Persona series

I see him as a guy who's good with people, but all of the constant moving has taught him not to get too close to them.

But the Midnight Channel business necessitated a change in that behavior, and we all know what happened next.

edited 25th Jul '16 10:44:35 PM by KarkatTheDalek

Oh God! Natural light!

He acted as an accomplice to a murderer?

edited 25th Jul '16 11:16:42 PM by EpicBleye

"There's not a girl alive who wouldn't be happy being called cute." ~Tamamo-no-Mae

Ah, the accomplice ending. I still have a screenshot of the face Adachi makes when you burn the letter. It used to horrify me during high school, and to this day it makes me wince.

I sometimes forget how much of a shitshow getting the true ending in P4 was. The sort of leaps of logic one would have to make in order to figure out what exactly it was that they had to do without just looking it up are staggeringly on par with old 90's Adventure games. I remember it took me 120 hours over 2 playthroughs to get the true ending of P4. For the longest time 16 year old me thought that the normal ending was in fact the true ending, and that it everyone on forums talking about this mystical true ending were just coming up with fan theories.

Stupid of me? Maybe; but god damn if I didnt have a good time figuring it out.

edited 26th Jul '16 12:31:01 AM by Brokenlampshade

You a motherfucker, Mr. President.

They hint at it throughout the game, even- The weird gas station attendant only shows up on rainy days and seems awful keen on spreading rumors...

It's another small touch, but you can bump into Namatame and Mitsuo for a pretty good stretch of the first half of the game as seemingly-minor NPCs though unlike the Moel Station Attendant they give away thir importance by having portraits.

I sure said that!

I feel like as long as you know that there's a true ending, it's not too hard to figure it out.

This song needs more love.

As long as you know, you can just try everything until it works. However, there are people who play completely blind, and this game's foreshadowing is way too subtle for them. I would even say that it feels foreshadowed only in retrospect or if you actually know that there is foreshadowing.

edited 26th Jul '16 2:46:38 AM by Kara

Not sure how much of an excuse that is when the Wild Cards form mystically significant bonds with old folks and little kids and working adults all the time. Even if they have to be someone you'd see in high school, there's always faculty.

Yeah, as someone who played mostly blind, can confirm that the true ending is basically bullshit. Not only is it not really hinted at in any way that you'd recognize as hinting at except in hindsight, the means to unlock it is also something that you're unlikely to stumble across by accident. I mean, the game literally says "you're done, there's nothing else to do. Do you want to keep wandering around anyway?" and you have to realize that the game is lying and there's more to do, then you have to find it.

It's not like the various bad endings, where they hint pretty heavily that you done fucked up and there was an obvious decision point right before then.

edited 26th Jul '16 5:33:38 AM by NativeJovian

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Also, the gas station attendant is terrible foreshadowing because you're never required to speak to them and they're rarely there.

Thank God for spoilers.

As well as the fact that Golden is years after the original game came out so all the twists were easy to find on online.

"I am Alpharius. This is a lie."

I played this game in 2009. I think I know whether it's right for me. I'm trying to work on my social links and instead I have to waste time on that dumb concert.

I mean, they would be pretty cool if they were optional or you needed to unlock them somehow. But given how much of these were already in the original P4, I just hate them now.

Also, I don't like the Arlamd trilogy very much. I just like Totori as a character. Escha and Logy was my favourite game.

"If you aren't him, then you apparently got your brain from the same discount retailer, so..." - Fighteer

That's why I like the Fast Forward feature so much.

Golden makes up for the events by giving you six extra weeks for socializing after you beat Ameno Sagiri.

Heart of Stone

imho Social Links are a busted system that forces what should be fun, interesting side content into this convoluted strict schedule based mess no sane player would be able to map out without a guide.

I like the idea but the execution is pretty bad all things considered.

Only if you're worried about doing a max link run on your first play through. Me, I tend play social links without worrying about mixing things out the first time through, and then go back in New Game Plus when my social stats are all maxed and breeze through them.

In theory, anyway. I haven't actually gotten around to replaying any of them yet because I'm still playing through stuff for the first time. (Kind of. I've done P3 FES, P4 Vanilla, and P4A, started P3P and then got distracted, and plan to do P4AU, P4G and DAN at some point.)

edited 26th Jul '16 8:57:16 AM by NativeJovian

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Social Links, in the grand scheme of things, are fine and don't really matter when it comes to affecting the game's pacing. That's all on the Calendar System not allowing you to skip days you don't care to spend time on.

It's also why I still think Devil Survivor 2's Fate System is the best implementation of Social Links without any pacing issues.

My issue with Social Links is that for party members, having a Social Link can actually hinder their character development.

In theory, the SL should mean "you like this character? Get more insight into them and further their development by choosing to spend time with them!" In practice, it means that their development in the SL has to be shallow, since it has to fit in at any point in the game. It bugs me that most of the (non-Teddie) party members SL ended with the characters resolving to basically maintain the status quo, because the plot of the game requires that.

Found a Youtube Channel with political stances you want to share? Hop on over to this page and add them.

More like four weeks. You start on January 10th and end on February 4th or 5th.

Maybe it would be better if party member social were linked to the story? Not exactly like Teddie's as much as that you can advance them to a certain point, and then you'd need to wait until a certain date to get further.

Of course, that might make things considerably more difficult...

Oh God! Natural light!

The way see it there are two options: Have party members develop during the story and neuter or remove their SL (the Persona 3 method) or have the characters remain static during the story while developing in their SL (like Persona 4). There really isn't much in-between that doesn't take a ton of programming work. Personally, I think both methods work for their respective games (the P4 cast dealing with the problems that their shadows brought up is something that needed to happen, but could not have been done naturally in the main story).

edited 26th Jul '16 9:53:00 AM by LordVatek

This song needs more love.

I disliked the P3 method so much. I didnt mind the character development cutscenes, and I'll admit that some of their stories were fairly interesting, but the fact that all that development took place over the course of two or three cut scenes made that development fall kind of flat in my eyes.

Limiting the party social links to just the female cast was so annoying (not to mention kind of sexist) and gave cause to one of the most frustrating social link based mechanics ever (Specifically talking about the jealousy mechanic). I cant honestly remember if the mechanic was dropped in P 3 P, but I found the party social links so much more interesting.

edited 26th Jul '16 10:39:07 AM by Brokenlampshade

You a motherfucker, Mr. President.

One alternative would be to tie in plot events to social link scenes so that the SL stuff references plot stuff that's happened recently. That wouldn't be that hard to program in (it'd basically be slotting placeholder lines in the appropriate places, eg "if date X then dialogue X, if date Y then dialogue Y" etc), and it would go a long way toward integrating the two different parts of the game, especially if some of the plot-dialogue also referenced social link stuff (which would be similarly not-too-difficult; "if link level X, then dialogue X, if link level Y then dialogue Y", etc).

Another way to do it would be as Karkat suggested, gating SL progression based on plot advancement. You'd need some sort of dialogue box similar to what you get when you can't start a SL because your stats aren't high enough (except something like "needs more plot" instead of "needs higher courage") and a "do you want to hang out anyway?" option would be nice.

Using P3 as an example, let's say you can start Junpei's SL as soon as the game starts. However, you're capped at SL level 3 until he joins SEES, and then he's capped again at SL level 7 until he gets his ultimate persona, and there would be some differences in dialogue for levels 1-3 depending on if you do them before or after he joins SEES and differences in 4-7 depending on whether you do it before or after he gets his ultimate persona.

As long as they made it clear that you wouldn't be able to level up the link until plot happened (though offering something to make hanging out with them anyway would be nice), then spreading things out like that would help integrate things into the plot, help spread social links out over the course of the game (one of the things that bothers me about SL stuff in P3 and P4 is "ALL THE BONDING WITH [character] OKAY DONE WITH THEM KICK THEM ASIDE TURBOBONDING WITH [other character] NOW". I'd rather see virtually all of the links available for virtually the entire game (or as much as makes sense with characters entering and leaving the plot) rather than having more-or-less enforced "early game SL", "midgame SL", "lategame SL", etc.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

That idea could work for party social links, with out of party links being similar to the previous ways.

One Strip! One Strip!

For character development, I prefer how Persona 3 does it. You get the meat of the plot-related development in the story, then you can flesh out background information on party members using Social Links. This way you can bum-rush a social link to completion without running into artificial gating issues OR losing out on a character's fleshing out.

Mitsuru's a good example of what I mean. Her plot development SHOULD happen in the story, but her social link is still used to explore thing like her home life and how socially awkward she is.

Persona 3's main issue, that I don't share but I know others have, is the inability to social link with the male party members. That hasn't been the case since persona 3 portable, so that sole issue with the approach is capable of being resolved.

Does the male version of P3P have the original social links from the PS 2 version of the game, or does it have the same new links as the female protagonist?

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.