Persona 3 Portable
Jun. 14th, 2016 06:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroYou've moved to a new town, and a new school, and are staying in a new dorm that has a mysterious secret--at midnight, time pauses and everyone is trapped in coffins for the Dark Hour. Everyone except those with the special powers to command Persona.
It's a visual novel! It's a MegaTen dungeon crawler! Stop, you're both right!
Backstory: Before this, I hadn't played more than a few minutes of any game in the MegaTen franchise, though I'd read Let's Plays of a couple of them. As I knew Mith and Puel were fans of the series, I asked their recommendations of which games I should play. Puel's top recommendation was this one.
Trigger warning like whoa: Summoning your Persona evidently involves shooting yourself in the head (which makes glass shards fly out with a shattering sound). So every single time you cast a spell, your characters are putting a gun to their temple. This is as disturbing as it sounds.
The mix of dark gore and goofiness that the Shadow Hearts series loves is evident here as well. You wander through bloodstained halls in the secret dark hour of the night fighting horrific monsters...and your "all-out attack" makes a big dust cloud that "Bam!" and "Wack!" fly out of.
I appreciate that there are multiple difficulty levels, though Easy mode doesn't actually make the dungeon-crawling significantly easier or the grinding less; it just makes the game less punishing if you die. Cheat codes can be used to make the dungeoneering easy, though, as the best equipment really does make a difference in your ability to breeze through battles. (As opposed to Digital Devil Saga, where being overleveled really doesn't get you much, and there isn't any equipment.) Hitting elemental weaknesses is critical to battle strategy--doing it gets you an extra turn and has the potential to knock down the enemy, which allows for the "all-out attacks"--but having an attack blocked is much less punishing.
I'm unwilling to slavishly follow a walkthrough for the social links, which likely means I'm missing all sorts of content from a "perfect" playthrough. Whatever--I did what seemed amusing. I joined the kendo team, dealt with a teammate lying about his knee problems, and attempted to romance the team manager. I goaded a classmate into starting a romance with a teacher. I worked part-time at a coffee shop (but then, as dungeon-crawling got more profitable, started hanging out in the arcade instead). I joined the music club and made friends with the insanely-shy student council treasurer and overbearing student council president. I fell for a scam and attracted the attention of a sleazy businessman and learned his "lessons."
By summer vacation, my grades were fantastic, so I participated in a kendo tournament and met the star player from another school. I also got to know the old couple who run the bookstore and the little girl who plays by the shrine. At this point I was on-and-off romancing the kendo coach, the student council treasurer, an MMO-playing teacher, and fellow-SEES-member Yukari. (This apparently comes to a head in late September--a typhoon cancelled the school festival, but the three girls got suspicious of my player ways at the clean-up. I opted to concentrate my efforts on just coach Yuko for a while after that.)
When I'd finished learning from the businessman and maxed out most of my stats, I started spending my evenings with the weird monk at the club. (Though after he'd told me his whole story, I ended up just studying at night again.) I joined the Music club and made friends with the president, and also met a dying boy who only hangs out at the shrine on Sundays. Once I'd gotten the Kendo coach to fall for me, I turned my attentions back to the student council treasurer. It took several months to win her heart, then the next day I could start to concentrate on Yukari. (Though I did spend Christmas Eve with Yuko, the coach.)
The last few months were spent trying to close up loose ends, so I grinded the MMO, grabbed lunch with the rival athlete every time I saw him, stopped by the dying young man every Sunday, and visited the book store whenever it was open. I still ended up with random free days, so I met the "Gourmet King" at the mall and continued romancing Yukari; and established a proper social link with Aigis.
In the end, I maxed the links with Classmate, Student Council, Old Couple, Kendo Team, Treasurer, Online Game, Music Club, Team Manager, Girl at the Shrine, Businessman, Unusual Monk, Rival Athlete, and Dying Young Man (13); plus the automatic ones: SEES, Mysterious Boy, and Nyx Annihilation Team (3). I also came very close with Yukari and the Gourmet King, but ran out of days. I feel like 16 is pretty good for a blind run, though.
I have to admit, I have a really hard time imagining playing through this enough to actually map out the different social links and fine the optimal ways to play them. I can kinda see playing through a 2-4 hour visual novel a bunch of times to see variant events, but even with cheat codes this took me almost 30 hours!
Random commentary on the school days: Why the heck do we have magic class at school? The Japanese history makes sense. The grammar lessons, sure. But magic? Even in summer school?
Plot spoilers:
If you make it to July, you get the first big reveal of what's going on: It turns out Mitsuru's grandfather oversaw a project to try to harness the power of the shadows. As as is typical when you try to power things with pure evil, it went out of control, blew up the school, and created the Dark Hour and Tartarus. Also, the 12 fragments of the mass of shadows they had been working with became the major arcana who attack during the full moons. It's not clear while ten years passed before this came to a head, but that's why SEES was recruited.
I think the overarching story/worldbuilding was what interested me the most here. The fact that Strega is an entire set of antagonists who are only antagonists because they don't want you to get rid of the Dark Hour (and with it, their superpowers) makes perfect sense.
Shinjiro dies saving Ken, which in turn upgrades Akihiko and Ken's personas. This sparks everyone gradually getting a Persona upgrade by events, starting in October.
(The ability of people to die from a single gunshot wound in a cutscene, particularly the ones who can challenge godlike Shadows, irritates me. Especially given the whole evoker-gun thing that people use to summon their Personas.)
Then, of course, we have the false ending when it's revealed that Ikutsuki was the evil mastermind behind everything. Who feels the need to crucify the party after capturing them, of course. And then manages to get both himself and the only other responsible adult killed within the span of the same cutscene, which means that the characters are left with no idea what's going on, just that they shouldn't have been doing what they did.
In December, we finally get a few explanations: New kid Ryogi is actually Death ("The Appriser"), who was sealed by Aigis inside the main character ten years earlier--until the 12 missing pieces of him were collected and he could manifest. (The reason everything waited 10 years was because the main character moving back into town triggered them.) The mysterious boy Pharos was Ryogi manifesting, as well. The purpose of the Shadows is to draw the Maternal Being, "Nyx". If Nyx awakens, everyone will lose the will to live (and become like the Apathy Syndrome "Lost") in an event called the Fall. When he returns on 12/31, you can choose to kill him and delay the fall (and erase your memories of these events) or continue to destruction.
(I tried the "bad ending" by killing him--everyone goes back to normal, most of the gang splits up, and they live in the moment...at least, presumably until there are no more moments.)
Jin and Takaya go completely off the rails at the end. He reveals that Kirijo "created" the members of Strega by granting them powers and sending them to investigate Tartarus--and that's why they needed the special medication to control their powers. SEES was apparently Kirijo's second attempt at causing the Fall.
The Nyx Avatar runs through 13 arcana in a marathon battle, then reveals that the moon is really a giant space cannon (aka Nyx). Igor reveals that the power of your social links creates the Universe persona, and you fight Nyx solo--and it curb-stomps you until the Power of Friendship kicks in from the rest of the party, and Nyx is re-sealed, averting the Fall.
The true ending starts the same way, in early March when the characters seem to have forgotten the events of the game. You can free-roam and get a coda to each social link story you completed. Then the party members regain their memory during graduation, and run to the roof to join you and Aigis.
In the end, the real "draw" of this game was the visual novel aspect. The overarching story was interesting, but hardly enough given the length of the game, and given that we never find out the greater story of why Nyx exists or why anyone would ever want to call it, it doesn't seem like that's the focus of the story anyway. The story worth appreciating is the character interactions.
Overall: I'm glad that I played this because it's an important game, but you need to really appreciate both visual novels and randomly-generated dungeon crawling to really enjoy the game, and neither of those are particularly favored genres for me. I think it unlikely that I'll play Persona 4.
It's a visual novel! It's a MegaTen dungeon crawler! Stop, you're both right!
Backstory: Before this, I hadn't played more than a few minutes of any game in the MegaTen franchise, though I'd read Let's Plays of a couple of them. As I knew Mith and Puel were fans of the series, I asked their recommendations of which games I should play. Puel's top recommendation was this one.
Trigger warning like whoa: Summoning your Persona evidently involves shooting yourself in the head (which makes glass shards fly out with a shattering sound). So every single time you cast a spell, your characters are putting a gun to their temple. This is as disturbing as it sounds.
The mix of dark gore and goofiness that the Shadow Hearts series loves is evident here as well. You wander through bloodstained halls in the secret dark hour of the night fighting horrific monsters...and your "all-out attack" makes a big dust cloud that "Bam!" and "Wack!" fly out of.
I appreciate that there are multiple difficulty levels, though Easy mode doesn't actually make the dungeon-crawling significantly easier or the grinding less; it just makes the game less punishing if you die. Cheat codes can be used to make the dungeoneering easy, though, as the best equipment really does make a difference in your ability to breeze through battles. (As opposed to Digital Devil Saga, where being overleveled really doesn't get you much, and there isn't any equipment.) Hitting elemental weaknesses is critical to battle strategy--doing it gets you an extra turn and has the potential to knock down the enemy, which allows for the "all-out attacks"--but having an attack blocked is much less punishing.
I'm unwilling to slavishly follow a walkthrough for the social links, which likely means I'm missing all sorts of content from a "perfect" playthrough. Whatever--I did what seemed amusing. I joined the kendo team, dealt with a teammate lying about his knee problems, and attempted to romance the team manager. I goaded a classmate into starting a romance with a teacher. I worked part-time at a coffee shop (but then, as dungeon-crawling got more profitable, started hanging out in the arcade instead). I joined the music club and made friends with the insanely-shy student council treasurer and overbearing student council president. I fell for a scam and attracted the attention of a sleazy businessman and learned his "lessons."
By summer vacation, my grades were fantastic, so I participated in a kendo tournament and met the star player from another school. I also got to know the old couple who run the bookstore and the little girl who plays by the shrine. At this point I was on-and-off romancing the kendo coach, the student council treasurer, an MMO-playing teacher, and fellow-SEES-member Yukari. (This apparently comes to a head in late September--a typhoon cancelled the school festival, but the three girls got suspicious of my player ways at the clean-up. I opted to concentrate my efforts on just coach Yuko for a while after that.)
When I'd finished learning from the businessman and maxed out most of my stats, I started spending my evenings with the weird monk at the club. (Though after he'd told me his whole story, I ended up just studying at night again.) I joined the Music club and made friends with the president, and also met a dying boy who only hangs out at the shrine on Sundays. Once I'd gotten the Kendo coach to fall for me, I turned my attentions back to the student council treasurer. It took several months to win her heart, then the next day I could start to concentrate on Yukari. (Though I did spend Christmas Eve with Yuko, the coach.)
The last few months were spent trying to close up loose ends, so I grinded the MMO, grabbed lunch with the rival athlete every time I saw him, stopped by the dying young man every Sunday, and visited the book store whenever it was open. I still ended up with random free days, so I met the "Gourmet King" at the mall and continued romancing Yukari; and established a proper social link with Aigis.
In the end, I maxed the links with Classmate, Student Council, Old Couple, Kendo Team, Treasurer, Online Game, Music Club, Team Manager, Girl at the Shrine, Businessman, Unusual Monk, Rival Athlete, and Dying Young Man (13); plus the automatic ones: SEES, Mysterious Boy, and Nyx Annihilation Team (3). I also came very close with Yukari and the Gourmet King, but ran out of days. I feel like 16 is pretty good for a blind run, though.
I have to admit, I have a really hard time imagining playing through this enough to actually map out the different social links and fine the optimal ways to play them. I can kinda see playing through a 2-4 hour visual novel a bunch of times to see variant events, but even with cheat codes this took me almost 30 hours!
Random commentary on the school days: Why the heck do we have magic class at school? The Japanese history makes sense. The grammar lessons, sure. But magic? Even in summer school?
Plot spoilers:
If you make it to July, you get the first big reveal of what's going on: It turns out Mitsuru's grandfather oversaw a project to try to harness the power of the shadows. As as is typical when you try to power things with pure evil, it went out of control, blew up the school, and created the Dark Hour and Tartarus. Also, the 12 fragments of the mass of shadows they had been working with became the major arcana who attack during the full moons. It's not clear while ten years passed before this came to a head, but that's why SEES was recruited.
I think the overarching story/worldbuilding was what interested me the most here. The fact that Strega is an entire set of antagonists who are only antagonists because they don't want you to get rid of the Dark Hour (and with it, their superpowers) makes perfect sense.
Shinjiro dies saving Ken, which in turn upgrades Akihiko and Ken's personas. This sparks everyone gradually getting a Persona upgrade by events, starting in October.
(The ability of people to die from a single gunshot wound in a cutscene, particularly the ones who can challenge godlike Shadows, irritates me. Especially given the whole evoker-gun thing that people use to summon their Personas.)
Then, of course, we have the false ending when it's revealed that Ikutsuki was the evil mastermind behind everything. Who feels the need to crucify the party after capturing them, of course. And then manages to get both himself and the only other responsible adult killed within the span of the same cutscene, which means that the characters are left with no idea what's going on, just that they shouldn't have been doing what they did.
In December, we finally get a few explanations: New kid Ryogi is actually Death ("The Appriser"), who was sealed by Aigis inside the main character ten years earlier--until the 12 missing pieces of him were collected and he could manifest. (The reason everything waited 10 years was because the main character moving back into town triggered them.) The mysterious boy Pharos was Ryogi manifesting, as well. The purpose of the Shadows is to draw the Maternal Being, "Nyx". If Nyx awakens, everyone will lose the will to live (and become like the Apathy Syndrome "Lost") in an event called the Fall. When he returns on 12/31, you can choose to kill him and delay the fall (and erase your memories of these events) or continue to destruction.
(I tried the "bad ending" by killing him--everyone goes back to normal, most of the gang splits up, and they live in the moment...at least, presumably until there are no more moments.)
Jin and Takaya go completely off the rails at the end. He reveals that Kirijo "created" the members of Strega by granting them powers and sending them to investigate Tartarus--and that's why they needed the special medication to control their powers. SEES was apparently Kirijo's second attempt at causing the Fall.
The Nyx Avatar runs through 13 arcana in a marathon battle, then reveals that the moon is really a giant space cannon (aka Nyx). Igor reveals that the power of your social links creates the Universe persona, and you fight Nyx solo--and it curb-stomps you until the Power of Friendship kicks in from the rest of the party, and Nyx is re-sealed, averting the Fall.
The true ending starts the same way, in early March when the characters seem to have forgotten the events of the game. You can free-roam and get a coda to each social link story you completed. Then the party members regain their memory during graduation, and run to the roof to join you and Aigis.
In the end, the real "draw" of this game was the visual novel aspect. The overarching story was interesting, but hardly enough given the length of the game, and given that we never find out the greater story of why Nyx exists or why anyone would ever want to call it, it doesn't seem like that's the focus of the story anyway. The story worth appreciating is the character interactions.
Overall: I'm glad that I played this because it's an important game, but you need to really appreciate both visual novels and randomly-generated dungeon crawling to really enjoy the game, and neither of those are particularly favored genres for me. I think it unlikely that I'll play Persona 4.
