everything rad is good for you: a persona/shin megami thread

what a great idea!

http://asktheinvestigationteam.tumblr.com/

is this, like, a thing

lots of SMT & related news recently
PS1/Saturn game Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers is being remade for 3DS
P3:FES is up for download on the PS3 in US, both Digital Devil Saga games coming next month to EU PS3
Ghostlight are localising Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor Overclocked 3DS and its DS sequel Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor 2 in EU

where will i find the time/when will Atlus stop with ports and make a new game dammit

oooh Shin Megami Tensei 4 announced for 3DS
playing thru Strange Journey atm, the demon conversations can get pretty funny

is something weird going on with experience distribution in strange journey or am i missing something

I'm playing through P3P on vita, yes I am

this game has the biggest disconnect between theme and mechanics of anything i've played since left 4 dead afaict

thomp did you ever emulate any of the old-school SMT games? i fucked around with the fan translations of the first few but never made any real progress.

nah i just decided to order a copy of strange journey. apparently they're a lot more annoying/arbitrary? i feel like the more user-friendly version of this experience is probably all i need for the moment, especially given the more user-friendly version still means running into enemies with a one-hit instant kill game over for a couple of hours before you can do anything to avoid it

avoiding the majority of random encounters by talking to demons is a pretty good mechanic

dark rooms you can't automap is kind of an annoying one

"Yes, the Shibboleth ...
You pronounce it well, Zelenin."

rmde

i gave my dude a polack name in this and have found myself getting more and more resentful of how the fn WASPs on board the red stripe keep expecting the ethnic minorities to do all the work

Buncha these are on sale for 3ds. I'm just wondering if the Soul Hackers or DDS Overclocked are actually worth picking up thru the 3ds

new Persona 5 trailer, looking and sounding good!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oc_9r4wifFc

came here to post this too haha

the angles/etc during many of the scenes are very Catherine

no surprise that P5 has been delayed, now coming out "Summer 2016" ... maybe.
new trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvpOwQaqRXA

I was getting frustrated 50 hours into P2: Innocent Sin when I was in what was clearly the final dungeon for forever and the difficulty suddenly jumped into the stratosphere and I was randomly encountering one-hit-killers like 2/3 of the time and using up all of my unreplenishable items, and I was seriously about to pack it in but I stuck it out until the end and I'm glad I did because the penultimate boss was (spoilerz) Hitler. Sorry, 'Fuhrer'. But seriously: Hitler. Followed by Nyarlathotep. So that was dece.

I think I'm going to take a break before hitting the second P2 though.

the difficulty suddenly jumped into the stratosphere and I was randomly encountering one-hit-killers like 2/3 of the time

yeah that's the point where I tapped out of P4.

gotta admit i am super fucking psyched for persona 5

yeah! for whatever reason i thought it was delayed until september

94 on metacritic is currently enough to make it the highest rated non-remake in ps4 history

i should get off my ass and go pick it up before t he store closes

Played the first couple of hours, strong start and super stylish. Already fighting the urge to play all night!

2.5 hours in and i am bored as fuck tbh

feels slow and clunky and talky after nier: automata

did you like p3 and p4?

the pacing so far is pretty much exactly that, slo to start but ramps up into itself after a while. i'm enjoying it!

Oh, huh, I blasted through the first two and guess I got distracted like an hour into 2b. Maybe I should just jump ahead to 3 so I can get caught up and play 5 in like 2021.

P5 otm
http://i.imgur.com/EOVY0WO.jpg

Do I have to play any of the first 4 because I'm only just hearing about this

You can start wherever, they aren't really linked (apart from the two P2 games obv)
Into the second dungeon, this game has really got its hooks into me now. Appreciate the minor SMT tweaks added to the battle system. Soundtrack is incredible.

P5 is probably the best place to start due to all the quality of life improvements in the menus and such, no more 5 minute long re-rolls of fusion results to get the right skillset inherited.

it's a paradox. all can be played separately. P5 is probably the best. (i'm not done yet but i already like it more in every conceivable way.) however P3 and P4 I also LOVE and they'd be hard to go back to. but i'm not gonna sit here and tell you to get a SP and PS Vita to play the essential versions of those two sooooo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUWQFnC2zqU

also lmao

i have been playing this fucking compulsively for the past week. being unemployed + this existing = uh oh

per my post 2 above, this may be my fave entry into one of my fave series OAT. wow wow wow

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-10-16-atlus-has-released-a-nifty-free-shin-megami-tensei-metroidvania
https://www.atlus.co.jp/news/5854/

surprisingly long for a gag game. i got to the second teleporter and had to take a break.

holy shit @ this game

i don't really play rpgs ever, but... dang dog

this game is going to take over my life, isn't it

i keep reading about "time management" and choices i get to make about down-time but so far there hasn't been any. i keep getting hustled to the next bit and then told to go to bed. don't get me wrong, the game is amazing (if a bit disturbing tbh) but i do feel a bit pushed around like it's on rails

i forgot how much fun turn-based battles can be. still trying to work out how confidantes' abilities map into this, how to "fuse" persona, wth arcana are, etc

the game does take a while before it opens up, the 'hustling' in this one definitely felt more obnoxious than in P4. You should be able to fuse by talking too the twins but basically you can make new persona by combining two or more other ones and it will let you choose certain abilities to gift to them based on the persona you are fusing. the game will also allow you to go back and buy persona you've fused at the level you last had them so there's no need to worry about losing certain persona.

each confidante represents an arcana and the higher yr social link with that character the more bonus xp you'll get when you fuse a persona of that arcana. Also if you currently have a persona of a certain arcana in yr 'deck' your relationship with the corresponding character will grow faster when you hang out with them. which are good reasons to be fusing persona.

sorry if that made no sense

lol it totally makes sense now, feels funny that i ever had to wonder about it

question though: how do you get the background music out of your head??????? this is a major problem with videogames with this many hours of play built in imo!!

I realized that I'm never going to actually push through with Persona 2B (which, I gather, is just a variation on the first version of Persona 2) so I jumped ahead to Persona 3. I don't know how I feel about the PSP version so far, since it does that thing that way too many Japanese Vita/PSP games do where they reduce the gameplay to not much more than clicking buttons amidst static images of talking heads (just watched some PS2 clips to confirm that the portable version strips away all of the cutscenes and character animation). Maybe the actual battles will make this feel like less of a (yaaaaaaawn) visual novel? Everyone seems to agree that it's actually better than the PS2 version so I'm hanging in there. I'm probably just spoiled by the fact that the PSP ports of the first two games are newer and more polished than P3.

This post has been sponsored by the year 2006.

the psp version is far superior in that you actually get to control your whole party, iirc. in the original i think you just set their "AI" and only had direct control of your own character. plus they added some stuff like the other gender main character. enjoy it! that game gets buckwild in the best way.

Persona 5 (PS3) is finally a reasonable price on the PS store so here I go

:D

I've never played any of these before; just getting started on this one. Music's cool, dialogue is... functional

This thing is 80-100 hrs long?!

depends on how far down the rabbit hole you want to go (secret boss is ng+ only, for starters) but i don't think you can beat it in less than 40 or so unless you're speedrunning it.

I've never played any JRPG stuff before so the fun part for me is catching little bits of Japanese culture amidst the Westernized dialogue, like when a character moans about conveyor belt sushi or letting a man take up his passenger seat(!)

is P5 on sale for PS4 too?

not booted PS4 up in a while but now this and horizon are reasonable prices......

You'd have to check but I assume so.

hope I get to play p4g and p5 someday but I refuse to buy a console just for one game let alone 2 consoles for 2 games. hoping sega moving in on PC and switch ports this year will filter down to atlus eventually

those atlus writers are really queer-phobic. look up the scenes they added in catherine full body if you want to be disgusted.

Finally finished P3:FES (The Journey) after 4 months and 100 hours of gameplay. Man, what an absolutely incredible — and just downright heartbreaking — ending. I know 4 and 5 get more acclaim (probably because 3 does have some gameplay flaws), but I’ll be amazed if either of them can pull off a better finale than that.

3 is the best ending

it's out

this went well pic.twitter.com/nbIwkih86B

— ella (@Ninto55) November 20, 2021

yep it's been kicking my ass too haha

Soul Hackers 2 for every platform except Switch, Aug 25th 2022

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emsm8wfo_MQ

rip all my jokes about how atlus's ps4 game will come out in 2025

if they are willing to make a Soul Hackers 2 this means that Digital Devil Saga 3 can't be far off ... right?

define "far"

anyway finally something i might want to buy for PS5

So I've beaten Persona 4 Golden now... the (true) ending was kinda underwhelming? Like most stories have a trajectory where they build up to a thrilling climax and then there's a denouement and conclusion.. but in P4G it hits a massive climax in december, then there's a period where not much happens, then suddenly there's another big confrontation at the end that happens so suddenly the payoff doesn't feel too large?

Of course it's still an incredible near-perfect game with characters i love to death, but P3 had such a more satisfying ending! and (slight spoiler!) i may have shed a tear when all your maxed-out social links visit you during the last battle

over time i've come to appreciate the relatively downbeat P4G - there's a lot going on with rurality and mythology and connection to place. 3, 4 and 5 all have very distinct moods

xp isnt that because the stuff after december is all after-the-fact additions in Golden?

P3 has always been considered the one with the good story. 4 was a hit due to the cast and setting, 5 due to style

Finally time to play the other ones?

https://www.polygon.com/23165846/persona-5-royal-4-golden-3-portable-ps5-steam-nintendo-xbox-release-date

Just noticed that the URL is misleading:

There’s no mention of the Persona games coming to Nintendo Switch

oh good i can buy Golden again, probably Portable too but i hope they buff the mechanics

v disappointed that P3 is a port of the PSP game and not a remaster of FES
learnt the other day that there's a fan hack of FES that lets you control all the characters, but it's very unstable

And 3-5 are coming to Switch now: https://kotaku.com/persona-5-royal-4-golden-3-portable-switch-release-jrpg-1849118719

aaaaand now i'm making my way through Persona 5 Royal. And it's just as amazing as everyone said it is. the writing, characters, dialogue, combat... it really feels like the peak of entertainment

it's also been super fulfilling playing them in order from 3 to 5 and watching the series grow and get better. 3 blew me away (even without directly controlling party members!), but it feels like an atari game in comparison to 5's maximalism!

5 Royal is the best