28
« on: March 03, 2015, 03:29:39 AM »
I'm not really in my SMT phase right now like I was back in 2014, but let me tell you: Nocturne and SMTIV are very, very good shit. The press turn system can be pretty punishing, but it always keeps you on your toes in battle (something I don't experience a lot in other JRPGs) and gives you such a great sense of accomplishment. I mean, sure, it may come down to luck a little bit, but it's more like a risk factor, as in a "what attacks will these demons use against me and how high are the chances they'll wipe out my entire party in an 8-turn crit weakness string on me" type of workaround strategy that adds to the thrill of it, in my opinion. Or just spam Megido(la(on)) and be WEAK! FUCKING WEAK!
I really dig the moral ambiguity of them, too. I've personally gone with chaos pretty much all the time (though I'd likely be a neutral piece of shit if I were actually in that scenario, haha), but there are still aspects of it that I don't really agree with ideologically, such as, oh, I don't know, demons wreaking havoc on earth and the resulting power struggle devolving the world into anarchy for at least a good amount of time. Meanwhile, law/order seems like an okay fit for me except for the fact that they basically exclude anyone that they deem to be "unworthy." I mean, chaos sorta does that too with its whole "survival of the fittest" mantra, but in a much more indirect and much less insulting/bigoted way. So, whichever way you pick, it's not going to live completely up to your ideal vision; I think that this and how choosing a different moral path directly affects the gameplay and story does a really good job of adding replay value without it feeling shoehorned in.
As for Persona, I hate to go all negative all of a sudden, but I absolutely just cannot deal with the grindfest gameplay of Persona 3 and 4. It would be slightly better if the progression wasn't on a (game) day-by-day basis. Like, yeah, I know that you're supposed to slowly learn to cherish like your surroundings and your social link companions and all that, but that same progression is also what hinders the gameplay to the point where I'm just like "e-NOUGH" after like an hour or so. The structure pretty much *lends itself* to constant grinding, which wouldn't be so bad if everything just took too damn long to complete. Every enemy has like a billion health, which reduces the element of actual challenge and the skill required to overcome it. I mean, SMT enemies tend to have reasonably high health, but not so long that you just sit there and get bored while attacking them and you're just waiting for the battle to be over. It seems like Atlus took all the good gameplay ideas from Nocturne and just threw them out the window when they made Persona 3 a couple years later and just gave every enemy a billion health, made their attacks do a ton of damage, and made your attacks do less damage in order to make the game grindier and more artificially difficult in order to accomodate for the simplified battle system. It's really a damn shame that the gameplay had to suffer like this in Persona 3/4, because everything else about them is legitimately great: the soundtrack, characters, story, and the art style (although the graphics are not quite up to snuff with other PS2 games) to name a few.
Persona 2, though... that's a game I really enjoy. This may be my PS1 aesthetic bias talking, but the non-gameplay aspects combined are easily my favorite out of the entire subseries. The soundtrack by itself isn't too, too special, but, like I said, the way it melds with the story, characters, etc. is what matters. Though the gameplay is still a little repetitive (especially with the demon conversation, which basically is just process of elimination dialogue choices without the element of randomness found in mainline SMT games), it feels a lot better due to its much more linear and NOT day-by-day progression that I think does a better job at telling a more cohesive and well-thought-out story at the expense of capturing, like, interesting moments like Persona 3 and 4 did. Speaking of which, the characters. Holy crap, the characters in both Persona 2 games are all so good in like every aspect and I could go on more but wowee zowee I really went on a tangent with this whole response.
I've tried Digital Devil Saga a little bit, but the PSN port lags like nobody's business a lot of the time, unfortunately. Haven't tried any other subseries yet, though I do intend to change that with Devil Survivor Overclocked some day.
Show Posts
