Shin Megami Threadsei

Niku
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Re: Shin Megami Threadsei

Postby Niku » Wed Jan 31, 2018 12:18 pm

i'm just sayin' that you're not all wrong about what's coming up next
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Re: Shin Megami Threadsei

Postby Spram » Thu Feb 01, 2018 12:41 am

Niku wrote:i'm just sayin' that you're not all wrong about what's coming up next


Lol. I was joking about that but it did happen. I liked the game a lot better before it turned into a cliche jrpg "fight a god" plot.

Anyway, this is like the 100th Japanese game that has me fighting Judeo-Christian themed enemies. It just feels weird that a country that is only %1 Christian would be so obsessed with fighting God.

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Thad
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Re: Shin Megami Threadsei

Postby Thad » Thu Dec 03, 2020 11:15 am

I picked up Persona 5 Royal (it was $20 at Best Buy for awhile; now it's up to $30) and I'm enjoying the hell out of it but I don't feel like I've actually experienced any gameplay in any meaningful sense yet. Mostly so far it feels like it's just an hours-long cutscene.

Sure, I've been to a tutorial dungeon (three times), and there's been tutorial combat, but the tutorial parts haven't really been enough to give me an impression beyond "seems a lot like Persona 4", which, y'know, I kinda already knew from the title.

Haven't settled into a real daily gameplay loop yet, either; days pass, but so far all my activities are predetermined and play out on rails. The VN stuff hasn't really started yet; I think I've had exactly one meaningful dialogue choice up to this point (a teacher asked me a trivia question about Ambrose Bierce; I know The Devil's Dictionary well enough to know that if somebody asks you a question about it, the answer is probably "blackguards"). The rest are usual JRPG bullshit "choices" that don't actually make any difference, and about 75% of them seem to be just repeating back the last couple of words the other person just said with a question mark at the end, like you're talking to a Wookiee or something.

Actually, come to think of it, everybody I speak to is speaking a foreign language, because after the opening scene I switched to the Japanese voices. Normally I don't mind English dubs in games or animation (though I prefer subtitles in live-action stuff), but the voices in this one...well, I mean, it's not like it's the PS1 era or anything, they're competent, but they feel pretty amateurish. Reminded me a lot of the new Transformers on Netflix with the non-union VAs; frequent emphasis on the wrong word in a sentence, which usually seems like a combination of inexperience, poor direction, and recording in isolation. So I switched to Japanese.

The game's stylish as hell, so far the story's well-told, and the themes are, unfortunately, always timely (so far it's largely centered around powerful people being able to get away with doing horrible things).

Guess we'll see if I still like it once I actually start, y'know, playing the game part.

I never did finish Persona 4. My PS2 died with the disc in it, then I got a PSTV and started Golden from the beginning but I never did catch up to how far I'd gotten that first time. As I mentioned over in the Lefthanded Games thread, I've still got pain in my right thumb and I've been playing Persona 5 using a dongle that lets me use Switch joy-cons on PS4 and a 3D-printed piece that lets me use hold of them in one hand. I'm not sure if I can get the dongle to work on the PSTV (I've tried and haven't been able to, but I also had quite a bit of trouble getting it to work on the PS4, so I'm not sure if it's a compatibility issue or just the usual "Bluetooth sucks" problems; I'll probably try again at some point).

I will say that so far, 5's music isn't as good as 4's.

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Re: Shin Megami Threadsei

Postby pacobird » Thu Dec 03, 2020 5:24 pm

5 is straight-up worse than 4 Golden in every way and anyone who says otherwise is a cop
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Re: Shin Megami Threadsei

Postby Thad » Thu Dec 03, 2020 5:39 pm

What's the state of Vita emulation? I don't know if I can get that Mayflash dongle to work with my PSTV, but it should work on my PC, and I think the Vita's been cracked thoroughly enough at this point that I could copy my save over.

(I know there's a PC version but I'm not going to switch to that because (1) Denuvo and (2) there's no goddamn way I'm starting over from the beginning again.)

Or is there, like, a way to stream a Vita game to another device, like my PS4 or my computer?

(ETA I found a video that shows a Joy-Con pairing with a Vita, apparently with plain old Bluetooth and no dongle necessary. It's in Moonspeak but it's clear enough. But it's unclear if I'd be able to pair both joy-cons as a single controller.)

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Re: Shin Megami Threadsei

Postby Blossom » Thu Dec 03, 2020 8:18 pm

pacobird wrote:5 is straight-up worse than 4 Golden in every way and anyone who says otherwise is a cop


the transphobia in 5 is more subtle and less front and center than 4

there are game mechanic improvements
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Re: Shin Megami Threadsei

Postby Destynova » Thu Dec 03, 2020 11:09 pm

pacobird wrote:5 is straight-up worse than 4 Golden in every way and anyone who says otherwise is a cop


GO TO SLEEP! ARN'T YOU TIRED? TIME TO SLEEP!

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Re: Shin Megami Threadsei

Postby Esperath » Fri Dec 04, 2020 6:27 pm

Fursona Warriors 5 on Steam in February (video starts at 0:36, ends at 0:37)





PS: 5 is strictly inferior to 4 because it lacks a hiimdaisy comic

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pisa katto

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pisa katto

Niku
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Re: Shin Megami Threadsei

Postby Niku » Fri Dec 04, 2020 9:48 pm

the only good persona game is 1
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Re: Shin Megami Threadsei

Postby beatbandito » Fri Dec 04, 2020 11:54 pm

Persona 2 and 2.56 Rebirth by Dropped Sleep Data were arguably better, but certainly the start of a slide further away from the weird creepiness of 1 into the sexy weirdness of 3+.
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Re: Shin Megami Threadsei

Postby Friday » Sun Dec 06, 2020 2:23 am

PS: 5 is strictly inferior to 4 because it lacks a hiimdaisy comic


also no chie
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Thad
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Re: Shin Megami Threadsei

Postby Thad » Mon Dec 07, 2020 12:31 pm

Chie's new voice in Golden is awful, though.

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Re: Shin Megami Threadsei

Postby Thad » Fri Jan 22, 2021 7:07 pm

Some various thoughts some 50 hours in:

pacobird wrote:5 is straight-up worse than 4 Golden in every way and anyone who says otherwise is a cop


I can't speak to 5 Vanilla because I've only played Royal. But based on that, I'd say I like 4's setting and (for the most part) characters better. 5 has some quality-of-life improvements that make it a lot less frustrating to actually play.

To wit, I'll go through a few 2017-vintage posts nobody even remembers anymore and compare and contrast:

Niku wrote:I am TOLD that (no names given to tie them to their Arcana, and I don't even know who they are yet) that mechanically speaking, you want to max Temperance ASAP and get Fortune to level 7 ASAP if you're going for a 100% playthrough. Not sure why or what those things actually get you, just that it's apparently Good for confidanting it up. The recommendation goes something like Temperance -> 5, Fortune -> 7, Temperance -> Max when you can after that.


This is still solid advice, but the numbers are different in Royal; Fortune's level 7 ability is a level 5 ability now.

I'm not that committed to a 100% run (I can only sustain so much enthusiasm for finding Mementos quests), but I would like to see as much of the various confidants' progressions as possible.

Also, Death for SP-recovery items, but supposedly they're expensive in the early going.

Niku wrote:One brief warning about that suggestion is that it requires spending a hefty chunk of money in game to really utilize, so you won't have much left over for items and equipment at first. After a while it smooths out substantially.


Royal adds a couple of new kinds of currency in Mementos and a shop where you can spend one of them on SP-restoring items and the other on increasing the amount of money you get from battles in Mementos. (Or experience or item drops, if you'd prefer, but opting for the money route largely alleviates the problem you mentioned that Temperance and Fortune are expensive.)

The main downside is that the shop shows up randomly. So while it decreases the amount of time you need to spend grinding in Mementos by fighting monsters, it substantially increases the amount of time you'll spend running up and down the same fucking flight of stairs over and over again right before you leave, because putting him at the entrance or at save points or whatever would have just been too convenient.

Friday wrote:It's really a Japanese thing more than it is a Persona thing. (Though it is also a Persona thing.)

It's part of why Japanese games are terrible at foreshadowing: they can't not explain literally every fucking thing to death, even stuff that's supposed to be subtle.

You even see it in anime with the protagonist endlessly repeating what the other characters just said so that they'll explain to him how a gun works or whatever.

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Niku wrote:The dungeon design is both leagues above the prior games and also still as tedious as those games could be at different parts of the game.


Yeah, Mementos does the same boring procedural generation thing that the Persona 4 dungeons did, but the Palaces have actual level design and I really like some of their gimmicks (the inside-the-painting thing on level 2 is pretty cool until the puzzles start getting tedious, and I loved the tumblers-in-a-lock imagery on level 3 even though really it's just a stylish skin on bog-standard "flip the switch to open the next locked door" gating). OTOH, they're still designed to be a real slog if you try to do them all in one day (I have mixed feelings about the first two palaces forcing you to break them up across multiple visits).

Niku wrote:That being said, on Normal difficulty after about .. 1/3rd of the way through the game the threat of bullshit RNG instant death stopped looming over every new set of random battles, so the frustration factor of luck wiping out twenty minutes of progress seemed a lot lower to me this time around. On the other hand, I might've just gotten lucky.


I haven't really dealt with any of that on Normal in Royal. I think the only time I've hit a "Whoops, you had the wrong elemental vulnerability equipped and now you're dead" party wipe was on a miniboss right after a save room.

I wonder if there was any rebalancing work done to correct those deaths in Royal. I know I had some pretty frequent problems in Persona 4 vanilla where I'd get killed before I could move but that never happened to me in Golden, so I suspect that may be part of the list of tweaks in the updated versions of the games.

pacobird wrote:I would say the really important links beyond the ones mentioned (and party members, obviously) are Sun (for lots of money and otherwise easier negotiations), Star (for party-swapping and easy escapes when ambushed), Moon (for keeping all party members leveled), and Strength (to break the fusion level cap).


Just got Star and man, being able to swap party members is a game-changer.

Lyrai wrote:Priestess is good if only because I imagine it makes the interrogation worlds more awkward.

"I wanted her code name to be Rider."


Haven't decided who to romance yet but she's where I'm leaning (partly for that reason and also I guess I've got a type). Lovers is the only one I'm actually far enough along with to romance at this point, but nah, I don't think it'll be her.

Thad wrote:I never did finish Persona 4. My PS2 died with the disc in it, then I got a PSTV and started Golden from the beginning but I never did catch up to how far I'd gotten that first time. As I mentioned over in the Lefthanded Games thread, I've still got pain in my right thumb and I've been playing Persona 5 using a dongle that lets me use Switch joy-cons on PS4 and a 3D-printed piece that lets me use hold of them in one hand. I'm not sure if I can get the dongle to work on the PSTV (I've tried and haven't been able to, but I also had quite a bit of trouble getting it to work on the PS4, so I'm not sure if it's a compatibility issue or just the usual "Bluetooth sucks" problems; I'll probably try again at some point).

Left thumb started bothering me the other day, I think from the weird angle of working the left stick while holding both joy-cons in the same hand. (So, for those keeping score: hurt my left thumb using the workaround I was using to prevent pain in my right thumb, which I got from the workaround I was using to prevent pain in my wrist.) Tentatively trying a standard PS4 controller again this past week or two, and...yeah, still hurts my right thumb, so I guess main thing is just limiting my sessions for now. I'm going to have to see a doctor about this once the zombie apocalypse is finally over.

I will say that so far, 5's music isn't as good as 4's.

My opinion is unchanged.

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Re: Shin Megami Threadsei

Postby Niku » Fri Jan 22, 2021 8:44 pm

I'm pretty mad honestly that the extra story in Royal sounded kinda dope but I wasn't gonna play the whole damn game again, so it brings me petty glee that apparently Strikers is just a straight up musou sequel to 5 with zero Royal content.

at least until strikers royal i guess
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Re: Shin Megami Threadsei

Postby Destynova » Sun Jan 24, 2021 1:09 pm

Hifumi/Star is actually one of the better pairings due to a few things..

Same age as MC
Not a team member so there isn't any Commander Shepard 'Go harass your team' scenes

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Re: Shin Megami Threadsei

Postby Thad » Mon Jan 25, 2021 1:41 am

Man, remember games where you could just walk up to a switch and press the A button and it would open a door and there wouldn't be a conversation with your entire party repeatedly explaining and re-explaining how doors work?

Mona: A switch! Do you want to press it?
Panther: A door opened!
Fox: That door opened when you threw the switch. Throwing the switch must have caused it to open!
Queen: If we find any more locked doors, we should look for switches that might open them.

Making games bigger than 40 megabits was a mistake.

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Re: Shin Megami Threadsei

Postby Thad » Fri Jan 29, 2021 12:34 pm

Destynova wrote:Hifumi/Star is actually one of the better pairings due to a few things..

Same age as MC
Not a team member so there isn't any Commander Shepard 'Go harass your team' scenes

Yeah, she seems cool.

Tempted to go with the doctor just for the weirdness factor.

I ended up really liking the pyramid level. Not the beginning where you have to climb up through the crypt (and going into town is a cool idea that's way underutilized), but everything after that. I liked the layout and the puzzle focus, and in this instance the sense of repetition worked for me. The puzzles weren't complicated, but they were more satisfying than that codebreaking stuff in the previous level. (Aside from the aforementioned annoyance factor of your entire party needing to chime in every fucking time you interact with the environment in any way.) There's a real sense that this level is a departure from the earlier ones; I wonder if there was ever any serious consideration to follow through with the introduction and not have any monsters in it at all, just make it a pure puzzle dungeon.

Even though they didn't do that, the monsters feel less like a constant interruption on this level than the previous ones. The difficulty feels less brutal; I almost made it out without using any SP restoratives. (I wound up using one, for the miniboss guarding the last Will Seed. So I guess I wouldn't have used any on vanilla, since the Will Seeds are a Royal thing.) It fits the narrative twist that this time you're not invading the mind of an unwilling target, you've been invited for a change.

And I liked the music. Even if the Santana pastiche would have made a lot more sense for, like, an Aztec or Inca pyramid than an Egyptian one.

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Re: Shin Megami Threadsei

Postby Thad » Sun Feb 14, 2021 12:59 pm

Thad wrote:
Niku wrote:That being said, on Normal difficulty after about .. 1/3rd of the way through the game the threat of bullshit RNG instant death stopped looming over every new set of random battles, so the frustration factor of luck wiping out twenty minutes of progress seemed a lot lower to me this time around. On the other hand, I might've just gotten lucky.


I haven't really dealt with any of that on Normal in Royal. I think the only time I've hit a "Whoops, you had the wrong elemental vulnerability equipped and now you're dead" party wipe was on a miniboss right after a save room.

I wonder if there was any rebalancing work done to correct those deaths in Royal. I know I had some pretty frequent problems in Persona 4 vanilla where I'd get killed before I could move but that never happened to me in Golden, so I suspect that may be part of the list of tweaks in the updated versions of the games.


Okay so while on the whole I think Royal's rebalancing is good, the Okumura fight has been modified into one of those SMT fights where you pretty much have to know what's coming and have the right buildout going in.

I see that in vanilla, the later waves of robots he sends out are mixed groups -- different robots with different vulnerabilities.

Having a mixed group you have to kill in a short timeframe is a compelling design choice; it takes what you've learned about elemental weaknesses and chaining and forces you to use it. I suspect there's still some RNG fuckery involved (I don't know about vanilla, but in Royal if they target Joker your best bet is to block and wait for the next wave), but on the whole it's an impressively-constructed fight.

In Royal, the groups aren't mixed; the last group is entirely made up of the green bastards who are weak against Psy. This would be fine if you could take them out with a couple hits of Mapsio, but you can't; you really need to chain single-target Psy skills. Meaning not only do you need to build Joker with at least Psio and probably also Mapsio (for the last hit in the chain, after all four are already down), you also need a supply of Psych Bombs for the two party members who can't cast Psy spells.

(They're also weak against Curse, but that doesn't really change the calculus; Joker's the only character who can cast Curse spells, so it's the same deal as Psy -- you need to build Joker out with the right spells, and carry items for the party members who can't use Curse or Psy to use.)

This wouldn't be so bad, except it means once you figure out what you need to do, you have to go back and do it (possibly loading from an earlier save or using the "go to previous morning" option on the Game Over screen, in case you need to craft items) and then replay the entire section leading up to the boss.

I'm not really a fan of that kind of design, the "impossible, unless you prepare in advance with the right buildout, then it's easy" design. At that point it's not about playing the game so much as playing a metagame. And the metagame involves a bunch of tedious backtracking.

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Re: Shin Megami Threadsei

Postby Friday » Sun Feb 14, 2021 7:44 pm

impossible, unless you prepare in advance with the right buildout, then it's easy


That's funny. I've been playing through megawads in Doom recently and have been thinking about exactly this.

Doom is infamous for it's "monster closets" and traps in general. Most of the time they're fine, but on harder wads they're fucking stupid. A wall suddenly vanishing behind me revealing ten chaingunners who deal 600% damage in 1.5 seconds isn't "fun" in any actual definition of the word.

It just kicks me back to the start of the level, then I make my way back, run of the line def to drop the wall, get to cover immediately, and snipe them one by one.

So the first time it's instant death, and the second time it's a tedious non-fight.

So what was the fucking point?

Either you design your level to be absolutely beatable blind with fair challenges and traps that can actually be reacted to if you don't know about them, or...

Well, or nothing. You don't make traps that cannot be beaten the first time. Unless you're making I Wanna Be The Guy, but that's done for comedy.
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Re: Shin Megami Threadsei

Postby Thad » Sun Feb 14, 2021 8:39 pm

Friday wrote:So the first time it's instant death, and the second time it's a tedious non-fight.

Yes, exactly this. Emerald and Ruby Weapon in FF7 would be my canonical examples, but at least they're optional.

I did go back with the correct buildout and beat him. Still died once; he did his "I'm going to party-wipe you unless you defend" move and either he doesn't telegraph it the second time or I missed it because, y'know, this game's got so fucking much tedious and pointless dialogue that you start tuning it out eventually and maybe occasionally miss something important.

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