Story and cast wise, of the three persona games, P3 seems to be the most well-regarded still for the reasons Very Melon stated, i.e having a strong central theme that it lands without too many problems. It's still far from perfect as a game overall (the social links are bland overall from what I recall, and the gameplay in general is very rough and unpolished compared to P5), but my estimation of it has definitely grown with time.
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Right? Persona 5 is great when it's serious and even the gags aren't as bad as previous games.
Granted the gay stereotypes are awful but are minor players.
Edited by RedHunter543 on May 20th 2020 at 10:55:05 AM
"The Black Rage makes us strong, because we must resist its temptations every day of our lives or be forever damned!"Isn't that what the bad ending of P4 all about? Them just accepting the convenient easy truth of who the real murderer is? Same with the red herring murderer that they could have easily seen through. They didn't think about it because they wanted the red herrings to be the real killer.
Gag wise I think P5 was similar to Golden or P 3 P in my opinion.
Edited by Cosplaythief on May 20th 2020 at 1:59:41 PM
Wondering why atlus was ever considered deep because they suck at writing what essentially is comedy scenes feels like missing the forest for the tree to me. All three modern games have solid overarching themes, a character casts that feels real enough for their problems to hit home and relate to, and as other have said, the recurring motif of facing the truthes you aren't comfortable with, which may not be the most innovative thing ever but is given interesting emphasis in the game by confronting metaphorical manifestations rather than some asshole that happens to embody the things the game wants to take a shot at.
Yosuke being a failure of writing doesn't take that away. P3 needing to play harem route to max out all links doesn't cancel out how powerful it feels to see Aigis and the SEES find the Answer and confront erebus. Ryuji getting molested for fun by two gays doesn't make everything about kamoshida less real. A good and a bad don't make a nothing, it makes a good and a bad.
Edited by Yumil on May 20th 2020 at 8:28:49 PM
"when you stare too long into the abyss, Xehanort takes advantage of the distraction to break into your house and steal all your shit."Persona 4 was hype literally six months ago when it was hip to shit on 5 for it's stated flaws and because of Royale's negative hype. Coincidentally, now that royale's out and that it's surprisingly pretty good, I see markedly less people jumping at the gun to dunk on 5 and 4 goes right back to being the whipping boy.
Even the best game in the world has enough negatives to monoplise two hours of oral discussion straight without interruption. How long you can talk about the bads of a game doesn't indicate how good the goods are.
Edited by Yumil on May 20th 2020 at 9:07:21 PM
"when you stare too long into the abyss, Xehanort takes advantage of the distraction to break into your house and steal all your shit."Generally speaking, people only focus on negatives when the positives don't really land for them. And when something starts to get more popular that always ends up producing Hype Backlash of some sort, when the honeymoon period for a game ends people usually end up noticing more problems and critical opinion shifts for a while before eventually settling.
In that regard, every Persona game got increasingly popular after 3, with 4 especially receiving a lot of promotion and spin-offs which probably soured some people due to them feeling it was over-exposed. There was even more hype for Persona 5 which is now a multimillion seller and was proclaimed by many to be a GOAT JRPG when it was released, so it was naturally going to get that kind of reaction sooner or later. People sometimes have trouble with nuance, you see a lot of people being binary with how they rate games, the moment they start to notice more flaws the game suddenly becomes terrible even if on the whole it's still a positive experience.
I think the Hashino games are good overall for the most part, but I didn't really find the writing in P5 to be that impactful for me personally outside of Kamoshida (I wouldn't call it awful personally, just on the level of an average anime) so it's the negatives that stand out to me more in terms of writing even if the game overall is quite good, I wouldn't have played it through to the end if I didn't legitimately enjoy it. I wasn't planning on getting Royal and still don't but based on the spoilers I do think Takuto and Kasumi seem like good additions to the game and his storyline and goals seem genuinely interesting.
Truth be told I seem to have a more positive opinion on the gameplay than most, I've heard multiple people complaining about the dungeons or battle system but both held up for me very well throughout the whole game. The only really annoying dungeon for me was Okumura's but that didn't even last that long.
To me I find that all 3 Hashino persona games have one thing that I like a lot more than the other two so I pretty much love them all equally at this point.
I would like a modified remake of P1 or P2 of some sort though. Sure not wanting to modify something your predecessors did is nice but that sucks for consumers.
thanks everyone, didn't expect this one to get this much of a reaction but that's nice. and yeah, agreeing with Drag there, the more something gets exposure, the more people who won't like it there will be. P3 is probably the one who's still the most confidential of all three and coincidentally the one which gets the least bad press overall, and it's not because it's an inherently better game than the other two - I do believe it does some stuff better, but there also a lot of stuff where the others outdo it.
"when you stare too long into the abyss, Xehanort takes advantage of the distraction to break into your house and steal all your shit.""level of an average anime"
Not sure what this even means, as what an "average" anime is is due to personal tastes.
Average anime in general don't really focus on the same themes as the Persona games do, at least not to the same level of depth.
Watch SymphogearI think P3 also suffers from the fact that there isn't a complete and definitive edition of it that's widely available. FES is perfectly good on its own, but P 3 P added a brand new Fem MC route (IMO something that should have become standard afterwards) with new social links and some nice Qo L features like being able to control your party members. Except that P 3 P basically plays like a visual novel outside of tartarus where you can't properly explore the overworld. On paper this might not seem like a big deal since most of the story was conveyed through dialogue and character portraits anyway rather than the character models and environments (which weren't anything special), but removing that extra layer of interactivity really makes it feel like something is missing.
I didn't contest that it was up to personal taste and experience, I tried to make that clear in my post. As for how it applies to P5 itself, it's far from being the worst out there in terms of JRPG stories (I'm playing through Disgaea 5 recently and boy does it make P5's story look great in comparison), and it has its positives, but they don't really land in a huge way for me and when combined with the downsides, I think there are better ones out there. Hence it stands more or less in the middle for me. But there's plenty to like about it even with its downsides.
Edited by Draghinazzo on May 20th 2020 at 3:45:34 PM
If anything, I would like to see Persona 3 get remade. It would be nice to see the female protagonist on something that isn't handheld, but I suppose that beggars can't exactly be choosers. The gameplay improvements from Portable should be kept in though (guard command to negate weakness, direct control of party members and/or improving their AI so no more situations where Mitsuru casts Marin Karin instead of a healing spell).
And
'd.
Edited by CybranGeneralSturm on May 20th 2020 at 12:37:30 PM
Really, the most I expect in regards to 3 is some kind of "P3 Complete" where FES and P 3 P's content is combined. I would also expect Golden to get some kind of re-release since lol stuck on the Vita.
@Draghinnazo: Disgaea is not meant to be very story focused as much as its the goofy characters and the sheer insane levels you can go up to in terms and the ridiculous damage.
Soul Nomad and the World Eaters is much better story wise, anyhow.
Watch Symphogear

Edited by HamburgerTime on May 20th 2020 at 12:51:51 PM