I’ll wait to read your spoiler tagged stuff until later but I have reached the point that usually happens to me in these calendar-based atlus games where fucking up and losing time feels so bad that I knock it down to easy to avoid that feeling, hopefully that mitigates some of the endgame stuff you’re talking about
something about that clock makes it hard to chill out, no matter how generous with time everyone assures me this game is
I spoiled the royal archetype requirements for myself a while ago just to avoid this
Ye I think if I’d have had more experience of Persona I’d have rectified it much earlier. It just all came crashing down two weeks before the end. I’d absolutely have been fine spending the final chunk in easy and I think that would’ve alleviated much of the gripe.
I came up with a name I really like and might use in other games going forward. The protag in my game is named Tumult O’b.
I played a bunch of this over the weekend and cleared a couple dungeons around Martiria and finished the story there. Now I’m off to the third settlement. I really, really like this game. The combat is fun and the world is well rendered, if a bit cloying re: democracy. But I like the relationships between the characters pretty much outright with no qualms. Heismay is one of my favorite dudes I’ve ever met in a JRPG. Love his face.
I am a bit anxious over how long this game could be. Hate to be so backlog beholden, but I wanna play some specific games during the summer, and there are only so many weeks left!!
Oh, didn’t know we had a thread for Metaphor. I beat it a while ago but I still have some thoughts on it.
I think this game would’ve been a thousand times better if there was no Calendar System. The calendar system is the worst feature that modern Persona games have featured IMO, removing pacing and instead filling it with time wasting or stat grinding. At every point in Metaphor when I felt like the plot should be moving forward, instead it suddenly dropped a 2 weeks-to-month long break where nothing happened and I could do whatever, just filler to level up. Even at the end, when it felt like the final confrontation was going to happen, suddenly the game gave me a week to fuck off and I screamed.
The game was also pretty easy (though only if you’re familiar with Atlus RPGs). The Royal stats or whatever were very forgiving, and I was surprised the game just started giving huge amounts of points in any stat if I still didn’t max out by the last month or two of the game. Also letting us redo fights whenever made me reroll RNG to get crits or not get status effected, just to get the max fight reward. It was convenient but maybe too convenient? I played on regular difficulty though - I’m sure on harder difficulty, being able to redo fights is a life saver.
Also annoyed me that the best class, The Merchant, is locked from its final form until the last month and it doesn’t even make sense storywise because the system that’s been oppressing the lady by that point is totally dismantled. Completely feels like a last minute balance change when they realized the Merchant was too powerful so they moved the last form farther back but it was too late to adapt the story. Which sucks, because at that point, you can get the Prince class and everyone else’s final classes which are just completely better in every way. Poor Merchant evolution never gets to shine…
Anyway, makes me laugh that Atlus positions Junah as the main heroine star, when Eupha is better in every way and is way more popular in every popularity poll. You can tell they didn’t expect that because all the merch they planned in advance that are coming out now like figures are still Junah focused.
As a big fan of Etrian, I feel like the peak of the game was Dragongrace Shinjuku. Completely recontextualized the game for me - it didn’t even occur to me until that part that all the generic monsters I was fighting were straight out of Etrian, that the lore was all wrapped up to tie into the beginning of EO1, and it even made sense why the battle system took features from EO like certain moves, classes, and the row system. The lore doesn’t exactly match up 1:1 to Etrian but it blew my mind they’d even try to tie it together. Just makes me wish they’d make a huge budget Etrian sequel with the same level of quality.
Anyway Metaphor is pretty rad. I enjoyed the characters, the battle system, and the plot twists - especially the ones towards the end. I just wish the game was like 40% shorter.
This is my first Persona-like and I am constantly contending with an interesting amount of anxiety over spending time or focusing on this or that archetype at the right time. It sounds like that feeling was overplayed in this one compared to other Atlus goes at its, but I am intrigued. Right now, it’s the archetype stuff which really has me in knots. I am leveling the Faker for fun, and finding this one ability that it has which may or may not grant you dazzling turn icons or even more or less turn icons in tow to be really fun and useful. But is it being wasted on Heismay when Hulkenburg should be using it? Ooooh I cannot say and it’s driving me a little sideways to think about. I guess it works for now.