Only three weeks of summer and now I assemble a solid stack of turn-based, Japanese role-playing games? Dangit. And I still have books to read and essays to write...

Persona 3: FES
Progress: Five doors completed

The Answer is certainly a slow burn. A slow, laborous, tedius burn. And yet, I can't bring myself to just watch the encounters and cutscenes on YouTube. I feel compelled to see this through to the end.

At first I was excited about Persona 3's epilogue, but now I think it's a poorly-concieved, watered-down version of vanilla Persona. With no Social Linking to do, the only carrot stringing you along is the five minutes of cutscene you get for an hour of grinding. As I understand it, the story kicks into high-gear once I finish the seventh door. In fact, I'm sure it does, because I scrolled down one page too far in an FAQ, and spoiled the turning point of the plot. Oh well.

There are plenty of other ghetto elements, namely the Velvet Room. You don't have access to a Compendium, which makes fusion a much more tricky process. It's hard to fuse away a Persona you had to manually level and get a bunch of skills, only to be able to pass on three or four at the most. In addition, you don't get bonus S. Link XP. What's up with that? Surely they can find an excuse in the lore for getting a free Rank 10 bonus each time, or at least having your bonus Rank increase over time.

Wild ARMs 4
Progress: Fifteen hours

This is funny, because I bought this game two years ago, fell off instantly, only to pick it up a few days ago and get hooked on it again. It's not the story; I don't care for its whimsical "coming-of-age" story or all its talk about war and government. I'm just skipping over the plot and the character interactions; I'm about halfway through the game anyway, so I'm fine with not knowing what's going on.

It's the battle system I'm way into. I think the HEX system is interesting, and really something different. I actually looked forward to all the minor bosses the game throws at you. The bizarre platforming and object-based puzzle-solving is still hit-or-miss, though. Most likely my mood is a factor. Sometimes I'm in the mood to hit switches to open doors, and sometimes I'm not.

It's also nice to play an RPG with a fixed party, where each combatant has develops in a specific way. I'm not interested in arguing about which is better; I'd rather just play games that have both. There is a problem with uneven leveling, however. Characters gain handsome XP bonuses for finishing off enemies, which causes your healer girl to lag behind occasionally.

Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne
Progress: Somehow left the Hospital

This game is just goofy. I get the idea that all the SMT games, especially the original, more "traditional" ones, are insane. Within a half an hour your character has been unwittingly transformed into a shirtless, tatooed, humanoid "demon," and he just rolls with it. As you punch gingerbread men and Hua Pos, you pay enemy demons to join your ranks, all against the backdrop of muffled grunge metal. That game is just goofy, lemme tell ya.

This is only the third SMT game I've played, and like Digital Devil Saga 2, it's pretty different from the Persona games. Besides the significant lack of dating elements, this game uses Press Turns, which are less forgiving than Persona's "One More!" In addition, Tarukaja and Makakaja are separate abilities, buffs affect all cohorts or demons, you've got the Zan element to think about, and you have to freaking manually scan every enemy.

I couldn't tell you much about the game yet, since most combat encounters have involved that magic Triangle button. The game certainly isn't compelling me to continue on, but I will anyway, because I trust that it will get more interesting. Maybe...

Final Fantasy X
Progress: Starting over

Why would I ever want to play this game again? I don't do. Blame pangs of nostalgia. That game was great, chiefly for its creative boss encounters. The story and characters are less stupid than Wild ARMs's, but still pretty stupid.

I never actually finished FFX. Braska's Final Aeon was too much for my characters to handle, which is too bad, considering I aced the boss right before (Seymour Omnis). The fact that it took twenty minutes to activate the encounter didn't help either.

There's no way I'd hunt for all the ultimate gear, and dodge 200 lightning bolds, or... snowboard... to get all the best loots. But, maybe I can play smarter and bother to equally level my characters and such. Then maybe I can finish that game.

It's only forty hours to get where I got, but it remains to be seen if I can play the same game again. Hey, it's been two years, like Wild ARMs; what's there for me to remember?

Persona 2
Progress: None

Three of these five games are borrowed for the same person. We went to a GameStop seeking Persona 4 to no avail. I suspect we read the website wrong.

Also interested in this game, to see how much it's like Persona 3, and how much it's like the rest of the Shin Megami Tensei series.

Not much else to say, as I haven't even put it in. But, oh no! It has multiple discs! How will I ever finish it if I have to get up every once and a while to change discs?!

Completion Stats:

Level: 80
Completion: 84 hours
Money: Over 8,000,000 yen
Compendium: 55% complete
Social Links: 17 of 22 maxed

The Journey

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: great game. Actually, I don't know what adjective to use. It's one of those game review cliches, what synonym for "good" to use. Fantastic? Outstanding? Spectacular? It's certainly a 5-star game, and a 9/10 on that scale. But we don't need to get into numbers.

Besides the fact that P3 sits very clearly inside it's sequel's shadow, my main problem with the game was the amount of combat, and the somewhat uninspired nature of the combat. I don't really know what I want out of my randomly-generated hallways, other than for them to maybe be not randomly-generated, and to maybe have some design to them.

(spoilers now for The Journey of Persona 3)

The team I used to clear Nyx was Aigis, Ken, and Mitsuru. A slightly non-standard party, to be sure, but I wanted a weird group. I like Ken more than Yukari, so I picked him as my main healer. And, as much as I hate Mitsuru's battle dialogue (and, well, her mannerisms in general), she was probably the best choice for nuker.

To get everyone's skills required me spending extra time leveling, until my whole party was in the high-70's. It's not like me to overpower content in RPGs, but I ended up doing it on accident, as the final boss caused me little to no trouble. And I was so prepared! I burned through all my gems to stock up on Sutras, Balms of Life, and Homonoculii (?!), most of which wern't needed.

The ending was satisfactory, even if the Bad Ending and the Good Ending share that initial dialogue exchange. I was afraid everybody was going to forget what had happened! But, luckily, Mitsuru remembered her past just in time to leap in slow-motion off the school auditorium's stage and make a dramatic exit with the other members of SEES.

Seeing Hugo (my character) cozied up with the robot was disconcerting to the say the least, but then again, you just look at Hugo, and you know he would be the type to fall asleep in the lap of a female android that's totally falling for him. He's just chill about it.

The Answer

(After my first night playing the Persona 3's epilogue, my thoughts on it spilled into a jumbled mess of words, replicated below. After that you can find some slightly more sound writing, although I've only played the game another hour and a half since. Spoilers in this, obviously.)

Maybe it's because he was near death. I'm not sure if you know your character is dead at the end of the main game or the start of the epilogue. In any case, I'll keep that tidbit of information down here. I was spoiled anyway by a review of P3:FES, not that I cared that much. (I have little issue with being spoiled in games)

That was last night, and tonight I started up The Answer, the epilogue to Persona 3 added in the FES re-release. (in case, you know, you haven't played P3 and are reading this anyway) I was just excited to be watching more of this story unfold; granted, P3's story wasn't that interesting, at least to me. It at least went beyond "we need to destroy the ambiguous evil in the world."

Plus, because The Answer is purportedly a 30-hour game, I figured maybe it would be more heavy on story and not follow the exact gameplay patterns of Persona 3. Hey, I might be wrong already!

Within 30 minutes you're set loose to go fight. I form my party, descend into the Abyss of Time, open the first door, and what do I find? More winding hallways filled with monsters! Huzzah! I cleared one floor and quit, my hopes for this epilogue a little dampered*.

I'm sure it will be a good time, but seeing the amount of assets recycled was a little disappointing. Everyone's wearing the same clothes (except Aigis, who's new robo-gear freaks me out), the battle dialogue is all the same, and the gameplay seems to be the same. Heck, I'll be fusing Personas in the Velvet Room like always! Maybe I was expecting too much, but I thought at least they would have thought up something cool for the combat, other than "it's harder," as explained to me before starting the game.

The Answer seems to be a new story wrapped around the same game, which I probably should have been expecting. Maybe something changes; after all, I never reached that second floor behind the first door. It's possible that everything changes there.

I probably just wasn't in the mood tonight. Oh, and hearing "I need your help!" every few seconds is sure to be tons of fun. At least they recorded her saying the names of all 170 Personas. Isn't that something.

* While a "damper" can be put on something, the act of putting said damper on something can not be referred to as "dampering." I used the word regardless.

Updated impressions

Mitsuru pointed out that the dungeon hub that is the Desert of Doors is "exactly like Tartarus." Everyone is expressing their exhaustion at having to fight again. Frankly, I feel the same way.

Maybe I was expecting to much out of this game; I just figured The Answer would be more about the story and would give you some new gameplay mechanics and a new way to look at the game. Ultimately, being a condensed experience, this isn't the same Persona. There are more dungeons to burn through, more characters to interact with, but there's no Social Linking, and the fusion system feels gimped to me.

Part of my problem with The Answer is probably a larger issue, dealing with the nature of dungeon-crawling in general. RPG dungeons, especially this game's, feel very detached from the story itself. You don't even get Persona 4's clever, thematic dungeons; these are just a jumble of hallways, baddies, and chests, the only difference between each block of Tartarus being the walls and the Shadows.

In theory, SEES was "unlocking" the "mysteries" of the tower, but there's actually a very simple explanation for its exsistence: it's a big podium on which Nyx will stand when she needs to bring about the end of the world.

Really, if the crux of Persona 3's story was supposed to be Tartarus, and Shadows, and Nyx, and The Fall, then whatever that story was, I didn't care that much. At the start of the game, I was worried that P3's plot would be nothing more than "bad things pose a vague threat to all mankind." At some point, the story did go in a few directions, with the relationships between characters being the more interesting things to me.

The marriage of gameplay and story has evolved over the years. Games still have cutscenes, but there's the growing crowd of indie forward-thinking-types who want to do away with cutscenes and go for the Half-Life method of all scripted events. I like the Valve approach, but I'm not entirely against cutscenes; I mean, I'm playing a Japanese RPG. This is nothing but riding the rails and seeing what happens.

I really don't know what can be done to dungeon-crawling to better meld it into a game's world; I just know that P3 is, in my mind, a bad example of dungeon-crawling. The concept is terrifying in and of itself, and is reminiscent of old-school trends: one, big dungeon, with over 250 near-identical floors. Barely anything story-driven happens here, at least while you're leveling.

As Jeff Gerstmann once put it, "this is why I don't make games, because I don't really know what they should be doing." There are a lot of creative people out there, but maybe the JRPG scene isn't the most creative. Atlas at least seems a bit more foreward-thinking; the high school-sim/dungeon-crawling genre is something all their own, but even something as interesting and fresh as Persona is steeped in the traditions of old, good and bad.

Is my wish unrealistic? I don't know. All I know is Persona 3's approach to dungeon design is not something I'm in favor of. There are most definetly better ways to do it. That, along with the fact that there's no Social Linking, will probably make for a more bland Persona experience. At this point, the only carrot stringing me along is 10-20 minutes of dialogue between finishing blocks.

As I say at the end of most impressions, "we'll see." We'll see if The Answer can be more than a tedious revisiting of the Press Turn system. I think I'll try and finish it regardless. I was playing some this morning, even. The enemy was casting Ice, so I switched to a Persona immune to ice. Then it cast wind instead, which I was weak to, and I died. Fantastic!

No, this isn't about motion control, but I intend to write about that very topic eventually.

Giant Bomb's Endurance Run series of videos have been running 80 episodes strong so far. Jeff and Vinny have been playing Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 for a total of 16 weeks, or four straight months, with a total of 40-some hours played under their belt. They're almost halfway through the game, assuming they can achieve the game's real ending, although most people believe they haven't that capability.

Like a lot of the dorks* voraciously consuming this content, a full repertoire of new-found inside jokes under their belts, I went and found myself a copy of Persona 3: FES. I've played Digital Devil Saga 2 (which is not a great game) in the past, and, of course, the concept of Evokers was mind-blowing, so I had always been interested in playing this game. However, its hard M-rating impeded my ability to purchase it. Lucky for me, I held off long enough that I could get the updated FES version, which allegedly improves the main game and adds a new epilogue.

I suppose at some point I will try to review Persona 3: FES, but something has gotten in the way, and hindered my ability to enjoy the game to an extent. If I had played this game when it was released in 2006, I would have thought it a novel concept that needed further refinement of mechanics, especially on the high school sim side. Having experienced Persona 4, at least, I can see what the future held for this series, and it was an assuredly brighter one. The story is better, the Social Link system is more-refined and more-forgiving, not to mention more flexible; the character interaction is better and more absurd; there are more events along the lines of the school camping trip (P3 has two of those, neither of which are too exciting); you can actually control your party members; the list goes on and on.

I could nitpick things I think make Persona 3 better - giving one of your party members debuffs, or having getting up use a turn - but there's no doubt that Persona 4 is a better game than it's predecessor. Now, Persona 3 is a great game by all means. The concept is a novel one, and for a first go it was great. The problem is, I can see all the improvements that were made on both sides of the coin. This may have only been a problem starting out. I definetly got into this game, having played 60 hours in the span of a month. There hasn't been a game I played this much and was this into since World of Warcraft, and before that, Final Fantasy X, which I played for 40 hours until my progress was halted by the second-to-last boss. That seemed like a long time to play one game (that isn't an MMO), but I'm still not tired of Persona 3, even if it doesn't have a lot of the same narrative hooks its successor does. Actually, I would appreciate more in-game time to play the game; I don't think I can finish every Social Link in time, and I'm not entirely sold on the concept of playing this game again in "New Game +" mode.

The internet working the way it does, the world is my oyster in terms of what I can write about this game. It's a game I'm very interested in talking and writing about, and I'm not obligated to write a review in the formal sense, although I suppose I'd be interested in evaluating this game's quality. Granted, my audience is a small one, and I'm not sold on the concept of throwing another User Review into the mix, this being a small-fish-in-a-big-pond kind of situation.

But, if were to, say, evaluate the quality of Persona 3: FES in some capacity, what is the most fair way to approach it? Having seen what Persona 4 is, and having seen how it is in many ways a better game than Persona 3, I can't help but have my own experience with the latter be marred. Like I said, it didn't prevent me from enjoying this game, because I think it's fantastic** in many ways.

Let's get to the point, because it's taken me four paragraphs to do so. Would it be at all fair to reference Persona 4 when talking about Persona 3? Granted, because I'm not someone paid to play games and write about them, I don't really have any rules to follow when it comes to what I write about and how I choose to approach it. But, my circumstances are also different. Most "professional" game reviews are written for the window during which they're released. We all know games don't exist in a vacuum, so comparisons to similar games are logical, but in this case, I'm comparing P3 to it's successor, released two years afterwards. It may not seem fair, but at the same time, I can't just ignore it, because it did color my experience with the game.

Ahh, it probably won't hurt anyone. I would definitely recommend one play this game first, before Persona 4, so you can appreciate P3 for its firsts, what it did for the genre, and to see the progression of the arcane "high school sim/dungeon-crawler" genre.

* Within the group of people who enjoy the ER and think its funny, is the subset people who obsess over it, repeating funny things said in the day's video, followed by "LOL", in the comments, and think wearing one of these jokes on their own bodies would be a novel experience and one worth spending money on. Nothing against you guys! Well, maybe something.

** Note the jump in word-usage from "great" in Paragraph 4 to "fantastic" in Paragraph 6.