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What's everyone playing this week?
(lemmygrad.ml)
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this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2024
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I've never tried persona. How is it? I'd really like to get into the series, what's a good starting point?
I am playing through P5 Royal right now for the first time and it is awesome, already on my all time list. On top of all the positives you will hear over and over again about this game, it does a good job of introducing all the gameplay elements one-by-one and spaced out enough so that it never feels overwhelming. I am not a JRPG guy so I really appreciated it, and I am glad it didn't turn out to be a game that you have to restart a few times to understand it.
But yeah, just a really good story, characters, super stylish in every aspect of the game, amazing music. The story definitely goes off the rails at times but the way it talks about societal themes are overall pretty good (especially in the beginning IMO) but suffers from liberalism and anime sexualization at times.
I think P5 Royal is the most newbie friendly. P3 and P4 are pretty good, especially Reloaded, but all the dungeons are procedurally generated based on old PS2 tech. It gets grindy repetitive. P5 mostly has hand designed dungeons (there is one procedurally generated dungeon, but it's quasi-optional for most of the game). P5 also has best quality of life, especially Royal.
They're super anime, totally buy into common tropes and lovingly embrace a lot of common character types and story telling, I know that's turned off some folks I know, so just be prepared for that. I also think P5 has the best story, you play as criminals and try to solve societal issues. Obviously, like most stuff targeted at teenagers, it goes off the rails after a while narratively, but it's still fun. I also like the visual novel-like gameplay outside of the dungeons where you only have so much time in the day to do things and learn to min-max during that time.
If you like it, P3: Reloaded should probably be your next stop. P4 has a reputation for a... controversial story. So, I would only play that one if you're really into the series. The first three games (Persona 2 is divided into two games), feel a bit different than the more recent three, they haven't aged as well, in my opinion. Rumor has it with the P3 remake doing well, they may remake them though, which I think would be nice, the stories in them are very good, especially for the time they came out.
I was thinking of playing P4 Golden next but I have no idea what the story is, could you explain how it's controversial without spoiling anything?
Most of the problems with the plot are tangental to true spoilers, so luckily, it's not hard to talk around it. That said, P4 does have a fantastic twist, as it's a murder mystery game for most of it and finding the identity of the killer is a huge part of it. So, if you've avoided spoilers so far, I'd try your best to keep it that way.
All of the Persona games are little poor in the way many Japanese games are with gender, sexuality, et al. But P4 is especially bad about it with one of its main characters very gender bendy and basically their lesson in the game is that, they'll never pass as anything but their birth assigned gender for their character arc. There's a decent amount of fat jokes that are in poor taste. There's homophobic humor wrung out of another main character's non-gender conforming interests and passions. There's another main character that has a non-traditional career, but they are pushed toward something that's more gender appropriate. Because a lot of the game revolves around overcoming your "shadow-self" and pushing out bad thoughts, it gets kind of dicey for character arcs. Basically the message being, there are certain core things about yourself you can never change and you need to accept that; bur rather than liberating, it's stifling.
All that said, if you can get past that stuff, it's still a reasonably good story with what some people consider the best cast of characters in the series. I certainly wouldn't say avoid it, but know you're going into a plot with social ideas that are flat out regressive, especially by today's standards.
spoiler
That's a subject of controversial discussion but can be seen in that way. I personally think the interpretation of "Male(-perceived) people are subject to less discrimination at many things in live, so I'll do the old school trope of the person who acts male to fit in" is more likely what the intended story portrayal was - an old school writing trope.Nevertheless the solution presented by the game is a simple "don't do that.", which is weak even for a lib game. Persona 4 doesn't care what the characters' complaints are, it just wants them to stop complaining. You're gender non-conforming/bothered by sexism? Have you tried not being bothered? You're gay or bisexual? Have you tried not showing attraction to people of your own gender? You don't wanna inherit your parents' inn/be an idol anymore? Have you tried not complaining and doing what you must?
Persona 4 was actually my first megaten game, but it's probably the worst written one, in spite of the actual quality of the plot - the message it tries to convey drags it down in enjoyability a lot.
This really hits it with the over coming the shadow-self thing. There could be a really liberating message there. Like "society has certain expectations of you because of x gender identity or y career path, but that sucks and you should be true to yourself even in the face of that pressure" but instead it's more "society has a certain expectations of you and have you thought maybe you should just suck it up and accept that?"
1 and 2 are old school JRPGs, dungeon crawlers (the first even having a first person perspective) without the social sim perspective. However, they do have very good characters and stories (especially the Persona 2 Duology), excellent music (1's original soundtrack is incredibly atmospheric) and at their core, fun gameplay.
However, they suffer from jank issues and high encounter rates, not unusual for 90s RPGs. Persona 1 had a remake for the PSP that unfortunately changed the soundtrack to one I consider inferior. 2 (Innocent Sin)'s PSP port is bad due to it messing up the difficulty and making the game way too easy. Eternal Punishment's fixes that but has the issue of being a sequel game and not reaching the same heights as its predecessor. Still highly worth playing imo.
Persona 3 has a lot of versions and unfortunately none of them is the ultimate version to play it. The new remake is probably the best one, but Persona 3 Portable (with its half assed PC port) has an entirely new route, that of the female protagonist.
3 introduces the social simulation aspect of the game, and has the unfortunate issue of being very slow in the beginning. Once the story gets going however, it becomes really good and the best written and most mature of the new Persona games.
Persona 4 is known for being far lighter in tone for the most part, having a memorable rural setting and character cast. The villain is really good, but the additions of the "Golden" re-release are kinda bad in quality in my opinion. The game really ups the anime-ness of it all in ways that have not really aged well. The game is also dragged down by its clearly right wing, socially conservative writing that shines through in many aspects unfortunately.
Persona 5 is very stylish. Set in Tokyo, it takes on a revolutionary/rebellious aesthetic and some of the themes it tackles are very interesting and challenging assumptions in society. While ultimately liberal in writing, it fails on a different way - it feels very stitched together at times, only finding sure footing at the final third of the story. The gameplay is very sleek and fun, though some would call it a bit too easy. Definitely not as bad as Persona 2: Innocent Sin however. The one big issue is that the game is LONG. Somewhat bloated, in fact. And weeb-brained, like Persona 4 is.