Good move. Be aware, there is a lot of story up front, but it will settle and you will be able to get into the standard P3 gameplay of school, s. links, and dungeon work and the game is longer than P3.
Well, I beat it today with the good, full ending earned by clearing the fog on both sides of the TV.
I really liked this game, even better than Persona 4. I think the characters are better and I really liked the storyline with the murder mystery and the TV world.
I still think they need to fix the following things if the do decide to make a Persona 5:
-
Lose the swinging of the sword to start battle. I struggled some with the depth perception of where the enemies are and the MC’s sword swings too slow to make the contact perfect every time.
-
Either drop the light and dark one-hit kills or let us resurrect the Main Character. I know, these games are “hard”, but this just seems cheap. I don’t’ want to carry a Persona who blocks light and dark all the time(which I did not do, but nearly had to at times).
-
Don’t make exploring a dungeon take both day and night…choose one.
-
Drop the fishing.
-
Drop the mistakes in fusing Personae. I only had it happen once, but it’s annoying.
-
Make sure you incorporate your final boss throughout the game, or at least hint towards it. I agree with what others have said about the ending. It seemed very tacked on.
For the most part I agree with your other points, but for this one I didn’t mind too much. I think I always had a good supply of homunculi (?), or if I was in an area with instant-death casters I would just put the Partial Award or Patient Collar on the MC.
I guess. It didn’t but me that much, really.
How many times did you die in your playthrough? I died three times I believe:
Bonus Boss of Yukiko’s castle, for which I was underleveled.
One set of Death Dice in Adachi’s dungeon killed me with a “last resort” attack. Just a random bad luck one.
Once when the final boss inflicted me with a status ailment, then did the “summon Yimo” attack that kills all characters with status ailmentes(she did this in one set of two turns). Annoying!
It was long ago enough that I don’t remember, but I definitely remember dying against Shadow Teddie, and I think once on Izanami as well. I’m sure there were other random deaths mixed in there too, I’m not too cautious of a player. Overall though I felt it was a lot easier than P3, which had some damn frustrating bosses (World Balance, Sleeping Table, etc., to say nothing of The Answer, where basically ever boss was ridiculous–and you couldn’t even heal up before them!).
The worst, though, was when I died in P3 with only a few rounds left before I would have killed Nyx. I don’t exactly remember the details, but she had Night Queen up, and I accidentally attacked her somehow, and that was the end of me. Having to fight those 13 forms again was NOT appealing…
I did not play “The Answer” of P3.
I just heard it was crazy difficult and was able to read the major reveals online. Guilty as charged, but I just didn’t care. I wish it had cheat codes…I’d use 'em.
P4 basically included the Answer in the main game, with the extra bit being the search and battle for the final boss.
I completely agree here. The challenge isn’t the timing but the camera. In P3 I used the elevated areas to lure in the monsters and then stab them when they turned around. In P4 there wasn’t any terrain hooks to work with. I hate
I had homunculuses but I wound up running out of them from the sheer quantity of of mudo and hama using enemies who seemed to target me specifically.
The time management aspect is one of the things I like in Persona and making the XP earning tasks the most costly in terms of time is part of balancing it.
My PS2 controllers lack rumble so this part of the game was completely unplayable to me even with the vibration set to off. Just as a point here: if your game uses vibration feedback and you let vibration get turned off then you have to provide some other kind of feedback. It’s elementary interface design.
Ugh, that was a bad idea. I wound up saving before fusing just in case and reloading in those situations.
What really kills me about her is that she doesn’t fit in with the entire concept of the Persona series.
Thematically Persona is about Jungian archetypes. In fact all of the Shin Megami Tensei games have that to some extent but it’s right out there in the open in Persona. You as a character look within yourself and identify your inner Whore of Babylon Riding the Antichrist (my favorite Persona mainly because of the absolute insanity of it) which then manifests to do your will.
The personas are about that. The shadows are about that. Even Teddie is about that.
And then at the end of the game the Japanese goddess of death from their creation myth and Orpheus-story shows up. She’s not human or an aspect of humanity like everything else in the game, she’s divine. In P3 Nyx is the end of humanity and destruction of its collective consciousness; Izanami is a goddess dicking around with people for no good reason.
It’s a completely sour note of an ending and the fact that I’m writing this much about it indicates how much I hate it. I’m not joking when I say there’s less than a dozen games I’ve played in thirty years that have what I’d call a well-written story. Persona 4 was on its way to being one of them up until December which grates on me more than the gibberish that passes as writing in other games.