zoku88 said:
I always thought Press Turn tipped the battle way too much into the Player's favor. I thought One More slightly helped with that.
I'd argue it's the opposite. One More has no limit on the number of turns you get until you run out of enemies - if you've got a Persona with one skill of each element, it's almost literally just a matter of putting the (fire-element) peg into the (fire-element) hole, and moving on to the next one - then when you run out of enemies, you get a super-attack at absolutely no cost that will instantly obliterate 95% of every enemy in the game.
In the Press Turn games, there's a clear upper bound on the number of turns you can get, you can't let one multi-element character have an uninterrupted run on every enemy they can tag, and if you can't kill everything by the time you run out of turns, the game doesn't just let you decide to kill them all for free.
One More also really half-asses the negative side of Press Turn's double-reinforcement design. You can miss a turn if you actually miss an ordinary physical attack and your character takes a dive, but apart from that, if you miss with a spell, or if your skill gets nulled or reflected, that's as far as it goes - you don't accomplish anything during your turn, but it's not really a big deal, because no matter how bad you whiff, Teddie isn't going to lose his turn too.
But really, it's not a matter of tilting the game's balance toward or away from the player - it's that the Press Turn games allow so many more options and strategies built around the system. Past the first couple months of game-time, almost every single boss in Persona 3/4 lacks a weakness, which generally turns the fights into shallow-ass standard RPG 'hit the bad guy really hard until he dies' slugfests. In the PT games, even if there aren't any elemental weaknesses, you can actively make use of the mechanics offensively by Passing turns to consolidate your actions into whichever characters are more useful for that particular combat round, or defensively by swapping in a demon (or using a Void skill in DDS) with innate immunity to the boss's attacks.
That's not even mentioning how much better the PT games' buff stacking works compared P3/4's single levels of positive or negative status, whether on their own to swing the fight drastically in or out of your favour, or combined with the actual Press Turns to use as chaff for an enemy to waste their turns on Dekunda/kaja or to just sap all their turns away by dodging everything.
I mean, it goes a
little deeper than that, and you can tell that the designers of P3/4 recognized some of the problems and
tried to add elements that added a bit more thought to the process (specifically, The Answer in 3 and the first few months of P4 sort of avoid some of the pitfalls), but in general, One More was a pretty drastic devolution in gameplay mechanics.
Edit:
RevenantKioku said:
Wow, what? Not only is One More much better than Press Turn (simple evolution) the Extra Turn in Devil Survivor was great because it helped you to gain advantage but not dominate.
No, Extra Turn was shit because whether you started with an ET, whether the enemy started with an ET, whether you or the enemy gets an ET for hitting a Critical/Weakness, and whether you or the enemy loses an ET for being hit for Critical/Weakness is random. Standard RPG combat is already
way more than random enough taking into account random AI skill selection, damage ranges, and to-hit chances. Devil Survivor has all of that,
and adds an arbitrary swing in your effectiveness of up to 4x between the worst-case and best-case dice rolls.
