I can't comment on PQ. I'm sure it's mostly fanservice, but I hear good things about the gameplay. I own it, but have not really gotten around to it. I think Ultimax left a sour taste in my mouth, though PQ2 looks adorable. Yeah, it's really hard for me to come up with a bad Confidant in P5.
... okay the Hierophant confidant in P5 is now my favorite social link in the series. Damn that one hit.
Btw, have you played Persona Q? Is it any more than just P3 and P4 fanservice?
It's likely intentional cause you could do stuff like that in the main SMT games as well occasionally. I genuinely love the Sun Arcana segments in each game.
So ever since I started the Sun Confidant I can press demons for multiple item / money drops during Hold Up... but this has the kinda hilarious side effect of allowing me to always still extort money or an item from a shadow and *then* wreck it to bits with an All Out Attack, instead of it being a choice. Is this intentional? It does make you feel like a major dick if nothing else; except against those demons that are a total ass to recruit, against those it's karmic justice.
I don't even dislike P4, but in comparison to the other entries, it feels a bit too bland for me, and I feel your insight about the addiction element is quite spot on for it. Persona 5 is a bit more ambitious and brings back a lot more tactical fighting. The SL concept has a funny self awareness to it in this entry, and adds a new layer of choice to how you should spin your time. I still feel that P3 is better thematically, but P5 is better with tension and momentum within the story, and frankly better gameplay than any entry in the series. I hope you do like it. I want to do a replay of it soon, but my backlog is too full at the moment.
Well I finished the game now so I guess I'm in a better position to come back to this. Also a rant on Persona 4I kind of agree that there is very little in the way of plot progression for the vast majority of the game, though as someone who knew the answer to the mystery from the beginning it played out a bit differently since what I got was basically exactly what I expected from it; slice of life hijinks with an incredibly slowly unfolding murder attempt series going on in the background. And yeah, the story is relatively clearly aimed at highschoolers or students about to enter adulthood. The stories could've been more interesting by pointing out how many adults even never truly get over the very issues these teens are having, and it missed a huge opportunity in really delving into what Adachi legit did wrong vs what he was a victim of. He's a scumbag but despite the parallels the game draws between them it's not like he actually had the very same opportunities the protag had and just missed them. Feels ironic for LGBT groups to latch onto Kanji and Naoto given the entire point of their arcs is that their grapples with sexuality and gender identity turn out to be, in the end, a lack of a proper role model of their respective sex instead of actual dysphoria or anything of the sorts. I will say that in a meta-sense I kinda liked the final twist because while it did nothing for the plot it at least played to the themes of the game because of how Izanami and Adachi, and also Namatame and Mitsuo all kinda added their own spin to the case which made the entire thing an insanely entangled mess that could never be simply explained with X or Y is the culprit, but rather the truth was largely out of control of any person's hand. Though in that sense it also kinda falls flat in the whole final symbolism of Izanagi dispelling Izanami's illusions with Myriad Truths because that... kinda misses the entire point to me? I dunno, maybe I'm just approaching this wrong in the end. Gameplay-wise the game was kinda pretty uninteresting compared to Persona 3. I probably overgrinded early on somehow because besides Shadow Yukiko (and taking on the later optional boss in her place back when his Rampage still one-shot my party) there... really never was any challenging fight in the whole game. Probably at least partly due to me playing the Golden version, or so I'm told, cause every time Rise swooped in and power and mind charged my whole party for free it was like RIP boss, and besides that it was just a matter of spamming AoE physical moves cause they got crits - and therefore extra turns - often and healing up the HP penalty with healing spells was far more time and cost efficient than using actual magic spells. Overall it's not even like the concept is bad, it's just way too goddamn easy and AoE spells dominate the field. Kinda would've liked to try my hand against Margaret, but alas, I'm not about to play an entire new game for that. I did like the comparative lack of emphasis on Hama and Mudo skills which were always just a source of frustration in P3, but that's about it. Overall Persona 4 was fine but... I think it just hit me, it's made to be like a drug. It lures you in and keeps you entangled with the prospect Social Link levelups and making new personas, but when I look back at it now it was all... so very empty. Every character's character arc was smurfing done by the time they were introduced so there was no real growth to experience along with anybody, and honestly the group's bonds are for the most part seriously superficial, outside of their S.Links with the protag. All in all it's like a product carefully crafted to feel like a persona game, and even touches on many interesting subjects that could be talked about in more depth, but it ultimately doesn't have the same kind of substance behind it and never did anything to really stick. It just addicts you to it enough to have you keep going. ... wow even though I ultimately enjoyed my time playing it I guess it turned out a lot more harsh than I expected. Could've gone into a lot more nitpicks or details that I actually liked but that's not really important. Guess I'm moving on to Persona 5 now. Hope I enjoy it as much as you did ^^
My Abridged Rant about Persona 4 There are quite a few problems. While I don't dislike P4, I largely found it to be a less ambitious and kind of backwards compared to the other entries. In terms of plot, my main issue is that P4 seems less interested in solving a murder as much as it's interested in it's slice of life antics. There's no real momentum to the plot, so it quickly falls into routine. The Investigation Team is no closer to actually solving the mystery from Month One as they were by Month Six which is kind of aggravating, and in the end, I find the whole resolution of the mystery to be pretty contrived and unsatisfying, especially with the True Ending which felt like a twist for the sake of adding another twist than actually being meaningful. None of which is helped by how utterly rushed the last few months of the in-game time feel. P4's resolution happens in November, the remaining time afterwards feels tacked on because the devs did a poor job of building a greater scope conflict. The team gets along far too well which made many of their hijinks together get a little too saccharine for my taste. P3/5's casts actually have drama and some serious baggage they have to work through whereas the problems in P4, while far more grounded and realistic, ultimately feels pedestrian in hindsight. I mean I can get how LGBT groups latch onto Kanji and Naoto but in addition to taking their stories out of context, their issues are the kind of thing you would likely only worry about when you were in high school. That overall is my main problem with the plot. I can see someone in middle school or high school latching onto the story and cast cause they deal with drama like that at that point in life, but for an adult, it's like a quaint run through an embarrassing time in your life and you know the cast and fandom are making a bigger deal out of something that is normal for most people to go through. Whereas P3's story deals far more with primal fears and issues that can hit you regardless of age, or P5's story having a bit of a timeless quality to it which it balances with the right level of self-awareness to not take itself too seriously all the time. The game side of things bugs me because P3 may have had issues, but the overall design was damn near flawless in terms of making a game that balanced challenge while still being very newbie friendly. The new knockdown mechanics completely diminished the overall strategy the knockdown mechanics offered in P3. Reducing the three melee types back into one generic melee element limited the party and several persona options. In P3, Yukari was unique cause she had access to Wind magic, healing spells, and pierce damage, Yukiko by contrast only has Fire and healing spells. This made the team builds less interesting with Chie and Naoto especially coming across as benchwarmers, though I've heard Golden fixes some of these issues. The lobotomizing of the Navigator job so that they can't actually scan enemies and simply just keep a record of what you try, slows down combat. Money was easy to get in P3 and technically P5, but P4 makes it a pain in the ass to get a hold of by making it a terrible loot system which was hardly as well balanced as it was in FFXII for instance. With no money, I often felt P4 became a much more difficult game because I had to choose either to outfit my team, since equipment was rare in dungeons, or upgrade my Personas of which limited funds made it harder to experiment even with the discounts. The lack of an accessible and not terrible optional side dungeon like Tartarus or Mementos made wanting to spend time grinding and getting money problematic, especially since P4's dungeons are barely any better than the RGD's from P3/5 and are just as repetitive. I did enjoy the new card draw mechanic, and kind of wish P5 kept it but c'est la vie. The social link mechanics were a nice touch, and I loved how P5 improved on some of the concepts but making the cast the majority of them felt a bit like a cop out, especially since unlike P3/5 where party member Social Links usually deal with original story arcs not dealt with in the main plot, P4's mostly deal with in-story issues, of which I felt the main plot already did a better job of addressing and resolving most of them than the actual social links. The non-story character SL's are sadly a bit more forgettable in P4 because most of these people really feel like satellite characters since the party members get the most screentime and the most benefits for using them. Overall, P4 always felt less like a true sequel to P3 and more like a spin-off series. P5 actually feels like a true successor to the original. Honestly, I felt the anime was a better story cause it cut out the filler and doesn't really hide the fact the plot is just a slice of life anime masquerading as a murder mystery.
Heya, you're not too big a fan of Persona 4 as compared to 3 and 5, are you? I'm currently still playing P4G and do find it not quite as fun to play as 3, but I'm curious to hear, what are your major reasons for preferring the others?
Yeah, by the time those franchises started to get popular, I was either diving head first into MegaTen or more likely too busy with going back to college.
