So a few months ago I finished Persona 3 FES, and now I'm finally publishing this thread after giving everything some thought.
If the title was any indication, I wasn't all that fond of the game.
Before we do anything, let's get the music out of the way. Most of the soundtrack was meh. I did not like Lotus Juice, and the background music got irritating at times. However, the songs that were good were insanely good. Memories of the City being my favorite of the bunch.
The game has two segments. Dungeon crawling through tartarus, and living your life in the day time.
The battle system itself is actually pretty good, using the one-more turn system. However, the battles in this game suffer from the lack of control over your party. This sucks. Countless times I died because my party members had crappy AI. Dying itself wouldn't be an issue if it was actually my fault that I died. They have small directions you can point them toward, like support, conserve SP and the like, but more often than not this helps nothing.
After every few floors of Tartarus you would bump into a floor guardian. This is where the battle system really screws you over. There were plenty of times when one of my party members would knock an enemy down only to get it right back up by hitting that same enemy. It was frustrating to watch this while being powerless.
Outside of battles, Tartarus is a compilation of randomized floors. There are over 200 of these so it gets a bit repetitive after a while. Though one thing I did like about the dungeon crawling was being able to not worry about running out of SP, because you could heal and save every few floors. This helped take some stress off of the repetitive grinding. And it was actually fun at times. Believe it or not this was my favorite part of the game. Alas, they decided I couldn't have my fun, so they added a system where you get tired after exploring for too long. The game also restricts your progress in Tartarus. You can only explore to a certain point until the next full moon.
The main boss battles(the ones that aren't floor guardians) are actually well designed, and fun to fight. I especially loved the final boss, music and all.
Outside of dungeons and battle, the game progresses day by day. This makes the game take forever. The main story events happen once every full moon. In other words every 29 days. Every once in a while you get events outside of the full moons, but these typically aren't very substantial with the exception of a few. As a matter of fact, I can't remember any good events that happened in the early months. They just drag. I swear the most depressing feeling in the world is seeing the counter at the top go back up to 28 after a full moon.
In the mean time you go to school and can activate Social Links. Most of the Social Links are alright, with one or two really good ones, and few really bad ones(Kenji and The Gourmet King). I quite enjoyed Mamoru's and Akinari's though. Throughout the entire game, Aigis' social link was the only one that was able to keep me entertained for days on end. Rather it kept me motivated for the next day. Akinari was only on Sunday, so once I got done with a rank, I was left waiting a week for the next meeting. This game involved a lot of waiting. It also didn't help that they introduced Social Links via Kenji. It's like they were trying to turn you off.
The story as a whole was good, though it was kind of hard to enjoy it when the events were so few and far between. I was often left disappointed with many of the events. There was a ton of build up but not a lot of delivery. The confrontations with Strega were always disappointing, there were some fights in there that fell flat on their face when the moment actually came, and on two separate occasions the villain
The characters are alright. Some good, some bad, it's a mid-tier cast at best. Yukari was alright, nothing too special. I did not like Junpei(January fixed him somewhat, but more on that later), Mitsuru and Akihiko were meh. Fuuka was just there, Ken sucks, Koromaru is a dog (and I love him), and I loved Aigis. Shinji did not get any development. In fact it was criminal the amount he received because he was actually a cool character. It was to the point where I did not care about
It should be noted though, that January got rid of a lot of these problems over it's course. January was amazing. The atmosphere was on point, most of the characters were better, you weren't restricted from Tartarus, you had Aigis' social link to keep you busy during the day, the music kicked it up a notch, and there was an overall sense of dread looming in the air. If you didn't have to trudge through December to get here, and believe me when I say there was literally nothing to do in December, this probably would have made up for most of the game before it. But that's the problem, it's just one month. It took me 40 hours to get to January. 40. Hours. The only thing that kept me going throughout was that I heard the ending was very good. Was it? In retrospect, yes. As I played through it though, my reaction when the credits rolled was literally "Is that it?". It left such a foul taste in my mouth that I had absolutely no desire to play the Answer. I was sick of it by this point. The main reason I took so long to publish this thread was because I was still getting around to the Answer.
So let's talk about the Answer. The Answer decided it liked the dungeon crawling aspects of the Journey, and made an epilogue out of it. The only problem is they forgot to include what was good in the dungeon crawling before. Instead of healing before each guardian, you heal after each guardian. Meaning you have to go through 10 floors without healing before fighting the guardian. The AI doesn't get better either. Meaning your party will kill you. A lot. On several occasions I outright turned off the console after I died because my party would do stupid things on the floor guardians. What's worse is that they removed the compendium from the Answer. So anything you fuse is gone and you need to go back into the labyrinth to get a persona again.
The story of the Answer consisted of two parts. The first half and the second half. The story was meh during the first half. I do say though, the story and execution were pretty good in the second half. Though keep in mind the 'second half' is the last 4 hours of a 25 hour grind. The entire concept of fighting your party was very well done. And the aftermath with Yukari and Mitsuru getting some good development was good to see as well. All of the characters were better by the time the arena segment was over. If the entire game had story execution like the second half of the Answer, and pacing and atmosphere like January, this game would have been a lot better.
If there's one thing that perfectly describes this game to me, it's wasted potential. Which is a shame because the production value is something you can expect from an Atlus game.
If the title was any indication, I wasn't all that fond of the game.
Before we do anything, let's get the music out of the way. Most of the soundtrack was meh. I did not like Lotus Juice, and the background music got irritating at times. However, the songs that were good were insanely good. Memories of the City being my favorite of the bunch.
The game has two segments. Dungeon crawling through tartarus, and living your life in the day time.
The battle system itself is actually pretty good, using the one-more turn system. However, the battles in this game suffer from the lack of control over your party. This sucks. Countless times I died because my party members had crappy AI. Dying itself wouldn't be an issue if it was actually my fault that I died. They have small directions you can point them toward, like support, conserve SP and the like, but more often than not this helps nothing.
After every few floors of Tartarus you would bump into a floor guardian. This is where the battle system really screws you over. There were plenty of times when one of my party members would knock an enemy down only to get it right back up by hitting that same enemy. It was frustrating to watch this while being powerless.
Outside of battles, Tartarus is a compilation of randomized floors. There are over 200 of these so it gets a bit repetitive after a while. Though one thing I did like about the dungeon crawling was being able to not worry about running out of SP, because you could heal and save every few floors. This helped take some stress off of the repetitive grinding. And it was actually fun at times. Believe it or not this was my favorite part of the game. Alas, they decided I couldn't have my fun, so they added a system where you get tired after exploring for too long. The game also restricts your progress in Tartarus. You can only explore to a certain point until the next full moon.
The main boss battles(the ones that aren't floor guardians) are actually well designed, and fun to fight. I especially loved the final boss, music and all.
Outside of dungeons and battle, the game progresses day by day. This makes the game take forever. The main story events happen once every full moon. In other words every 29 days. Every once in a while you get events outside of the full moons, but these typically aren't very substantial with the exception of a few. As a matter of fact, I can't remember any good events that happened in the early months. They just drag. I swear the most depressing feeling in the world is seeing the counter at the top go back up to 28 after a full moon.
In the mean time you go to school and can activate Social Links. Most of the Social Links are alright, with one or two really good ones, and few really bad ones(Kenji and The Gourmet King). I quite enjoyed Mamoru's and Akinari's though. Throughout the entire game, Aigis' social link was the only one that was able to keep me entertained for days on end. Rather it kept me motivated for the next day. Akinari was only on Sunday, so once I got done with a rank, I was left waiting a week for the next meeting. This game involved a lot of waiting. It also didn't help that they introduced Social Links via Kenji. It's like they were trying to turn you off.
The story as a whole was good, though it was kind of hard to enjoy it when the events were so few and far between. I was often left disappointed with many of the events. There was a ton of build up but not a lot of delivery. The confrontations with Strega were always disappointing, there were some fights in there that fell flat on their face when the moment actually came, and on two separate occasions the villain
unceremoniously jumps off of a cliff before you can kill them.
The characters are alright. Some good, some bad, it's a mid-tier cast at best. Yukari was alright, nothing too special. I did not like Junpei(January fixed him somewhat, but more on that later), Mitsuru and Akihiko were meh. Fuuka was just there, Ken sucks, Koromaru is a dog (and I love him), and I loved Aigis. Shinji did not get any development. In fact it was criminal the amount he received because he was actually a cool character. It was to the point where I did not care about
his death because it wasn't a loss to me. It didn't help that there was no music playing on that part.
It should be noted though, that January got rid of a lot of these problems over it's course. January was amazing. The atmosphere was on point, most of the characters were better, you weren't restricted from Tartarus, you had Aigis' social link to keep you busy during the day, the music kicked it up a notch, and there was an overall sense of dread looming in the air. If you didn't have to trudge through December to get here, and believe me when I say there was literally nothing to do in December, this probably would have made up for most of the game before it. But that's the problem, it's just one month. It took me 40 hours to get to January. 40. Hours. The only thing that kept me going throughout was that I heard the ending was very good. Was it? In retrospect, yes. As I played through it though, my reaction when the credits rolled was literally "Is that it?". It left such a foul taste in my mouth that I had absolutely no desire to play the Answer. I was sick of it by this point. The main reason I took so long to publish this thread was because I was still getting around to the Answer.
So let's talk about the Answer. The Answer decided it liked the dungeon crawling aspects of the Journey, and made an epilogue out of it. The only problem is they forgot to include what was good in the dungeon crawling before. Instead of healing before each guardian, you heal after each guardian. Meaning you have to go through 10 floors without healing before fighting the guardian. The AI doesn't get better either. Meaning your party will kill you. A lot. On several occasions I outright turned off the console after I died because my party would do stupid things on the floor guardians. What's worse is that they removed the compendium from the Answer. So anything you fuse is gone and you need to go back into the labyrinth to get a persona again.
The story of the Answer consisted of two parts. The first half and the second half. The story was meh during the first half. I do say though, the story and execution were pretty good in the second half. Though keep in mind the 'second half' is the last 4 hours of a 25 hour grind. The entire concept of fighting your party was very well done. And the aftermath with Yukari and Mitsuru getting some good development was good to see as well. All of the characters were better by the time the arena segment was over. If the entire game had story execution like the second half of the Answer, and pacing and atmosphere like January, this game would have been a lot better.
If there's one thing that perfectly describes this game to me, it's wasted potential. Which is a shame because the production value is something you can expect from an Atlus game.
.
