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Finally got around to beating this today (having a baby really cuts into gaming time) and I am incredibly satisfied with the experience. This easily has the most absurd premise of a game I've played, but everything is so well done and earnest that it all works. When I first started playing I felt like it was more Persona than SMT, but my opinion quickly changed. It's only like Persona on the surface because the characters are high schoolers, but it more or less lacks all the things that make a Persona game a Persona game. There are no social links, you don't have to manage your time, and rather than your real life and your secret hero identity being at odds with one another, the two are intertwined in a much more organic way. The game also shies away from having more explicitly deep relationships. You're best buds with all the guys and the girls are all swooning over you, but it never goes any further than that. It's basically it's own thing with a few SMT trappings, namely spell names, weaknesses resulting in chain attacks, and Tokyo on the verge of an apocalypse. But while Unity was an interesting approach to progression, it really isn't anything at all like demon fusion. Basically it's its own game, which I consider to be a good thing since it felt fresh and we have SMTIV:A coming next week and Persona 5 on the horizon anyway. I enjoyed the battle system well enough, but I definitely was using abilities near the end to avoid as many random encounters as I could. Somehow I beat the level curve or something and entered the Cosmic Egg with all of my Radiant abilities available but with no Performa to make them. So I spent a lot of time on the first few tiers of the Egg grinding out Performa. The last boss ended up being cake as a result. I'm not entirely sure if there was enough content in the main game. I put about 70 hours into my playthrough, so I can't complain overly much as I feel I got my money's worth. Still, a lot of the requests were just doing the same thing over and over and every sidestory followed the same basic pattern (have a chat with a person, go and kill X number of enemies, fight a boss). I would have liked a bit more variation, but at least the writing in all of the stories was really good. I kind of wish there was just a little more exploration to be done. I got really tired of visiting the same dungeons over and over especially since they all had a gimmick for getting through them and the items or enemies you had to find weren't always in the most accessible of places (looking at you Shibuya camera maze!). Shibuya itself seemed massive when I first went there, but it became pretty obvious how tiny it was fairly quickly and there was only one other area even remotely similar to it and that place was only a single road. You could basically take out everything Fire Emblem related and the game would be about as good. I didn't recognize most of the characters in it but I was familiar with their classes so I was fine mechanically. In any case, the plot was silly but the developers had fun with it so there's no reason to get hung up on anything. Overall, it's one of the best modern JRPGs I've played. I'm hard pressed to think of a game I've played recently that I liked as much that wasn't also made by Atlus. I guess Trails of Cold Steel would be the other and it also hits a lot of those "not Persona but basically Persona" beats. I wonder if we'll ever see anything like this again from Nintendo/Atlus. I'm guess it's one and done, but I thought Atlus did a really good job putting together a more lighthearted RPG than they usually do and I wouldn't mind seeing something with this tone from them in the future.
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Sep 11, 2016 16:48
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 06:57 |
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