Do you even dungeon crawling?
Well yes as a matter of fact I do because I've been playing Persona 1. Perhaps the black sheep of the franchise this 2009 remake of the 1996 PS1 game was a mere £4 on PSN a week ago. I'm nearing the very end of the first half of the game although I'm also nearing the end of my patience with it's final boss, more on that later.
Starting the game up you are greeted with a flashy opening sequence, this is one of the additions to the remake along with animated cutscenes, the other half of the game that was cut for the US release and a completely redone soundtrack.
The story follows a group of Japanese school kids in a non specific Japanese town, without spoiling it the story is absolutely nonsensical at least towards the beginning but it does get better with some genuine emotional moments. The cast all have distinct personalities and have a decent amount of characterisation. I think the biggest issue that makes it hard to connect with them is that they are all so nonchalant about the demonic apocalypse, the fact that demons are roaming the streets barely phases anyone as if this kind of thing happens often. In SMT 4 going to Tokyo for the first time hit me like a tonne of bricks, Tokyo under the firmament oozes atmosphere whereas Mikage just doesn't. Now the story contains two paths, you spend some time meeting all the characters then you are presented with a choice; you can either run away from school to bring down an evil corporation and save the world, or you can golden sun it and just politely turn down the offer, then after following a specific list of illogical instructions you unlock an alternate story that recycles very little from the main story. Like SMT 4 the margin for error to get the good ending is stupidly narrow so if you don't want the game to abruptly end 10 hours before the end with no explanation I suggest following a guide. You can only have 5 party members in the game however one of the character slots is not fixed, you can get a different 5th party member by declining the offer of the first guy who comes along to join your team. I think each party member has unique dialogue so that must of been a massive amount of work for something so obtuse to obtain.
The music is pretty good although unfitting at times. For some reason the games director is also the games composer which is perhaps a testament of how understaffed ATLUS are. My favourite track is the boss theme.
The battle system is typical SMT with a twist. You and the opposing demons are on an isometric grid with different attacks having different types of range. For example shotgun will be able to fire at multiple enemies in a cone, where magic will be able to reach anywhere on the opposing grid however magic will consume sp. There is no press turn in this game which is a system in SMT 4 that would basically allow you an extra go if you exploit a weakness, so less emphasis is put on exploiting these weaknesses, making the game less punishing and a bit easier if you don't know what you are doing, but if you do know what you are doing it is much harder. In SMT 4 the difficulty curve was completely backwards whereas in Persona the game starts easier but gets insanely difficult at the end. At the moment the game has given me an ultimate Persona to beat the game, oh wait, you can't equip that Persona until you are level 62 and you are level 44. I'm sorry what?! I really don't know if I can realistically finish this game at this point, guess I'm gonna have to go heavy on the podcasts and turn off my brain for a few hours to get up to level 62. Oh and on a side note amount the bosses give a hilariously large amount of exp, like if you don't skip it the ding-a-ling-a-ling of experience going up can last 10+ minutes.
Demon negotiation is done by choosing persuasion techniques presented by your party members, such as Dance or Sing. The demon will respond and that will move the needle on one of it's emotions on the matrix, once it reaches zero it will act on that emotion, sometimes acting on multiple emotions at the same time . There's happy, eager, sad and angry, if you want to recruit the demon you want to try to make it eager, sadness will make it flee, happiness will charm it and angry will provoke it.
You talk to the demons to get spell cards that you can fuse into Personas, these personas have completely different play styles since they will have skills that change up how you play (until you realise nuclear is overpowered). And there are loads of different skill types/weaknesses in this game: Sword, Lance, Axe, Fire, Ice, Rush, Tech, Wind, Death, Electric, Expel, Light, Dark, Gravity, Nerve, Occult, Curse, Whip, Thrown, Arrow, Fist, Gun and Blast. They seem to have scaled it back for SMT 4 where they have like 9.
Should you play Persona 1? Yes, with a walkthrough, and a playlist of podcasts for the end game. It's held my interest thus far but I wasn't as deeply infatuated with it as I was SMT 4.
Topic: Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE - 2016 Wii U GOTY by default (Read 73899 times)
