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Persona 3

  
 
Spatula Clarke
15:05 / 20.08.07
I didn't even realise that this was out this month, until the postie came knocking on Saturday morning. Jiffy bagged package with my name and address on it, looking suspiciously like something ordered from Videogamesplus. didn't have the first idea what it could be. Opened up:



I'd pre-ordered it, but got it into my head that it was due to drop in September.

Atlus US really spoil their fans sometimes. That's a lovely, glossy, embossed slipcase, a hardback art book, a soundtrack CD, the game box and the seriously high quality manual. Extra chuffed as the soundtrack CD I got with the LE version of Digital Devil Saga 2 was cracked and unplayable, but this one works fine.

Shin Megami Tensei 3 on the PS2 (SMT: Nocturne in the US and SMT: Lucifer's Call in the UK) is, for my money, the single greatest JRPG ever made, with a unique, unsettling, totally believable world and the best take on the turn-based battle of games like Phantasy Star (original series), Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest that there's ever been, requiring and rewarding proper tactical thought and punishing attempts to just charge through it without thinking. See the thread hereabouts for more on that.

But the two most recent PS2 spin-offs have been disappointing, imo. Digital Devil Saga was hampered by being split into two parts and released seperately, with a first part that's actually quite boring. That first part was also far too traditional for me, after the stunning originality of SMT3. Devil Summoner has a really fucking awesome setting - you're a private detective in 1920s Japan, just at the point where the Westernisation of the culture is starting to take hold and knocking up against the country's traditional values, leading to this great clash and mix or art styles, clothing, architecture, etc. And that's perfectly captured by the game, but the gameplay was screwed by a rubbishy real-time combat system that just didn't work very well.

This, though - I've just played ten minutes of it, which involved watching some anime cutscenes, listening to some J-pop hip-hop, walking around a school entrance hall and sitting in a school assembly. The story's barely started, I've not had a hint of the battle system or, in fact, *anything* that could really be classed as gameplay, and yet it's already showing serious promise. I'm more excited about this than I am any of the big name games that are due to come out over the rest of the year - Bioshock, Halo 3, whatever. Meh to them.

It's all about the style. The anime intro is fantastic - kid on the train to his new school, disembarks, wanders around the station, the clock hits 12 and everything stops. People disappear, there's a weird green tinge to the world and a single streak of blood starts to ooze down the clock face. Walking through the city streets, there are what seem to be gravestones dotted around. While all this is happening, the scene keeps cutting to a girl sitting on the floor in a bathroom, crying, playing about with a gun and trying to put it to her head.

Then we see the original kid make his way into his school dorm, before a weird child with really blue eyes appears and tells him to sig a contract (which you do, with your name - as long as neither your surname or forname contain more than eight characters, that is. Fed up with not being able to put my real name into games because of this kind of limitation <_<).

Contract signed, the odd child disappears and the girl who was previously trying to kill herself (?) runs into the room, whips a gun out of a holster strapped to her leg and points it at our hero. He looks like he's shitting himself, obvs, as does she, until another girl appears on the scene - again, equipped with a gun - and tells her that it's alright. The green tinge to the world disappears, time starts running again and everything calms down. The girl who'd just been about to kill the hero smiles and offers to direct him to his room.

Then it's morning and you go to school. You find out which form you're in, find the faculty office, sit through assembly and meet a couple more of your classmates, before the day ends and you return to the dorm.

And that's what I've played so far. But here's what I know:

There's a hidden hour between the end of one day and the beginning of the next, during which time a demonic dungeon appears in the world. Your character, the two girls and others have personae, demon versions of themselves that they bring out during this hour in order to fight through the dungeon. They bring their personae out by pointing handguns at their own heads and threatening to kill themselves.

I'm not making this shit up, btw.

The battle system adopts the superbly realised 'press turn' system from SMT3. It's all turn-based, but if you hit an enemy with an attack of an element that they're weak to, you gain an extra turn. Hit them with one that they're strong against or, worse, can nullify, and you'll either lose your next character's turn or even your entire party's. Which is why it's brillinat and why a lot of people who aren't prepared for it found it so difficult to understand in SMT3 - because you really need to think carefully about the make-up of your party and which attacks you're going to use in which circumstances.

It also features a play on the demon creation system in SMT3, apparently, but I want to play a lot more of it before I go into that, because I'm not too sure exactly how it manifests itself here.

So, ten minutes, no real gameplay, but I love it. Because of the style. SMT games and spin-offs nearly always seem to have their own unique style - they certainly have since the series moved onto the PS2, at any rate, and this one's no different. The style here is a complete departure from the other games in the series - J-pop soundtrack, as I say, full-on anime storytelling (it's been talking heads stuff or in-engine cutscenes previously) and on-screen displays that remind me of nothing as much as Jet Set Radio Future. This is the shop screen, for example:



And there's a whole extra element to the gameplay in that there's now supposedly a hefty element of relationship management here - I've seen touches of it already in the choices provided in the conversation trees. Again, how that impacts on the battling side of things remains to be seen, but I'd imagine that different strengths of relationship affect how well characters fight alongside each other, or something. may well also alter the plotline - SMT games are HUGE on plot and storytelling.

Listening to the soundtrack CD while I'm typing this. It's fupping great.

And look - highschool kids pointing guns at their own heads in an anime devil world, soundtracked by J-pop and techno-opera. What's not to love? The atmosphere's already totally fucked, in a really twisted, disturbing way - all bright, poppy high school realtionship stuff, combined with suicide imagery and demon otherworlds? I'll have some of that, ta.

Here's one of the two attract sequences,

here's somebody playing the first eight minutes (mostly the anime intro, so it can be watched without fear of spoilers)

and here's HG101's extensive article on the entire SMT series (although it does miss the one SMT spin-off that I think most people are going to be aware of, the Dreamcast first-person slasher Maken X).

Blue Dragon 360 pre-order? Cancelled.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
17:36 / 30.08.07
So, nobody? Even after the interest previously shown in SMT3 around here?

Here's a description of how it plays that I posted to another board:

There are elements of the story that are set to happen at certain times of the year and others which only kick in once you've reached a certain floor in the dungeon. As a result, you can get to the end of the game without getting to the end of the story - the proper end, anyway. A New Game + option allows you to start over with all personae and stats that you had at the end of your previous run, in an attempt to get a better ending if you made a hash of it first time around.

The game as a whole doesn't really reveal its regular structure until a few hours in, which is why I've probably not described it particularly well so far. For those opening hours, *everything* is on rails - where you go, what you do, who you talk to. The first battle, and some time after it.

Here's how it works once you're past that intro stage:

The game runs over the course of a school year. That year's broken down into days. Days are broken down into periods - early morning, morning, lunch, afternoon, after school, evening and night. There might be another one in the first part of the day, actually. I forget.

On most weekdays and Saturdays - apart from when there's a school holiday - most of the day flips past in about three seconds. The names of the periods just flick across the screen. Sometimes they'll halt at a particular one and an even will occur - an assembly (which, so far, have all been for narrative purposes), a question during a lesson that you'll be required to answer (from a choice of three) or a lunchbreak where, again, you'll get a short narrative scene. And by short, I mean short - three minutes, max.

During the after school period, you get to choose where you go and what you do. The purpose of this is the building of the social links that I was talking about earlier - you can partake in a training session with a sports club, go to the music or arts clubs (only if you've taken the time to become a member on one of the limited occasions when that's possible), go to the bookstore to chat to the old couple who run it, hang out with a schoolfriend. Other possibilities open up as you play and depending on what choices you've made previously. Spending time with certain people ups your affinity with certain Tarot cards, which in turn increases your ability to summon and use personae that are aligned with those cards.

During the evening period, you've got three choices - leave the house to go to the shopping centre, stay in and study/get an early night, or go to Tartarus, the randomly-generated dungeon, and explore deeper into it/level up.

As you fight battles in Tartarus over the course of one night, you and your party become more tired. If you become tired you need to leave asap, or else you'll become ill the next day or the day after. If you're ill, your battle stats will decrease in Tartarus.

So it's all about managing your time - building up the links, levelling up, exploring the dungeon.

Oh, each social link also has a little sub-plot of its own, which can make it a bit of a decision which to follow - you want to know how they carry on, but focusing on one more than others may damage those others. I think if you ignore one for too long, it breaks down completely.

It's effectively two games in one, yeah, but with an intricate system linking them together.

In battle, you're teamed with up to three AI-controlled team members. You can issue them with limited commands (more like suggestions, actually) and the number of commands available increases as your social link with the team (yeah, you've got one of those with them, too) grows. The AI is surprisingly good - I felt kind of disappointed when I realised that you've got no real control over the rest of your team, but that disappeared once I realised just how decent it is.

Your character is capable, during battle, of summoning a persona to perform one of the skills as an attack or a healing/attribute increase move. Different personae have different skills and they level up as you kill enemies with them. The stats of the persona that you've currently got equipped become your stats, their weaknesses your weaknesses - if you're in a battle and have Jack Frost equipped, and teh enemies you're facing have fire moves, you'll need to change to another persona - JF's weak against fire. You can swap personae once per turn. Means that you can go into battle, see which enemies you're facing, then change persona to fit (as long as you know the enemies' weakness, that is). It's a lot less strict than SMT3, where you'd enter a battle with a team of demons that you'd pre-selected and get fucked over if your team was unsuitable for the enemy type.

As personae level up, they learn new skills. At a certain point in the game - just after full control has been handed to you - you'll get the ability to fuse different personae together to potentially create a new one. That new one will inherit some of the skills of those that were possesed by the fused personae, but this will be random. It's a bit like Pokemon training, in that it allows you to create personae with skills that they wouldn't have otherwise.

I don't want to give too much about the personae fusing/levelling stuff away, because figuring out how it (or its equivalent) worked for myself was one of the best things in SMT3.
 
 
Triplets
20:42 / 30.08.07
Honestly, dude, after watching Bleach this shit is so up my alley. Unfortunately, I am incredibly skint right now, so unless I get lucky with a 2nd hand bargain I won't be playing this for a good while. More's the pity.

Just about to read fully through your second post. Without playing it I can't really think of much to ask. Does it bring anything to the roaming RPG scene that we haven't seen before? What do you like most about it?
 
 
Mysterious Transfer Student
08:02 / 31.08.07
I felt a bit bad about failing to reply to this thread as like Mr. Satanic, this game is so tailor-made for someone with my tastes in film, comics and anime it's not even funny. The only thing standing in my way is non-ownership of an R1-capable PS2, but I'm seriously considering investing in one or getting my existing console modded on this basis.

SMT3 is also a great game and has a genuinely original feel, but as I am the worst, most concentration-deficient player of RPGs in the world I have not got as far with it as I'd like. I'm currently in the early stage of a replay after my previous save file got eaten during the first Kalpa of the Labyrinth of Amala, so perhaps I'll put in some more effort this time.

The relationship management stuff sounds like just the kind of thing that could suck me right into Persona 3 and leave me there, as I love the drama element of RPGs when it's done well. Conversely a boring storyline can kill the game's appeal for me no matter how much fun the rest of the gameplay might be, as happened with FFXII.

you'll get a short narrative scene. And by short, I mean short - three minutes, max.

Thank fug for this. If you've played any part of the Xenosaga series you'll know better than anyone how arse-achingly annoying long cutscenes can be.
 
 
_pin
08:14 / 31.08.07
This just isn't getting a PAL release, is it? I know that, now, and am taking the necessary steps to deal with the disappoitment in my own way.

Or I could just chip the stupid box. How do I do that? Fat, old model, if that changes anything.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
17:16 / 31.08.07
I was going to say that you're probably right, pin, because you can currently pick up the limited edition PAL Digital Devil Saga 2 release for £15 on some websites, it sold so poorly over here, and I was presuming that this would mean that the game's UK publisher would have given up bring the series and offshoots out over here as a result.

But then I found out about this, which had completely passed me by until now - Koei picking Devil Summoner up for Europe (and, according to this, giving it the all-important 60Hz treatment). And then I had a little search and saw this.

So. March 2008. If you're happy waiting. If not, it might be easier to get a US PS2 than getting yours modded now - that's what I did, anyway, because I couldn't be bothered with the hassle. More expensive, mind. Videogamesplus are very reliable - I've never had a bad experience with them.

If you want to go the modifying route, then I think the easiest option is still the flip-top lid/disc swap one. This is a random Google search result - I have no idea how reliable this firm are, if at all. It seems simple enough and I know a bunch of people who've done something similar without a hitch.

Trips> will respond to yr qs when I'm a bit less fugging crackered.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
13:31 / 02.09.07
It's pretty different to any other RPG I've played, Trips. What appealed to me first was the Shin Megami Tensei link - all the spin-offs take place in different universes and have different styles of gameplay to each other, but they share the demonology//mythology stuff. And that's what got me interested in the first place - that, plus the whole setting of SMT3, which takes place within the blink of an eye between the destruction of one reality and the creation of another.

P3's a bit like a mirror image of SMT3 - the same, but all reversed. SMT3 was all haunting isolation and this floating, unreal sense of emptiness in the world. That's the opposite of what you've got here - P3 is very poppy, very snappy, and all of the relationship gubbins is something that belongs in an entirely different world than SMT3's. The time management aspect of P3 is also anti-SMT3 - you take that game at your own pace, but here you're always working to a deadline, whether that's within the school day, within Tartarus or within the overarching storyline.

It's also the insane mixture of lots of different things that shouldn't work together at all, yet fit perfectly. The way that they've tied the relationships into the battle system means that they#re more than just a mini-game to play when you want a break from teh rest - they're an integral part of the structure. Every decision you make affects what you can do later on.

The battling's just fun, too, which is obviously important in a game where it's the ultimate point. Figuring out enemy weakpoints, building a team that can face any challenge, fusing demons/personae to create new types. It's much easier than SMT3, because of the ability to change personae once per turn, but it's still challenging.

Here's the SMT3 thread. As I say there, the other thing that I love about the series and its offspring is how willing its creators are to keep mixing it up, keep pushing it into weird new shapes.
 
 
Mysterious Transfer Student
19:11 / 16.09.07
Ehh, it looks like 2008 for me. Reality is a bastard.

I have obtained the soundtrack, which is, as acknowledged, great stuff. In fact the only thing that could possibly cause me any aversion to this game is having to listen to the English language in preference to the Japanese - a piddling thing given that games like this should by rights never make it over here at all; but the J-voice track has a couple of my favourite voice actors involved. Dual audio options would be bliss. Randy, please update us on your play whenever you like, as material elsewhere has refreshed my interest and your first-hand accounts always make for great reading.





Ahh, screw it: highschool kids pointing guns at their own heads in an anime devil world, soundtracked by J-pop and techno-opera. What's not to love? The atmosphere's already totally fucked, in a really twisted, disturbing way - all bright, poppy high school realtionship stuff, combined with suicide imagery and demon otherworlds? I'll have some of that, ta. Damn straight, I'm chewing my nails for six months now.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
21:32 / 03.11.08
PERSONA 4 IS NEARLY UPON US. I AM A HAPPY RANDY. even though i've still not got around to finishing p3.

Yes, so I thought people might want to know. And because there doesn't seem an enormous amount of point in going into huge efforts hereabouts otherwise, I shall lazily point the two or three people here who might want to know more to a thread on it elsewhere: here.

Also, Barbelith gamers pls join GHZ kthxbi.
 
 
Mysterious Transfer Student
18:24 / 04.11.08
Done and done. On reading GHZ's P3 thread I realise I should have posted about it, either here or over there, much sooner as I bought the PAL edition in March, but played it right through long before Randy had a chance. Except that I was so absurdly over-levelled by the end (Lv 95-plus) that the New Game Plus element hasn't brought me back to the game as it would. It's the prospect of completing every Social Link, and the incredible level of finesse and timing required to keep track of all these loveable classmates, eccentric townspeople and demanding girlfriends, that'll draw me back in.

Especially considering that PAL Persona-users now have access to the startlingly cheap expansion-plus-original twofer Persona 3 FES, which I haven't got hold of yet, but which contains all the bonus content you could want in the shape of more Personae, additional S-Links, costume options (no anime-themed production is complete without a swimsuit episode after all), a Hard Mode for P3 and the epilogue game 'The Answer'. It's the perfect thing if you wanted this game as badly as I did when this thread started last year but didn't have the hardware to play it on. Oh, but then Persona 4.... nnngh. Do very want.

Randy wrote about the fabulous levels of style and design that've gone into P3 and its follow-up and I agree that it's one of the most seductive games on that level that I've played. The MGS-ish comic-book-panel pop-ups and mood-indicating visual effects, the in-game-model cutscenes and full-on anime movie story set-pieces, the brilliantly detailed Persona Compendium, the bizarre, rambling and totally inaccurate magickal lectures delivered by the school nurse, the delicious character design (the main character, with his super-bishonen everyman role and narcissistic little post-battle victory flourishes, is a particular favourite), the first-season Bleach fluorescent pop ambience, the slowly progressing seasons as the school year turns from heartbreakingly bright summer days to the melancholy of autumn and winter... it's all utterly lovely. And the story, disjointed and overwrought and frequently batshit as anime-esque storylines are apt to be, did get to me after a while, particularly when it came to the ending....

[+] [-] Spoiler

P4 had better have something pretty awesome to top that.
 
  
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