Just got to the end of Golden Week. Junpei's a bastard, I thought he was a true friend and ally, until he introduced me to this stupid "Devil Busters Online" MMORPG shit. So now instead of just having the "sleep" or "study" options at night in my room when I'm not exploring the Tataros (or on holidays if I decide to stay at home), there's now a stupid "NET GAME" option too. To make things worse, it's a community as well, so if you keep "playing" there are benefits, but you really waste a shitload of time. Grrr... that ****er! :lol
Also, I found that there's a burger joint called WILDUCK BURGER, and there's even a silly duck mascot thing inside the joint. The "special set" even came with Duck Fries... ^^; I've figure out that doing certain activities alone (karaoke, eating at places, etc) will boost your Courage, while staying awake in class and reading shit at the library will boost your academic stat. Unfortunately they're all still really low, and I haven't figured out how to improve my Charm yet. I've asked some girls spend time with me but they're all avoiding me like I'm some weirdo.
Dungeon-wise the battles can get really interesting. While the loads themselves are really fast and the battles really short, you can make them even shorter once you've memorized the weaknesses of each Shadow. When you damage an enemy with either an elemental weakness or a critical attack, they get into a "down" status which gives that character one more attack. Downed enemies also lost a turn since they have to get up on their next turn. Party members can also be hit with Down if the enemy gets your weakness, which I believe is determined by your equipped Persona. If you manage to Down all enemies in a single turn, you can do a bumrush attack with your entire party that does good damage to every enemy. But you might want to avoid that if you need to heal instead, since you'll be getting a free turn next.
Also interesting is that while the spells of the Persona take up your SP, using the normal attack of a Persona (as opposed to your own weapon attack) takes up HP instead. Also I've unlocked Quests from the Velvet Room where Elizabeth has special requests of items from the Tataros tower, and when you fulfil the requests you get the rewards. Some quests have time limits as well, so you need to complete them by a certain date or they're gone.
The dungeon crawling and school life thing is very well balanced and integrated imo, but I can see why some people wouldn't like it. It's definitely not a game for everyone since you need to have the patience and acquired taste for dungeon crawlers, and you need to enjoy school life sim stuff. Tsu'll probably hate this game since we keep talking about the differences between games driven purely by gameplay (BoF5 for example), and games that are driven by the overall experience (MGS games).
Persona 3 is definitely one of those experience games for me, since the entire overall atmosphere and the leisurely pace of me choosing and doing what I want and progressing in the directions I want is very enjoyable. If you keep thinking of it as a game and trying to justify everything by stat boosts and gameplay development, you'll probably miss the entire point of the game.
The game is all about a high school students who are also part-time dungeon crawlers at night. So in the morning you'll be going to school, in the evening you might be having ramen with a classmate after school while he tries to nudge more information about your female party member Yuriko out of you since you board together with her, but at night you'll be dungeon crawling and hoping to get the most out of the trip by either hitting the next checkpoint or at least getting some new Persona.
