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    Code Geass was a weird but interesting one. I love BBig O, NGE, Gundam Wing, and in the realm of gaming, Xenogears, Front Mission, and Armored Core.
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    It is, and it's weird too. So what's your favorite mecha anime?
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    It's just a love it or hate it genre it seems. I grew up watching too many shows with robots not to be in love with it. Transformers, Go-Bots, Voltron, and Robotech to name a few.
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    The first game was quirky. It's biggest problem was being painfully short and having a bit of an abrupt ending. S fixes a lot of that as well as having an easier and less tropperific (at least as far as Giant Robot stories go) main character, but I did enjoy it.
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    Yes, I own both, but I've only managed to play the first one which most fans don't think very highly of. I need to get around to playing the better sequel.
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    OMG that's hilarious! I take it you've dived into P5 now?
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    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.
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    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.
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    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.
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    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.
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About Karifean

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Date of Birth
August 7, 1996 (27)
About Karifean
Real Name:
Fabian Mitscha-Eibl
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M
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Wandering the Kakera
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Student (Software & Information Engineering)
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Japanese Language, Visual Novels, Computer Science
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Final Fantasy X
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Recent Entries

A Modern Guide to Ys - Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of DANA

by Karifean on 01-12-2020 at 12:17 AM

YS VIII: LACRIMOSA OF DANA

If it's not clear by now, I adore the Ys series. I love how purely fun these games are, I love the simple sense of adventure, and the sense of genuine mystique from uncovering the lore of ancient places of legend. I love the way Falcom humanizes their characters and really makes them feel 'real' in a way other studios' JRPGs struggle to match. And whatever I may have said about Celceta it still is a game that has a lot of that.

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A Modern Guide to Ys - Ys: Memories of Celceta (Ys IV)

by Karifean on 01-03-2020 at 10:09 PM

YS: MEMORIES OF CELCETA (YS IV)

Time for a quick history lesson! Ys IV's history is a strange one indeed. Back around its initial release there were actually two games that were Ys IV, there was "Ys IV: Dawn of Ys" by Hudson Soft on the PC Engine (TurboGrafx-16) CD-ROM, and then there was "Ys IV: Mask of the Sun" by Tonkin House on the SNES. How did that happen? Well Falcom were in a bit of a situation at

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A Modern Guide to Ys - Ys Seven

by Karifean on 01-03-2020 at 01:37 AM

YS SEVEN

Heading into the final era of Ys games and in the series' timeline the chronologically last of the localized games so far we have Ys Seven. Released for the PSP in late 2009 and ported to the PC years later, this game marks a heavy departure from earlier titles in the series in terms of graphics, gameplay and storytelling alike. The shift was met with mixed reception, but given all that came out of it, I couldn't be

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A Modern Guide to Ys - Ys Origin

by Karifean on 12-31-2019 at 10:03 PM

YS ORIGIN

Now for perhaps one of the best-known games in the series, Ys Origin has gained quite a bit of notoriety especially on Steam, probably mainly because its Steam trailer is super hype. Does it deserve it? Well, to put it very simply... hell yeah it does.


As mentioned already, in Ys Origin you do not play as Adol. That's because this game is a prequel to the Ys I & II duology,

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A Modern Guide to Ys - Ys: The Oath in Felghana (Ys III)

by Karifean on 12-30-2019 at 10:55 PM


YS: THE OATH IN FELGHANA (YS III)

The third Ys game was known in the SNES era as "Wanderers of Ys", and was the game to introduce a lot of the western world to the series. Its reputation overall has been mixed, being a sort of "Zelda II: The Adventure of Link" of the Ys series, ditching the overhead view for a sidescrolling adventure and as already implied not really being about the land of Ys at all anymore,

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