Baal Backlog: New Poll

I really like the series, but it requires a pretty huge time investment so it's really bad for backlogs. You have a 3DS so if you did want to get into it you have a pretty good selection of SMT games, it's a good starting point.

Just finished it, the ending's a bit anti-climactic but over all I really enjoyed it. I'll do the DLC and then go ahead and write up my thoughts and start a poll when I finish it.

SMT games which aren't Persona are great and probably worth trying out, they are literally pokemon with demons. You can also fuse demons which is pretty cool to, for getting abilities you want.

Persona 4 is really good and so is Persona 3 Portable. Shame about the rest of the games though.

I never played P3 in any form, but spent hours on vanilla P4, and I'm currently 75ish hours through Vita's P4 Golden, which is just so unbelievably slick, it may well be my favourite handheld game of the last ten years.

I'll try out P4 Golden in that case, but seeing as P3 hated the only character I liked I refuse to play it, even if the portable version fixes a few of the issues I had with the game.

I like half of the characters in P3 and Shinjiro's S. Link in P3P along with the characterization of the new Female Main CHaracter is great, P3P is a solid game. Persona 4 Golden also adds a lot of stuff to the game that makes it a lot more fun including a really good S. Link, unfortunately the new dungeon is ass and so is the other new S. Link.

So, Baal, which is the better game P4G or SMTIV?

Hold I'll answer your month old question in a minute. Sorry for not updating this sooner, but like I said I was sort of planning on playing this to the point where I could do everything, but with all of the new games coming out, I'm just gonna have to write up my feelings on SMTIV based on the 80 hours into it which include beating the Neutral route and two of the three super bosses. My attention span and the time I'm spending on the new games are not going to allow me to do what I want with SMTIV on multiple playthroughs and I will come back to talk about it at another time. This will be up later today and then I will have a new poll up.

New poll is up and so are my short comments on SMTIV, I have a lot to say about the game actually, but was trying to keep it relatively short for the sake of stuff. Since Simian asked me what I think is better, I'll go ahead and give all of my feelings on both games on that if you wish to see more in-depth details.

Poll is going for 2 Days, get to voting.

Mass Effect 1 is fucking great, play that.

I decided to not put GTAV in thinking that would sweep the other games, then I did the thing I was trying to not do by putting in Mass Effect, I am become error.

Alright, so SMTIV and P4G are insanely different games, but at their core they are still worth trying to compare to see which I like more. SMTIV is more of a game where one person influences the world and P4G is a game that's stuck in a sequestered little town where nothing happens and even the murder that does happen is still pretty insular to the area. The gameplay of both is even vastly different despite both of them being turn-based RPGs, SMTIV focused more on preparing and not holding back, while P4G is about preparing only for bosses really and is a lot more lenient in what you can do.

The story of both games is so vastly different. SMTIV's story is about the choices you make and how they effect the world. The game conveys through several different ways, the most obvious one being you will see visions of people in possible futures throughout the game. You get a multitude of choices in not only main story events, but sidequests that will influence your choices and you get to see every option possible before making your decision. Unfortunately, SMTIV is not able to really break the habit of previous SMT games in terms of every choice that is not neutral is a ridiculous extreme. HOWEVER, the game makes choosing neutral very tough and time consuming. If you want to beat the Neutral route you have to do a series of sidequests, manage your choices so you remain within a certain boundary, and finally you have to beat the two final bosses from both chaos and law's sides. That being said, it is very rewarding, Atlus makes it very clear that if they were going to make neutral as obvious as it was, they were going to give you what you wanted in terms of vindication and just shitting on both sides.

Your neutral companions as well, both speak for the main character, but they have really great lines that shows what it means to fight for the side of humanity in a war between heaven and hell. The ending honestly seems a bit anti-climactic, but I loved it just because it was so simple. No more bells and whistles were really needed, it was everything it should've been. I think the biggest problems with SMTIV's story though is that it's really a commitment of your time, it does not get good until you get past the halfway point which is really where all of the philosophy starts becoming more apparent and more of the choices you can make are shown to you in a really awesome way. To be honest, that's sort of SMTIV in general, but it really is worth it to see it through to the end. I doubt the Chaos, Law, and Nihilist choices are as good, but I need to see those for myself.

Persona 4's story by and large is significantly different and doesn't appeal to me as much because of the way the game is structured. Persona 4's story is one that just follows a group of people trying to save their town from a serial killer. SO throughout the story they try to find evidence and investigate who could possibly be the killer, but it's not handled very well. A big problem with the murder mystery is despite it being the focus of the story, its not really important. Like it's more of an excuse to justify going into the TV and going around the town, nothing the story does really ever compels you to care about these murders or why they're happening. Finally, when you learn the truth it's just a dude who killed people because he was bored. Persona 4's story is not very good when you just look at the plot and how things flow together, there are large periods of nothing happening because of the way the calendar system works, the team never actually makes any real headway into the investigation, and finally when they catch the killer it's through rather contrived circumstances that the killer could've deflected and they would've had nothing on him.

This is mostly because Persona 4 is a character driven story, you're not meant to really care about the investigation, you're here for the characters which I will talk about a bit more after this. There is another layer to the story of P4 and it is the mystical crap going on. Gods are behind the Fog and the Midnight Channel, but these gods are very one-note and you barely ever see them. About the only one you have proper build-up for is Izanami and even most people still get surprised by her, because most of her buildup is rather subtle. The gods of the mist, Kunino-Sagiri and Ameno-Sagiri aren't given proper buildup, hell Kunino-Sagiri's just a boss form for Nametame, she's not even considered one of the gods of the Mist in the actual game. Then P4G adds another boss who is an extension of Marie, who is the fucking worst addition to Persona as a whole. Kusumi-No-Okami is just a boss form for Marie too, it's a shitty boss fight with a dumb gimmick and it has no actual bearing on the story either beyond an extra dungeon for P4G and closure for the Marie character, who is also awful. I'll talk about her a bit more when I get on to the characters, but god damn does that addition piss me off. Persona 4's story hardly needed more mystical bullshit, that addition just made Izanami as a character dumber. At the end of the story, it's meant to be portrayed as humanity taking a hold of its own fate, but of course like every God from every Japanese thing ever "So long as evil exists within the hearts of man, I shall return." and all of that. Unfortunately even SMTIV is not immune to the latter thing as Lucifer, Merkabah, and the White say the same damn things.

That's the story for right now, I'll talk about gameplay and characters after a while.

So are they vastly different?

No, they are literally the same game, they even have a 4.

Superbuu3 wrote:

I'll try out P4 Golden in that case, but seeing as P3 hated the only character I liked I refuse to play it, even if the portable version fixes a few of the issues I had with the game.

You refuse to play P3 because of how they treated Shinjiro? I won't admit he was a cool character, but that didn't stop me from playing P3. Though I would have been more happy for that useless little brat to die.

Empirewild wrote:

Superbuu3 wrote:

I'll try out P4 Golden in that case, but seeing as P3 hated the only character I liked I refuse to play it, even if the portable version fixes a few of the issues I had with the game.

You refuse to play P3 because of how they treated Shinjiro? I won't admit he was a cool character, but that didn't stop me from playing P3. Though I would have been more happy for that useless little brat to die.

Typo?

Persona 3 was a dating sim, with some RPG elements. The battle system with awful AI that would in some cases repeatedly heal bosses (on a first playthrough when you don't know whats coming this will happen a lot) was terrible. There was one dungeon. For the record I like other SMT games so i like how the battle system is, it works well with how turns are done.

Its a terrible RPG, its probably a good dating sim, but anyone ignoring that it is a dating sim is lying.

I heard the clunkiness that was in the original with the dumb AI was fixed in the PSP version and in P4 so fair enough, but considering P3 is considered a big deal I assume its people who are desperate to play a dating sim, but were too scared to play one as its deemed sad.

Characterwise Shinjiro was great, Akihiko and Mitsuro were inoffensive. The others were all loli/weirdo/bitch/loser I'd not talk to those kinds of people out of choice ever, so being forced to build social links for powerful stuff was pretty much torture for me. Most RPGs I cn just ignor the annoying characters this one they are in your face the whole time. I can't remember if this had honorifics tagged on to everything or that was just fans, it was just painful on so many levels. Had some great ideas though.

I do agree, when Persona 4 finally gives you control of your partners again, I was like "Thank god!" Persona 3 was largely part dating sim, no one is going to deny that. I still enjoy the games story and characters. I will admit though, 4 fix A lot of P3 problems and the characters felt more fleshed out.

Shinjiro was cool, Akihiko was awesome, Mitsuro is very great. Fuuka is good, but annoying. Yukari is a bitch, Aegis was just ugh, Ken is useless, Koromaru is awesome (as a fighter), and Junpei reminds me a lot of Yosuke (since I played 4 first).

I like half of the P3 cast and of course it's the ones people call bad even though they're great. Junpei, Yukari, Fuuka, and Shinjiro are all great. Unfortunately, Shinjiro didn't get any actual character and depth to him until P3P so he's just a plot device in Vanilla P3. Mitsuru and Akihiko fucking suck, they are about the most bland characters you can name in the game, they both go through very contrived development, all of it happening as a result of characters dying and even after that they still don't do anything interesting. Ken and Aegis are just the worst, Ken for being an obnoxious little shit who gets a guy killed and Aegis for basically being perfect dream robot wife who has a terrible S. Link.

Literally all of P3's good characters are the ones who have actual flaws as people and grow from their flaws. Shinjiro is the only one that doesn't follow and it's because his development is more about getting to know who he is in P3P rather than him evolving as a person. P3 by and large does a bad job at making any part of the team feel meaningful and the story takes fucking forever to get going, this is not helped by half of the cast being complete garbage.

Baal wrote:

I like half of the P3 cast and of course it's the ones people call bad even though they're great. Junpei, Yukari, Fuuka, and Shinjiro are all great. Unfortunately, Shinjiro didn't get any actual character and depth to him until P3P so he's just a plot device in Vanilla P3. Mitsuru and Akihiko fucking suck, they are about the most bland characters you can name in the game, they both go through very contrived development, all of it happening as a result of characters dying and even after that they still don't do anything interesting. Ken and Aegis are just the worst, Ken for being an obnoxious little shit who gets a guy killed and Aegis for basically being perfect dream robot wife who has a terrible S. Link.

Literally all of P3's good characters are the ones who have actual flaws as people and grow from their flaws. Shinjiro is the only one that doesn't follow and it's because his development is more about getting to know who he is in P3P rather than him evolving as a person. P3 by and large does a bad job at making any part of the team feel meaningful and the story takes fucking forever to get going, this is not helped by half of the cast being complete garbage.

That why I described them as being inoffensive. Admittedly Shinjiro didn't get developed in the vanilla game, but lets face it if he did he'd been a regular in your party. The cast as a whole is annoying. You only like Junpei because he was an asshole to start off and was alright in the long run, which sounds exactly like you.

All the girls are jarring. The kid is just a kid, it pretty much went down the way i'd expect it to, I'd rather not have to listen to it though.