Persona series

Well I would genuinely like some input from others or some clarification.

Do you agree with Hashi or Draghinazzo? Does fully understanding Persona 4 necessitate you play the arliest Persona games?

Only Eternal Punishment was out when P4 was released I thought. Persona 1 and Innocent Sin were first localized on the PSP as far as I know.

Officially localized anyway.

edited 21st Jan '17 9:39:58 PM by Nikkolas

I didn't necessarily say that you needed knowledge from P1 or P2 to understand 3 or 4.

I was just corroborating hashil's point that if you're asking this many questions in regards to P3, you'll probably have even more questions regarding P4's plot.

For myself, I've never played p1 or p2 but didn't feel like there was some big thing I wasn't in on that wasn't explained. I thought P3 was satisfactory in that regard and I didn't have any trouble taking things as they were. For 4 it's not necessarily that you need knowledge from previous games, so much as the way the execution of the murder mystery went down.

Persona 1 was released stateside but it was very badly bowdlerized. See here for the changes they made to it.

edited 21st Jan '17 9:47:36 PM by Draghinazzo

I will say that there's nods and tidbits throughout the metaseries that can be rather interesting if you've played lots of the games, but yeah, every entry is its own entity and can be easily understood on its own terms.

He isn't talking about that. P4 itself leaves a few unanswered questions in itself that are not explained anywhere, some matter some don't.

However it is like 3 and it does not explain the same nitpicks like Personas, Igor, The Velvet Room and such.

edited 21st Jan '17 9:47:22 PM by Memers

Alright, thanks everyone.

My earliest questions and posts were not intended as nitpicks. The fact is, when I am playing P3, I just roll with it. On here, when I'm just thinking more abstractly and logically, I have little things that pop into my head and I wonder "why is this?"

But those little things are easily forgotten when I'm enjoying S Links or whatever.

Honestly, I feel like the plot of this game is really an excuse just to enjoy the subplots and the characters.

edited 21st Jan '17 9:49:37 PM by Nikkolas

I would say most of the midgame of 3 is that yeah, the big plot is rather backloaded.

Yeah, for all its faults P4 definitely has better pacing.

Neither game is paced very quickly, mind- And in my book, pacing is far too common a stumbling block in this medium to get worked up about- But hey.

Dammit I have Academics and Charm at max and I aced the last exam. I just started the Yukari S Link. Why won't the Mitsuru one start when I talk to her at school?

I think there's a story event that has to happen first. Her link doesn't open until the end of November or something.

I already told you that Mitsuru's social link is gated to the late part of the story.

edited 22nd Jan '17 5:54:31 AM by VeryMelon

Sorry I must have missed that post. My bad.

Make sure to talk to Mitsuru to get your reward for scoring the highest in your class. She is standing by the Faculty Office on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.

Yeah I got all that covered.

1...2...3...can we go home now?

Aigis is the best.

Strega's boss fight was pretty easy as I was forewarned. I assume they are actually dead and gone forever but this kind of "death" is very easy to reverse. Still, considering some people I've talked to have said they don't even remember Strega existing, I guess that plotline is over and done with and now the "REAL" story will begin. Only 50 hours into the game.

Oh no, it wasn't the end and Ikutsuki was a villain. I'm shocked.

So Pharos is Death? They split Death itself into the Shadows we beat? I'm sure it will be explained ab it more but at least I'm finally seeing traces of a point to all this. People have told me Persona 3 has a theme of death and acceptance and I've seen maybe faint traces of it up until now. However, in the last half hour, more has happened than in the rest of the game combined. I'm not precisely sure where all this is headed but it's definitely going somewhere now and I appreciate that.

A post from elsewhere on the relevance of each Persona game to one another:

"In terms of how they use the concept of a Persona as a psychological/mythological concept, 1-2-4 are more Jungian. 3 treats it as a superpower with vague connections to the psychological concept. I have no idea how 5 deals with it."

This is kind of what I was getting at earlier.

But yeah, things are happening. In spite of my total lack of surprise at any of these twists, it was all pretty well-done. I hope the game goes into more detail about what exactly was up with Takya an dJin and their "forcing out" their Personas. I'm guessing it probably would kill them as surely as the stuff Shinjiro was taking would kill you and that's why Chidori is all upset now. That's my guess anyway. I'm not quite sure where her plotline is going, although I don't see it ending well.

I hope I get Mitsuru and Aigis back soon. I can't explore more of Tartarus with only half my team. Everyone else is at least 20 or so levels behind us so it's out of the question trying to use them.

So I've been focused a bit too much on story stuff, how is Persona 4's gameplay compared to 3's? Is it the same basic system?

P3 makes me think of Final Fantasy X's gameplay where every enemy is designed to be taken out by one party member. Only difference is you can place yourself in the role of each of those party members.

edited 22nd Jan '17 4:38:55 AM by Nikkolas

P4's gameplay is basically the same except that the three physical types were all reduced to one.

Standing up doesn't use up a turn, either.

And of course,you can issue direct commands to allies.

Oh, and shocked and frozen status effects don't exist anymore.

Your support character can no longer scan for enemy weaknesses, so if you play on harder difficulties expect to die here and there because you guessed wrong trying to find them.

Unless you're playing Golden because Rise is completely broken there and either tells you a weakness with a mid level link or just displays the entire enemy status with a higher level link.

Well the full scan thing is only gained at the point in the game where it matters little as enemies have no weaknesses or extremely needed as enemies reflect everything but 1 element.

Full scan is her third Persona's ability, yeah?

I get the feeling I need to play on a higher difficulty setting than Normal. I got tired of trying to get this FOE to move off a title and just decided to murder it instead. It's no real threat.

edited 22nd Jan '17 8:22:34 PM by Arha

So a lot of people were talking up Persona 2 elsewhere - that it has the best story in Atlus history - and I figured I should give it another shot.

Worth it. Shadow Maya was the hardest boss yet by far but man, the cutscenes at the mountain were great. People weren't kidding when they said this game does "we all grew up together" way better than FFVIII. Those were like the best scenes in the game so far.

I think I fucked up though because only Maya and Eikichi got new, upgraded Personas.

edited 23rd Jan '17 6:04:07 AM by Nikkolas

Yeah. And that was fun for like, a floor but then I just completely lost interest in Q.

I have no hard feelings about Q. But I'm pretty positive that it's a game I'm never going to be assed with beating.

Persona Q is incredibly easy. The only difficulty that has challenge is the hardest one.

I like the idea behind the game but having to beat it twice just to get to the final bonus boss is pretty annoying.

I didn't expect most of the cast to kind of hate Elizabeth, but she does seem to be something of an asshole so perhaps that's appropriate. Getting Margaret as my destined partner made for some pretty amusing scenes though apparently she almost caved my skull in when I picked her up. Although that nonsense from the navigators about not being able to handle the boss with just the two of us was kind of laughable.

edited 23rd Jan '17 12:33:42 PM by Arha