Ultimadrago
Member
Tyrone is correct!
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Why are SMT fans soo divisive?
- Thread starter Coolbgdog12
- Start date
Tyrone is correct!
Coolbgdog12
Member
He's spot on. Risette fans aren't too bright.
Glass Rebel
Member
Classic SMT fans are insecure because Persona sells more and has higher production values. Persona fans are insecure because SMT has better gameplay.
Those of us that like both can acknowledge both series' strengths and weaknesses and get to enjoy more great games. Hooray!
Those of us that like both can acknowledge both series' strengths and weaknesses and get to enjoy more great games. Hooray!
LegendofDragoonLives
Member
Hyperactivity
Banned
Isn't Persona technically a completely different series that doesn't even have the SMT before it in Japan, and they put that there when it was localized to help the new IP out?
Mihos
Gold Member
When in doubt, always choose Laura Bailey
Correct, but it is still technically a Megaten spinoff.
In fact, SMT if... is pretty much a prequel to Persona.
Chance Hale
Member
They're separate universes but they use many of the same monsters, abilities, and so on. It's very much an SMT offshoot.
And I love Persona and SMT, they do very different things. Was a bit of a bummer to see SMTIV run into very obvious budget limitations though, where Persona 5 is going to be a big budget title. Nocturne is still the pinnacle of the SMT franchise.
)doctorblurg
Banned
SMT Devil Survivor was my first SMT game after that I jumped onto SMT IV, then the P4G train, and now working my way backwards through that series and I've enjoyed every title I've tried so far. I can understand why OG SMT fans would get really pissed off though with the huge change and massive popularity Persona gets nowadays.
Definitely right, that's why I hate Persona 3 and 4. They have turned a great series(loved the first three titles) into garbage.
It's also not surprising why 3 and 4 attracted new players. Add to what's below the style, the awful music and the dating aspects. Sigh...
People can like what they want and businesses should make money, so I've long accepted that Persona is gonna be their focus for a long while. They've thrown some bones with Catherine and SMT4 and Soul Hackers, so maybe the older games aren't totally dead in the water.
That said...my issues with persona 3 + 4, which i'm not gonna argue about or be divisive about with anybody:
--Randomly generated hallways don't appeal to me. they couldn't be more boring.
--the games have to hold the record for most menuing in a game (also not for me)
--I guess I learned through Persona that I'm ambivalent towards the issues of socialization in a Japanese high school
--waifus are a blight and I credit these games with making weird otaku moe crap mainstream (sorry, I know it's not the whole point of the game, but these aspects dominate the discussion of the games online. The devs went great lengths to humanize every character, but waifu wars just undermine that and have tainted the series for me.)
--that said, no matter how tastefully presented, as a 66 year old male, I think I'm past the point where high school dating would resonate with me as a game feature/story point.
--the battle systems are like press turn with extraneous, useless crap added on.
--Getting "tired" in a dungeon was a pain, though necessitated by the game design
--When you no longer get tired, you just get stopped at a certain floor. Things are no longer randomly generated, there's nowhere else to go. You're forced back to the story/menuing. Also necessitated by the game's design, but still an annoyance to me.
--I loved Nocturne's way of presenting the story. People are praising the Souls games for the same thing at the moment. Persona is anime all the way--hit you over the head with a boulder 500 times with each development. Also, I felt like I was always 10 steps ahead of the characters and sometimes it took hours for things to happen that I knew were coming.
--The difficulty is reduced with each game. Even on harder modes, P3P and P4G are kinda laughable. It's unbelievable how broken Shuffle Time is in P4G. Demon/ability picking also makes the game trivial (though they need to find some kind of balance between this method and the pure RNG of the other games, which is also not totally kosher.)
--also, if your game is 80 hours long, please compose more than like 5 tracks and 5 remixes of those tracks. How they went from being conscientious about repetitive music in Nocturne to this, I don't understand. Gonna go ahead and guess disc space was an issue, but still...
TL;DR: the way I see it, the games are the opposite of what I liked in other SMT games. That doesn't necessarily mean i'm gonna hate them, but P3 and 4's design and game flow just don't grab me at all.
That said...my issues with persona 3 + 4, which i'm not gonna argue about or be divisive about with anybody:
--Randomly generated hallways don't appeal to me. they couldn't be more boring.
--the games have to hold the record for most menuing in a game (also not for me)
--I guess I learned through Persona that I'm ambivalent towards the issues of socialization in a Japanese high school
--waifus are a blight and I credit these games with making weird otaku moe crap mainstream (sorry, I know it's not the whole point of the game, but these aspects dominate the discussion of the games online. The devs went great lengths to humanize every character, but waifu wars just undermine that and have tainted the series for me.)
--that said, no matter how tastefully presented, as a 66 year old male, I think I'm past the point where high school dating would resonate with me as a game feature/story point.
--the battle systems are like press turn with extraneous, useless crap added on.
--Getting "tired" in a dungeon was a pain, though necessitated by the game design
--When you no longer get tired, you just get stopped at a certain floor. Things are no longer randomly generated, there's nowhere else to go. You're forced back to the story/menuing. Also necessitated by the game's design, but still an annoyance to me.
--I loved Nocturne's way of presenting the story. People are praising the Souls games for the same thing at the moment. Persona is anime all the way--hit you over the head with a boulder 500 times with each development. Also, I felt like I was always 10 steps ahead of the characters and sometimes it took hours for things to happen that I knew were coming.
--The difficulty is reduced with each game. Even on harder modes, P3P and P4G are kinda laughable. It's unbelievable how broken Shuffle Time is in P4G. Demon/ability picking also makes the game trivial (though they need to find some kind of balance between this method and the pure RNG of the other games, which is also not totally kosher.)
--also, if your game is 80 hours long, please compose more than like 5 tracks and 5 remixes of those tracks. How they went from being conscientious about repetitive music in Nocturne to this, I don't understand. Gonna go ahead and guess disc space was an issue, but still...
TL;DR: the way I see it, the games are the opposite of what I liked in other SMT games. That doesn't necessarily mean i'm gonna hate them, but P3 and 4's design and game flow just don't grab me at all.
Sgt.Pepper
Banned
Because Social Links exist.
eyeball_kid
Member
What. The ability to choose who you're going to date in an JRPG started long before Persona 3. The first one I remember is Final Fantasy 7, which was a lot more influential than these games.
Persona 3's story might have been too obvious and trite in places, but Nocturne's story was far too minimalist and offered almost no character development, and what was there of story suffered from bad pacing. But I loved both games despite their flaws.
I think this is the crux of why most SMT diehards don't like the Persona series -- they place the most importance on hardcore dungeon crawling. Anything to change that balance of gameplay is just not appealing to them.
atlusprime
Atlus PR
Gameplay wise DDS is very close to Nocturne (press turn), story wise it is very close to the original Persona series (same writer).
Both Persona 2 and DDS feature the sentai show party constellation (5 color coded "power ranger" types) and humans who become demons rather than fight alongside demons. DDS also has fusion attacks that are similar to the ones in P2. I think the fusion attacks in both games are inspired by the combos in Chrono Trigger.
In a sense, DDS is the true continuation of the original Persona and Persona 3 further differentiated itself from both SMT and earlier Persona. Which isn't a bad thing, new interpretations of old stories keep the games fresh. DDS being so different from previous games despite being titled almost the same as the original duology (Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei) and the obvious similarities to Persona is also what makes it so interesting.
I prefer "the same, but different" to "just more of the same".
I agree almost entirely with this, but with extra emphasis on the awful twisty hallways.
Have something nice!
Not everybody can like everything! I find that a lot of the divisiveness comes up because people are really passionate about what they like, and not every SMT/Persona game has the same things.
It'd be nice, right? I think there are more people that enjoy both than people that actually cause the rift. People just like to act silly on the internet.
I can comfortably say Yukiko is best girl while also claiming the world in Lucifer's own glory.
I should also add that after tired status and blocking off floors, the game finally sends Death himself to tell you to get back to the other part of the game. lol
If there was one thing I absolutely hate about SMT it's demon negotiation. Fuck that shit. Love everything else, but negotiations are so fincky and random it's bullshit. Now if only they just went with the demon auction of Devil Survivor for the rest of SMT proper.
AcademicSaucer
Member
I spent good money in Persona 3 FES and Persona 4 , and both games bored me really fast , they are just not for me
NotDreamcast
Member
Your waifu a shit.
Neutral master race.
Neutral master race.
Where would the SMT fans from before Nocturne come from? Nocturne was the first mainline SMT game released in the West and I think even the first SMT game of any kind to release in Europe.
buddha0991
Member
Fixed.
Is actually Megam Tensei Gaiden and the first traditional MegaTen game released in the US depending on how much you want to consider the first Persona traditional.
Also, here's a reminder that we originally were getting MegaTen games under the Revelations banner until Atlus decided that it'd be fine to start selling games under the Shin Megami Tensei banner in the use
Starting with DemiKids :V
#notallsmtdiehards
At this point, people say "SMT" to refer to the Megaten umbrella. So in that case, a lot of western fans came from Persona 1 or 2. And that is very different from the games released on PS2. That has of course created a rift even within the Persona fanbase, to say nothing of the general SMT vs. Persona thing.
And then there's people like me. Westerners who started very early on with Japanese releases. But I know that my particular situation is rare.
Fan translations for games only available legally if you import and know how to rip aren't going to be building up much of a fanbase.
I'd also like to add something to the whole Persona being treated better than SMT thing though: Europe.
SMTIV got treated like shit, but spinoffs of Persona (itself a spinoff) get treated totally fine. One even gets a physical release, and it certainly isn't SMT.
A limited fanbase is still a fanbase, and it seemed to be enough of a thing to where Atlus acknowledged the contributions the fan translations made to building things up for them given they openly linked to Aeon Genesis on their front page around the time they began their second big push to get MegaTen established in the west.
SMT4 seems to have had other circumstances causing the European delay, and PQ not having to deal with that is probably them being ready to deal with those issues because of what they had to deal with SMT4.
Not to mention it's not like Persona hasn't had its fair share of release issues, given the stink that happened with Eternal Punishment PSP.
The Persona 4: Arena fiasco was also "fun" (...) to watch, while we're on failed PAL releases.
But I see gngf's point: a spinoff of a spinoff having a timely physical release, while a main SMT is comming 14 month after the US on eShop only is kinda laughable, whatever the circumstances.
Oh definitely. That Europe has had to get kicked around a bunch while they wait for SMT4 sucks, because SMT4 rocks and everybody should get a chance to play it.
I'm just saying I don't think it's as much because Persona is getting preferential treatment as much as it is that SMT4 just happened to run into a nasty snag and Persona Q is benefiting from what they learned from that (and also probably being an easier game to localize).
buddha0991
Member
WHERE WERE YOU WHEN PERSONA 4 REVOLUTIONIZED GAMING?
Sammy Samusu
Member
I have a weird relationship with Persona games.
P4 sucked but my interest in the series was still there, I saw potential in a flawed game. A year later I decided to play P3 and it sucked even harder, so much that I had no energy left to go through the FES campaign.
Now I have come up with new excuses to keep giving the Persona series another try:
- Persona 1-2, people say these games are different than 3-4
- Persona Q, a game inspired by Etrian Odyssey which I love
- Persona 5, maybe Atlus is ready to evolve the series and change the formula a little bit
As for SMT games, I enjoyed my time with SMT4, gotta hunt SJ, SH and Nocturne.
P4 sucked but my interest in the series was still there, I saw potential in a flawed game. A year later I decided to play P3 and it sucked even harder, so much that I had no energy left to go through the FES campaign.
Now I have come up with new excuses to keep giving the Persona series another try:
- Persona 1-2, people say these games are different than 3-4
- Persona Q, a game inspired by Etrian Odyssey which I love
- Persona 5, maybe Atlus is ready to evolve the series and change the formula a little bit
As for SMT games, I enjoyed my time with SMT4, gotta hunt SJ, SH and Nocturne.
Persona 1 plays more closely to a classic MegaTen game than the other games in the series (bar Q), so you might like it depending on what you like SMT4 and what you didn't like about the new Personas.
foxuzamaki
Doesn't read OPs, especially not his own
I found it amazing that your 66 and still gaming but also on forums, that makes life a lil easier for me
Don't forget a stage musical.
Tongue-in-cheek response: Mainline SMT games are for the "hardcore", emotionally scarred gamers with intra and interpersonal problems that have a need to have "POWAH"! and would kill puppies if they would not get arrested. They sound self-assured in their coolness on gaming boards and they make sure you know they are self-assured with their coolness. Persona 3/4 and Devil Survivor are for gamers who think that fun when playing a video game is more important than proving their badgassery on gaming message boards on teh internet. That said, these gamers would much rather argue about the wonderful choices of waifus in the games than the gaming mechanics, etc. This has a tendency to portray these individuals as perhaps a bit socially insecure and/or immature.
Bottom line: Waifus >> "Powah"!
Bottom line: Waifus >> "Powah"!
Link1110
Member
There are too many games under the Megami Tensei banner that are really good and extremely different from each other. SMT If, Devil Survivor 2, Persona 4, Raidou 2, and Soul Hackers are extremely different, but they're all amazing and it comes form to a matter of taste which you like the best.