While some games had better balance, or production values or pacing, no game this year addicted quite as fully as Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4.
Followers of the Electronic Games board probably know of my fondness for the SMT series. In fact the week I got P3 (which is straightforward with its length as progression is done on a month-to-month basis)
I wrote down my first impressions that eventually got expanded into a review.
Though I firmly believe that Nocturne is much better executed than P3 and the party progression is more reliant on the addictive parts of the game, P3's structure was too brilliant to ignore.
Persona games have always concerned high school students. Granted every game in the main series save for SMT2 involved students as well, but they were thrown into a cutthroat, darkly imaginative apocalypse at the earliest convenience which sort of eased most study troubles, P1 followed similarly and both P2 games had characters that ignored schoolwork in favor of gang battles, supernatural rumors and villains taken from Batman comics.
P3 was the first game in the series to actually include class in both the storyline and gameplay. They did this, logically enough, by classifying all the demon busting and endless fusions as an extracirricular activity. No, really.
Most of the game involves grinding your Social Links, your relationships with your friends and your personality traits such as courage and knowledge. By talking to a friend after school or on weekends, you can spend time with them which eventually strengthens your bond with them. The bonds then contribute an experience bonus during Persona creation that, depending on how far along the link is, ranges from negligible to running the risk that your strange personality will be more powerful than you.
Your fights are all delegated to a massive dungeon that is over 200 floors tall, a tower that your school turns into at night. Until the end, this tower was completely seperate from the story with story bosses occuring every 30 days on the full moon.
This was addictive. Very addictive. The rerelease which contained another 50 or so sidequests, brand new cutscenes, new Personas, new fusion techniques and a 40 hour epilogue to go with the 90 hour game didn't help my addiction much. The only problems were spotty pacing, a story that generally stayed away from the gameplay and the lack of direct control of your other party members.
All these have been fixed with P4 and it comes equipped with an equally bizarre plot (a murderer that kills by throwing people into a TV where they then are killed by their supressed emotions manifest in an astoundingly creative boss enemy), more realistic characters, a ton of more quests to do outside of your S.Links, a weather system that dictates item frequency AND keeps the pace brisk and a giant teddie bear that speaks almost exclusively in sexual innuendo and puns on the word "
bear"
.
If you want more info on the battle system, P3's story and P3's pacing, read its review. Both are must plays.
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Director of the Department of Orderly Disruptions
[Last edited by Snacko at 02-23-2009 07:09 PM]
/dy
