finally got a fourth party member and I am enjoying this a ton, it really is just only the parts of persona that I like
I feel like I only play RPGs these days – alternating this and rogue trader while watching TV in the evening feels excessive, especially since I’m probably going to play the new dragon age and ff7 rebirth in the next six months too – but I’m having a great time
I just beat the first big story dungeon (the Scottish guy). I really like the way this game handles party composition. It’s in this very satisfying sweet spot. You can find out in advance what you’ll basically need for the next dungeon by buying information from brokers. You can then easily reconfigure your party’s classes without any consequences so you’ll be able to hit all the enemy weaknesses you’ve heard rumors about.
In the first dungeon I was rolling with my main character as a healer blasting all these skeletons with light magic and blunt attacks, alongside a warrior and a brawler. The brawler was awesome because I found and enchanted a weapon for her that did extra damage to undead beings. Great for a necromancy themed dungeon!
The game puts items in your path (or on side paths) that are about to be KILLER for what you’re doing next, but they don’t make it too obvious so it feels slightly clever to wield them.
And then the optional dungeon I’m doing next sounds like it penalizes magic users, so I’ll have to develop a whole other strategy. It’s fun!
I like how the sandworm dungeon never gives you an opportunity to purchase information about it in advance, so you go in totally blind for once. As the characters were caught off guard by the plot in that area, I was staggering through this worm’s belly with a completely inappropriate build, struggling harder than I had been to this point. Could it be… the dreaded… ludonarrative consonance!?
Ooh, has enough time passed since the late oughts that I can say “ludonarrative consonance” without reflexively making the sign of the cross?
I’m about 45 hours in. Got (party member spoilers) Junah and Eupha and am finding the first bumpiness in the difficulty as you struggle to keep so many specialisations and people progressing, real plate-spinning stuff. Not sure how much of a sneak peek is too much. With bonds and archetypes, you can eventually look ahead to the next ranks to see what you get and I think it ends up being too much planning anxiety. It also lightly spoils certain plot stuff. But then it’s also useful to know given the game requires so much forward planning. I am torn.
I think the day structure is also weird for me to parse fictionally even if I enjoy the planning. At a certain point after a main dungeon and quests you just abandon a week to maximising bonds and actions that do not proceed time forward. There could be more real tension here that would make the days feel like actual consecutive days and I think this is most prominent when having to make travel plans with the runner. Being able to fast travel so early means that backtracking isn’t insanely punishing but it also means that you can do tons of stuff ‘for free’ on a given day. Like I can just teleport to shop in 3 major settlements and tune up my prep without spending a single minute in-world but as soon as I visit a village in a runner, I have spent the better half of a day talking to someone about courage or something. On the flipside, the longer the game goes in the more aspects of the prep phase you forget to do so you end up embarking on the runner and forgetting to do that one thing in town. I’m pretty sure I know who is the final party member. As such I’ve been planning out the 3-4 archetype routes per party member to ensure I can access them all. I enjoy it but the time remaining in the calendar also gives me a lot of anxiety. Like does the game just end after a certain date or can you keep going, what does Persona do?
I think they manage to capture the pragmatic psychopath CEO energy of Louis very well. Strohl asks him why he made the decision that destroyed his village and he just explains why. I am worried they’re gonna do a silly bait and switch with elder gods or something but for now I like that Louis is a more regular bad person with ambition and intelligence. Junah’s visual design is a bit too modern for me. Like it’s fine to draw inspiration and blend influences but she is just a straight gogo dancer modgirl and doesn’t really have as many fantasy elements. I think they do a pretty decent job with the cast so far though. No ally is annoying or a pain to talk to.
Ocean dungeon spoilers
Drakongrace Shinjuku is a bit on the nose for me. Reminiscent of Nier but in a way that sort of doesn’t treat it as a big reveal, as if the player has already guessed the twist and we’re just going through the motions. It only really has significance for the audience and presumably ties into the King’s plan and More etc. but no fictional character has much reason to care about such a crazy reveal at this point. We just have to sit there hoping the eventual payoff isn’t really dumb.
I’m still compelled this far in which feels like a triumph of pacing despite how similar all the side dungeons look.
What did you all name your protagonist? I looked up popular pet fish names and went with Swimster.
Xhorkse
the game ends! New Game+, start!
or in the re-releases of their games (like P5 Royal), doing certain things in the main story will enable you to access post-game content. i sort of doubt this will have that, though, but i know it has multiple endings. presumable, when Simile: ReReFantazio - The Extra comes out, they’ll have a true-last boss addition.
i am about 40-ish hours into this and just got my 5th party member. we are on the island (i won’t elaborate more) and i find myself wanting to play this game whenver i’m not playing it. it has an addictive game loop, at least.
that said, i dunno! i think this game is sort of flat - i assume there will be some meaningful twists at some point and maybe that will push it over the edge, but mostly i never feel much tension in this game (aside from the constructed tension via the gameloop). i guess one could say it’s a chill game, for people who just wanna hang.
a few hours into this now and i like it. kinda surprised at how personalike it actually is, right down to the voice announcing new bonds, the velvet room equivalent, and so on. i’m really enjoying it so far, and it feels like the team really had fun taking ideas they’d honed in persona and finding new ways to apply them, and i think that’s neat.
the persona-style ultraslick ui effects/design are mostly good but the effect for switching between player and enemy turns is perhaps a little too flashy
so far definitely not my favorite meguro score. not bad, just nothing really grabbing me yet
the ‘fantasy novel’ and ‘humans’ of it all risk being dumb, but right now i actually think they’re pretty clever and thoughtful. we’ll see how that holds.
i’m really hoping the game ultimately feels cohesive. so many long sprawling rpgs end up feeling muddy with a final act or two that feels disconnected from where the game started.
I’m at the third town now. I really enjoy Louise’s two dogsbodies. The smaller one is so quietly threatening!
i reached a part that is very uh…MegaTen, for lack of a better word. idk - i need to see where this is going. i’ll reiterate that i’m enjoying this game, but i think i’m going to have a lot to say about the recycled concepts i keep encountering when i finish
I am treading so carefully in the final stretch. They really push things and no matter how much I work things out on the calendar I worry I’m gonna miss some shit.
I am nearing the end but it’s a lot longer than I thought it’d be.
Spoilers and random thoughts from Montario onwards into the endgame.
Louis’ assassination attempt all happens quite quick and the plot really goes into overdrive after this.
They don’t really discuss the possibility that Louis might get someone else to perform the curse given he gets people (including you the player) to do his dirty work for him, or that any number of anti-royal parties might also want the prince dead. Poor Eupha loses her religious relic and is complicit in assassinating an ‘innocent’ guy.
Strohl might as well be the protagonist, in almost every scene where the party are talking to other major players he basically talks for everyone. He also has the most direct connection to Louis in terms of revenge.
Rella’s whole arc is kinda rushed through as well. She does a heelturn, admits culpability, forces the party into a bossfight, and then helps them once they win, and goes on to die in the span of like 2 hours. This bossfight is also another bizarre pacing decision. A dragon boss with no way to grind (unless you go back to a much earlier save). Yes, fictionally I can’t grind on the ride over but goddamn the last opportunity was like 2 hours ago. They also give you the berserker right before a boss that has a major nuke spell it is weak to. Why? Anyway, Louis ain’t dead so you gotta go fight him even though it’s clearly a trap. He’s just clowning on people with trick cards the entire game but I kinda like it. Competent villain is best.
A neat thing that happens in Louis’ fights is: Louis is not fully honest in his first fight, when attacking he says ‘I strike…’ But then in his challenge he says the full deal ‘I strike, to kill!’. Unnecessary detail that makes the earlier fight seem even more sinister in retrospect.
If I had to criticise one aspect of Louis as a villain it’s that we don’t really see a lot of what he’s done that is so much worse than any other high-ranking elite. Most of the time he just says he’d be willing to do some terrible thing but no-one has actually provided much specific evidence of his crimes. Yet the party is committed to his murder. They kinda deal with this by the endgame but early on it seems odd this isn’t more clearly shown to the player.
The whole reveal of the world you’ve mostly guessed by this point but it was nice to have it explained at the Elda village. They do some Cloud/Tidus stuff with the protagonist which was neat but didn’t really hit very hard for me. I’m glad for the restraint in showing the backstory of humanity. Was expecting some overwrought flashbacks to a science lab or something but it gets told in the same way any ancient legend would. Just fragments and murals. It does seem somewhat improbable that the church could cover up the past to the extent that they do but w/e.
The final stretch of the game invokes bloodmoon red sky making the game’s environments even muddier to look at. It’s a trope I really hate in games since it kinda ruins a lot of places which are otherwise nice to hang out in and then you are irreversibly stuck with dark skies for like 15-20 hours. Alan Wake 2 is another recent offender.
This endgame is one of the more unusually paced parts of the whole thing. Because the amount of things you can do at each story section can’t really drastically vary, especially since the game gives you ample time to do all sidestuff prior to this final month, you are coming in somewhat underpowered no matter what. In the final month the game effectively says ‘OK you gotta grind a lot now, here’s dozens of sidequests and enemy gauntlets go nuts’. I kinda appreciated it at first having felt like there weren’t enough optional dungeons to just while away the time in but now it’s too much.
The pace of story/journey/combat was more balanced in the mid-section and now it’s just pure combat/social link mop-up. I’m sick of doing the coliseum. Yet, when I go into the endgame dungeons, I am still getting rocked despite having mastered a whole bunch of archetypes and gotten seemingly super-powerful gear. You do so much fiddling sometimes to find the one ability that hard counters an enemy/boss. It quickly reveals how poor your earlier choices were if you cluster a party member’s archetypes in very specific ways, say like having someone take on too many damage-dealing classes or support classes. It also gets stingy and unpredictable with the bonds.
You have increasingly less opportunities to get royal virtues levelled up given how valuable time gets at this stage and some characters suddenly require you have 5 in a virtue to progress their link without any foreshadowing who requires what virtue. Eupha is my favourite character/party member and her bond progress requires 5 wisdom, something you can only get repeatedly in the endgame from sitting in the bench in Grand Trad. That’s 4 half days (or 2 dungeons/4 bonds) wasted to getting past that one hurdle.
All of this together has contributed to the final stretch feeling like the biggest chore in the game and you have no idea if the time you’ve spent is really optimal until you get destroyed at the end of a lengthy dungeon against a boss than can summon 6 turn icons. I could redo the entire month with an earlier save and a more optimal plan but fuck… Man can only hit the skip button so much.
I feel like I’ve had a big argument with the game. It’s not enough to end the relationship but I think we need to have a break from each other for a little while.
Finally looked up some guide stuff after feeling like I was going mad on the home stretch. I was level 59 with 15 days to go and the guides were recommending I be at 65 for this part, and at least 71 for the final boss. I feel like my grind game has slackened.
Have at least started making some progress in the hardest dungeons and there are some exploits I can abuse if I really run out of time but I’m hoping it won’t come to that.
The island dungeon’s extremely in-depth homage to Etrian Odyssey’s final dungeon is such a weird choice. Exact same plot twist, same look and feel, similar layout, similar elevator puzzles, same music, and it even brings in a simpler version of that game’s FOE mechanic. That dungeon was the best part of EO, but this feels a little too much like a rehash, to the point that it’s kind of taking me out of the game. Plus the version of this dungeon in the EO remake on Switch just plain looks better than this one! The colors here are so muted in comparison.
Otherwise, I’m still having a great time with this, though. I’m enjoying it more than any other Atlus RPG I’ve played.
This final stretch is really flabby. Are all Persona games like this? Metaphor presents this inherent tension of using your time wisely but they basically shepherd you into a marathon grind to gently steer you towards the correct level no matter what. However, it feels overbearing because you feel like you’ve been carefully planning as much as possible but still have to deal with the extended encore of what is now at least a 90 hour RPG. My next session I will beat this and have the biggest break from long games.
Yes. Except P1 I guess
Persona 1’s a bit different in that it has two flabby stretches at the 2/3rds point depending which route you take.
the 4th dungeon in this game is dogshit
It’s been a while since I got this close to beating a final boss and got stuck in an inevitable loss. Very demotivating after doing very similar things on my turn for the last hour or so.
Just some final thoughts since I beat it. I think the end of Metaphor takes a nosedive due to how much it basically requires you to optimise about 25 hours worth of endgame grind. Having a hard timer on all this makes it kinda hard to know what to plan for. The reveal of
the Royal archetype requirements also caught me from out of nowhere since I didn’t realise you had to make sure they had to level up with certain archetypes to get their best moves. If you didn’t do those archetypes well, better make a hard pivot if you want a powerful team.
The final dungeon (a boss rush) has so many reused enemies that I don’t think the game is short enough for it. The expectation seems to be that you use this space for the final grind but I have no idea what I need until I get to the final boss. Turns out the final boss has some bullshit but the number of abilities and specific strategies required in each of its phases means you have to see them to best prepare. The final boss enters a tantrum phase in the last hour of the fight where it casts Soul Scream despite it already having 5 turn icons to start. Unless you have a very specific combination of one-turn megabuffs and debuffing offensive spells you can’t win. I found I simply hadn’t optimised for this fight and there was no way I was going back to grind so I cast easy difficulty on em.
Looking online it looks like most Atlus fans seem to have a sense for grind exploit spots (and their necessity) despite the game giving you an entire month to improve. I think the way time can be spent has a fundamental flaw and the game doesn’t really hint at what is most useful to do. It recommends the colosseum but there’s two problems with this:
Yes, I could find the one spot in the dungeon and grind the specific enemies that give me the most MAG but then why isn’t the endgame balanced towards giving me that through natural play? Why must I be a sicko to see the credits? I ended the final fight with a very bitter taste, made worse by the very indulgent epilogue.
Plotwise the game does some silly stuff with the fantasy angle at the eleventh hour (the whole adventure was just fictional) before deciding it’s not doing that and just returns to the regular RPG ending where you fight an evil angel man. Though I will say I do like Louis’ suggestion that he is using archetype magic is almost a joke about final boss tropes since it turns him into a Kefka/Sephiroth angel. Ultimately it drags out the final confrontation and the final reveals about magla being powered by emotion and anxiety unsatisfying. Like if you’re making a game about the idea that utopia might just be a fantasy people hope for but isn’t really realisable, you need better writing than everyone just kinda shrugging and saying ‘we might not know how to rule the world but we just gotta figure it out’.
Your goal initially is to assassinate someone who shouldn’t have power but is extremely adept at acquiring it which is interesting, and it also acknowledges that the status quo government isn’t good enough but then can’t follow it up with an answer to what should replace them, ironically because this would probably be too radical. One of the candidates has a platform of redistributing wealth which seems reasonable (though the game takes great pains to paint it as an extremist position with no middle ground). Your party just ends up becoming the government even to the point of complaining about how much paperwork it involves. Becoming the government isn’t a fun ending to me, and it feels like the party could take a number of more interesting directions like dissolving the constitutional monarchy they otherwise perpetuate or using the immensely powerful magic the king is granted to actually change societal norms. Instead you spend 2 hours while all the characters confirm how happy they are with the new setup and just become bureaucrats. Boring.
Overall, I enjoyed a lot of the game but it really falls off a cliff once the final stretch starts. The midsection is great and I like the roadtrip aspect of it but the pacing and direction just flounders toward the end, especially for the length (90 hours).