SpectralTime
Since: Apr, 2009
07/26/2015 00:00:00
Characterization problems:
Chie going from "complex character who expresses traditionally feminine virtues in unfeminine ways" to "tomboy who eats a lot of meat," Akihiko from "cool-headed stoic who throws himself into combat to avoid facing his troubled past" to "hotblooded fight-loving shonen boxer," and Junpei from "hormone-addled teen who develops into a better, more-thoughtful person through falling in love with a troubled woman" to "hormone-addled teen" are the worst examples, though not the only ones.
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Great Everything Else. Shame About the Combat.
I haven't finished this game, and that's because I want to like Persona Q more than I do. Sincerely. The story's mostly an inconsequential excuse to watch the casts of two Persona titles I liked just hang out and have fun, and I approve. The times when it goes a little deeper and darker, with Zen and Rei, it does so in a high-quality way.
And everyone's... mostly in character. There are a few unfortunate bits of Flanderization. (The worst examples are in the comments.) That said, their shifts are at least merely Flanderization rather than Out of Character, and I'd put it all squarely on an "entertaining fanfic" level of quality. And they do sometimes return to their initial characterizations for serious moments. Besides, the blent cast is genuinely entertaining and fun when they interact.
The dungeons themselves are fun. They incorporate much more interesting and complex designs than most of the boring, procedurally-generated mazes of SMT that Persona games unfortunately usually copy, and they have fun aesthetics and gimmicks to liven up the travels. If it were just a game of walking through these places, avoiding weird enemies and solving weird puzzles in-between having goofy fun in the Festival hub, the opening of this review wouldn't've qualified the praise of the next few paragraphs. Unfortunately, the rate of enemy encounters, while structured, is high, and here, even more unfortunately, we must begin to talk about the combat.
To be blunt, it's awful. Every change away from the Press Turn system is for the worse in every way. Boost is not necessarily a terrible mechanic in a vacuum, but enemies can easily knock the party out of it, and all spells and skills are prohibitively expensive to enforce its use at gunpoint. The addition of elementally-charged physical attacks and scaling equipment quickly makes all attack magic just as obsolete as any other JRPG, particularly heartbreaking as other P titles went out of their way to avoid that problem. Fights are extremely difficult and resentfully reward paltry, miserly dribs and drabs of experience at a time, making grinding completely necessary and punishingly time-consuming all at once.
A potentially-fun concept ruined by a terrible battle system. Might still be worth playing, but with the caveat that the game's like having to hours unwrapping each individual chocolate in the box.