid a demon infestation. I just played it and it was Jinkoku.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2014 21:05
|
|
|
Anatharon posted:I just played it and it was Jinkoku. The name of the Deva? It had to be truncated to fit with the naming limit they had on demons in Devil Survivor, I think. The other Devas got renamed too, but we all know who they are.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2014 21:06
|
|
|
Persona Q site now live http://www.atlus.com/personaq/ Same with P4AU http://www.atlus.com/p4au/ E: Looks like they're differentiating the two Sho by having one with a capital first name and one with a capital last name. Dehry fucked around with this message at 21:42 on Mar 3, 2014 |
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2014 21:35
|
|
|
You can see a bunch of the Sahdows in the background of the image of the top of the PQ site. I think those are bosses, but I can't be sure.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2014 22:40
|
|
|
Want some subtitled Persona Q trailers/bios to tide you over? Here you go: Trailer: Persona 3 Side Persona 4 Side Bios: Persona 3 Protagonist Persona 4 Protagonist Junpei Yukari Mitsuru Akihiko Shinjiro Aigis Yosuke Chie Yukiko Teddie Zen Rei (That's all the ones translated so far, I assume you can keep an eye on the guy's channel for the later ones.)
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2014 23:15
|
|
|
I really like the fact that Aigis German Suplexing Yu is the official promo image for the new P4A
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2014 23:16
|
|
|
Just something to notice - Persona using Sho has a SEESlike Armband (yellow coloured, with a circle, and 5 pointed star touching the rims of the circle) while ME-Sho does not. Anyone know that logo?
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2014 23:25
|
|
|
Tithin Melias posted:Just something to notice - Persona using Sho has a SEESlike Armband (yellow coloured, with a circle, and 5 pointed star touching the rims of the circle) while ME-Sho does not.  
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2014 23:36
|
|
|
I don't know if anyone other than myself was still playing it, but SMT: Imagine finally got the ax this weekend.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2014 23:37
|
|
|
subhelios posted:I don't know if anyone other than myself was still playing it, but SMT: Imagine finally got the ax this weekend. I played it for a small number of hours a couple of years ago. It was alright, it had some neat ideas about combat, but it felt really hard to get attached to.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2014 23:39
|
|
|
subhelios posted:I don't know if anyone other than myself was still playing it, but SMT: Imagine finally got the ax this weekend. So that's what a tree falling in a forest with no one around sounds like.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2014 23:41
|
|
|
subhelios posted:I don't know if anyone other than myself was still playing it, but SMT: Imagine finally got the ax this weekend. 
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2014 23:45
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 2, 2024 10:16 |
|
|
Dammit, beat me to the joke.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2014 23:58
|
|
