Persona series

If you can't maintain hatred of Persona 5, you're not allowed into the cool kids club.

I mean even I don't think I can say that I hate p5. I don't like it's writing but in most other departments it's one of the best jrpgs out there.

I'm not that interested in Royal though.

My whole brand is starting to collapse. What's next? Do I admit the P1 manga is merely okay?

Well no, that's not gonna happen. I love the P1 manga.

that's only less scary than the perspective of me stopping to call p5 my favorite game ever.

i'd say to give The Royal a try, especially since it seems to be changing the base story quite considerably compared to the previous Rereleases.

P1 is honestly boring. P2 is better, but its still literally a game about Nazi conspiracies coming to life, so its not as progressive as people like to say it is.

Both of them could use the remake treatment to be more like the modern games.

Edited by Demongodofchaos2 on Aug 20th 2019 at 11:58:53 AM

Compared to the constant fumbling modern Persona does with sensitive subjects, P2 remembering that Nazis are bad stands out even more as great.

It had a whole lot more going on than Nazi conspiracies, which weren't a thing until towards the last quarter. Honestly it would work much better in a modern context since one of its biggest gimmicks is rumors and conspiracy theories being made real by Joker and Nyarly's interference. Prior to that it's yet another high school student and his friends wandering around a mostly grounded Japanese town setting like all the other Persona games, where they mostly just fight dudes in clubs or other high schools until shit gets really weird.

As big as social media is now and as quickly as misinformation spreads they could revisit that concept and have plenty more to do with it.

P1 is great, it just makes you take it slow and think instead of belting weaknesses for easy extra turns.

The persona system is broken though. Gozu-Tennoh all but invalidates most other Personas in the game, and you can get him really early on. Also really favors your strongest character getting stronger with how the Experience system works.

I wouldn't say "broken", but Persona 1 doesn't feel encouraging like later Persona titles, or even the SMT titles.

Edited by VeryMelon on Aug 20th 2019 at 10:41:51 AM

What do you mean by 'encouraging'?

Because other than its terrible EXP distribution that's what I like about it. It's not this super slick extravaganza of flashy colors. It's an understated, quiet, thoughtful game of maneuvering your characters on a grid and setting them up with the right skills to deal with the right situations.

It's pretty outdated today but I'd love a modern crack at it.

That would be great, if any of that actually mattered. Megido invalidates all type resistances most of the time, weaknesses are heavily nerfed, grinding even your default Personas for a few battles will just unlock area of effect versions of your spells anyway, and as said, it is very much in favor of your strongest character attacking first, so they'll contribute more and soak up most of the EXP.

So its just a worse Fire emblem game. Gotcha.

That's what I meant by "not encouraging". Persona 1's game design is so flawed that there's no natural inclination to learn all of its mechanics. Instead, you find yourself running into all after wall just to make the game playable. From Software's Action RPG's are much better at doing what Persona 1 tried, with stronger gameplay to boot.

Hell, Kings Field did it better, and that was a launch title.

P1 is definitely flawed but I resent the notion that it's unplayable or some kind of ordeal. You just have to put time into understanding its mechanics instead of rampaging through enemy weak points and building the right team with the right resistances and attacks to deal with every situation.

It's like Breath of the Wild for me. At first I hated it because I played it like other 3D Zeldas, but casting off those assumptions as to what the game "should" be and instead playing it as it was led me to appreciating it.

I dont know, its just so flawed.... its so easy to soft lock yourself to the point where you cant hit thing things you are fighting and potentially they cant hit you as well.

I will say though its combat system is better than 2's disaster of a system. Has more menus than a 4x game to just attack something and it gets worse if you wanna do something more.

I'd like 1's mechanics if they weren't so ridiculously easy to cheese. 1's combat just doesn't have much depth, and that's by design. They wanted to bring in more casual, younger players, and it's functional. beyond that, I play for the character interactions and the story.

Ironic that the original release has a terrible localization, and the PSP remake has the most polished localization in the series.

Persona's goal has always been to be an entry into SMT and be more 'mainstream'. They just failed at it disastrously with P1 and P2, P3 is where they hit the surprise home run.

P1 and P2 are peak "Play for the story" games for me.

P1 was the only installment in the series until P5 to sell a million units. That's not a failure.

This one guy is playing P5 one day at a time◊

I feel like that'd be hard to do at certain parts of the game, like the Hawaii trip or the endgame after beating Yaldy.

That kind of "challenge" would drive me nuts, so hats off to that guy.