Shin Megami Threadsei

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MarsDragon
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Re: Shin Megami Threadsei

Postby MarsDragon » Wed Aug 26, 2015 8:26 pm

You can skip time, but it's an easy way to get locked into Yuzu's ending unless you're very very careful and at that point you might as well just play through normally. Plus there's a ton of bullshit conversations you just can't skip at all.

The escort missions are just a Do You Have Wilders? Y/N check.

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Thad
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Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Postby Thad » Fri Sep 04, 2015 1:44 am

Sharkey wrote:It wouldn't be a Japanese RPG if they didn't take form, ritual and tradition to a bloody-minded extreme. The things are like fucking Noh. You're just not having a good time unless the players spend two days shuffling into position. Maybe an old guy hits a drum at 0.01 BPM.


They're plenty happy to shake up tradition when it means adding needless fucking blather. How did I ever manage to tell that my health was low, or that I have a status ailment, or that I had just been ambushed by three enemies, without some squeaky-voiced asshole telling me every single thing that is happening on the goddamn screen? I mean, I am a man who has been known to defend Snarf, but I just want to rip Teddie's head off and poop in him.

(Alternate reference: that bit from Hitchhiker's Guide about humans' need to continually state and restate the very very obvious, such as "It's dark" or "You're very tall" or "So this is it, we're going to die.")

But the most outright sadistic thing Persona 4 does is give you quests where you have to farm drops from dungeons you have already completed, which are only available after you have completed them, and the monsters only drop the drops after you've accepted the quests. It's pretty much the absolute worst way to encourage backtracking. If you have to resort to that kind of fuckery to encourage people to replay your dungeons, it's a pretty good sign that your dungeons are not very good.

(At least the drops themselves aren't random, and if you run into the enemy that drops them and defeat it, you will get the drop. Small mercies.)

Also there's the thing where periodically you'll run into monsters that can just randomly fucking wipe you out. Fortunately I've got the rhythm of using a Goho-M every few floors and saving just in case and I've never lost more than five minutes to that kind of cheap shot, but it's still a cheap shot. I guess if I had selected Easy Mode at the start of the game I would get a Continue option when I died? I've developed a habit of never selecting Easy Mode on anything, but it's about time I learned that in a JRPG "Easy Mode" usually means "Mode with Sane, Twenty-First-Century Design Ideas". (I restarted 45 minutes into Fire Emblem: Awakening after realizing that "Normal Mode" meant permadeath, because I'd never played a Fire Emblem game before. Fortunately it didn't take me 45 minutes to catch back up to where I was, because the first half-hour of the game is skippable cutscenes.)

And of course being able to adjust the difficulty of a game after you've already started is another one of those White Devil things that Japanese people want nothing to do with.

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MarsDragon
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Re: Shin Megami Threadsei

Postby MarsDragon » Fri Sep 04, 2015 1:56 am

The lesson you're supposed to learn from the enemies that wipe you out is to not have light or dark weaknesses.

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Thad
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Re: Shin Megami Threadsei

Postby Thad » Fri Sep 04, 2015 2:03 am

I'm...pretty sure I don't? I could check again. I thought they were physical attacks, but light/dark would be consistent with "usually misses but occasionally kills you instantly".

It's not just the rock guys in the strip club, though. The first time I went into the bathhouse, I ran into a party of Cupids who confused everybody in my party before I could so much as make a move (and it wasn't an ambush, their agility is just that high) and my confused party members killed my main guy. No anti-confusion accessories were available prior to that battle, and while you could buy items to cure confusion, that's not much damn help when you don't have a chance to use it.

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Esperath
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Re: Shin Megami Threadsei

Postby Esperath » Fri Sep 04, 2015 4:57 am

Image
pisa katto

ImageImageImage

pisa katto

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Mothra
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Re: Shin Megami Threadsei

Postby Mothra » Fri Sep 04, 2015 9:47 am

Auughg I'm having flashbacks to how unBEARably awful grinding in P4 was.

NEVER AGAIN

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Re: Shin Megami Threadsei

Postby Joxam » Fri Sep 04, 2015 10:56 am

eh I've been thinking the entire time that you guys are overstating the grindiness of the Persona games, but then I play WoW so grinding is basically my only skill.
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Re: Shin Megami Threadsei

Postby Thad » Fri Sep 04, 2015 11:36 am

On the one hand, it's not Dragon Quest levels of grindy. On the other, Dragon Quest fights are a lot quicker than SMT ones, so minute-for-minute it may come out about the same.

While the combat's a bit more complex than DQ, it does pretty much boil down to "Hit everything's elemental weakness and then rush them; if they don't have an elemental weakness just hit them until they fall down." It's a lot like a slower, harder version of FF10, where you can only swap one guy's abilities out instead of being able to swap out anyone in the party at any time.

As far as grindy...it took me two days each to get through the first two dungeons. By the end of the first one I just didn't have the MP left to take on the boss. By the end of the second I was getting the shit kicked out of me by random encounters, and while I could have paid the fox to restore my MP, it would have completely wiped out my money.

And of course part of the issue is that to get new equipment, you have to go home and sell the drops you've picked up anyway.

When I went back to the Baths to pick up where I left off, the monsters were still kicking my ass so I restarted from the bottom. By the time I got back up to where I was I was in better shape to get through the rest of the dungeon.

I'm not done with the Strip Club yet; I made it to floor 5 and so far haven't had to go home. (I did swap Kanji out for Chie when he ran out of MP. I suspect this will make it prohibitively expensive to refill my MP when hers run down, but maybe not; I've built my link with the Fox up a little bit since dungeon 2 and he's not charging as much as he was before.)

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Lyrai
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Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Postby Lyrai » Sun Sep 06, 2015 6:17 pm

Thad wrote:
Lyrai wrote:Why are you not playing Persona 4 Golden, which is amazing in every way and superior to P4 vanilla.


Because I don't own a Vita.


http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00KVM ... J7D7M2B3GK

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Re: Shin Megami Threadsei

Postby Thad » Sun Sep 06, 2015 8:32 pm

Yeah, the thought's occurred to me, and I've already got a PS4 controller so apparently I can use that with it. But buying one of those damn bullshit memory cards doubles the price of the thing.

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Re: Shin Megami Threadsei

Postby pacobird » Wed Oct 14, 2015 10:55 am

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Re: Shin Megami Threadsei

Postby Thad » Wed Oct 14, 2015 1:19 pm

...for the same price as Undertale?

...huh. Guess I've got a decision to make.

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Re: Shin Megami Threadsei

Postby pacobird » Wed Oct 14, 2015 3:12 pm

Undertale for $10 isn't going anywhere, though, and will be even cheaper in Steam sales.
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Re: Shin Megami Threadsei

Postby Thad » Fri Oct 16, 2015 2:08 am

One: Why does every single TRPG seem to be allergic to using the touchscreen?

Two: Is this one of those games where Easy is for pussies, or one of those games where Normal is for masochists? Like, I was 45 minutes into Fire Emblem: Awakening before I figured out that "Traditional" meant "permadeath".

Three: Just what the fuck IS it with Japan not letting you change the fucking difficulty after you start the game, anyway? Fucking Japan.



ETA: Found a GameFAQs thread suggesting that Easy just grants an exp/money bonus, and one guy says it also makes bosses less cheap. Sounds like Normal is probably okay, though I sure do hate boss cheapness in Persona. (I mean, it's like you're SUPPOSED to lose at least once on each boss.)

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Re: Shin Megami Threadsei

Postby Mothra » Fri Oct 16, 2015 9:01 am

SMT's difficulty always seemed on cheap and brutal side to me, though I don't really run into that in Persona games. I'm playing through Persona 3 PSP on Normal right now, and been finding it comfortably challenging.

That said, I did game-over on the second boss, before realizing Charm would work on them, but that's half of fun of JRPGs: Figuring out the trick and exploiting it.

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Re: Shin Megami Threadsei

Postby Smiler » Fri Oct 16, 2015 10:24 am

That's like my least favorite thing in JRPGs. Years of SNES and PS1 games taught me that status effects were a waste of time because in most cases the developers forgot to make them effect enemies. It messes me up a lot because poison and paralysis in Etrian Odyssey is actually REALLY good and I never use it because i forgot that poison does an absurd amount of damage to bosses in that game.

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Re: Shin Megami Threadsei

Postby Mothra » Fri Oct 16, 2015 11:05 am

Yeah, I think everyone our age came to regard status effects as useless.

I think it's a good thing that newer JRPG's like the Persona series are starting to make them useful again.

Then again, the second boss in P3P is one of those three-minibosses deals, so I get the feeling the minute I face off against a real boss, all of my status effects are going to be garbage again.

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Re: Shin Megami Threadsei

Postby Thad » Fri Oct 16, 2015 12:29 pm

(Talking Persona 4 again, not DSO:)

I definitely hit a couple of dungeons where, at any given time, I was one ambush away from being wiped out. Hasn't been as much of a problem on the one I'm on now (Secret Lab), but I'm still only a few floors up.

Can't say as I've found any bosses with weaknesses to status effects (I've tried a couple but I'll grant I could have probably tried more); most of them up to this point have been really boring battles of attrition where I spam attacks and healing magic for half an hour until it's over (and after my first death, rejuggle my party so I don't have anyone with an elemental weakness against whatever attacks it uses).

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Re: Shin Megami Threadsei

Postby beatbandito » Fri Oct 16, 2015 6:47 pm

Megami Tensei difficulty:

Easy - standard RPG combat

Normal - exploit every weakness every round or die. This will often involve some level of grinding to get the spell you need to exploit the weakness. edit: oh and also never have a possible elemental weakness.
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Re: Shin Megami Threadsei

Postby MarsDragon » Sat Oct 17, 2015 12:39 am

If you don't have a decent stable of demons/personas that can hit every elemental weakness at all times, you are probably playing the game wrong.

Not all on the same demon, of course, but you need to have a balanced team. Keep switching your demons out for new ones and patching holes in your offense and defense and you will rarely if ever have to grind.

It's okay to have elemental weaknesses if you're pretty sure enemies won't be using it against you, but never, ever have a weakness to light or dark. Meanwhile, feel free to use light and dark attacks against the enemies. They start off with 30% chance of instant death and go up to 80%, more if the enemy has a weakness.

SMT really isn't that hard, you just have to play by the rules and the rules aren't "mash attack, heal" like in FF.

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