1070: Victory and Answers at Last

I finished Persona 3: The Answer. I won’t lie, I am more relieved than anything, but after such an ordeal I find myself glad that I have now played the complete Persona 3 experience from start to finish. (This is, of course, excluding the female protagonist’s path through the PSP version, but I think I may need a bit of a break from Shin Megami Tensei for quite a while now — so that will have to wait!)

The Answer is a curious beast. All the while I was playing it, I had a big question in my mind, appropriately enough. That question was “should this exist?”

It’s a fair question. Does it need to exist? I certainly wasn’t unsatisfied with the way Persona 3’s original story ended, but I was also excited by the prospect of it continuing, which is why I immediately picked up a copy of Persona 3 FES as soon as it came out, despite having bought the original at full price. (Both are still on my shelf. And yes, it has taken me this long to finally get around to actually beating FES. For those who aren’t keeping track, FES came out in 2008. It is now nearly 2013.) I was excited by two things: firstly, the prospect of a “director’s cut” of the main Persona 3 story, and secondly, by an additional 20+ hours of gameplay that resolved more than a few unanswered questions posed by the ending.

On balance, I think I am glad that The Answer exists, because the story that runs through it and particularly its ending are very satisfying — at least, they are if you’ve played through all of The Journey beforehand. I just wish that the execution was better.

It’s sort of difficult to imagine how they could have done it differently, however. The core concept of The Answer is that the party have trapped themselves in the situation they’re in through their own regrets and desires, which means that they’re literally stuck in the same place at the same time on the same day until you beat it. This means none of the awesome “life sim” aspect of Persona 3 — no going out and going to school, no balancing whether or not you should go to Track Team or Music Club after school, no hanging out with the drunken old monk in the bar in the evening, no singing karaoke to build up your Courage statistic. Just dungeons. Fighting. Lots of fighting.

I like Persona 3’s combat system. (I prefer Persona 4’s ability to let you take direct control over all your members, but I still like Persona 3’s.) There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the idea of an add-on campaign involving a whole bunch of fighting using what is a very good JRPG combat system. However, what is wrong with The Answer’s gameplay is that it is regularly cheap, unfair and controller-flingingly frustrating, particularly when it comes to boss battles, and especially later in the game.

A key part of the Persona 3 combat system is learning the various weaknesses of enemies and then exploiting them to knock them down. Knocking all the enemies in an encounter down at the same time allows the entire party to unleash an “All-Out Attack” for massive damage, so generally speaking your aim in any battle is to knock down the enemies as efficiently as possible to trigger one of these, as they will usually if not finish the battle immediately, they will certainly tip the scales in your favour.

Here’s the annoyance with The Answer’s bosses, though — many of them have these weaknesses as in The Journey, but they also have passive abilities that allow them a not-insignificant chance of automatically avoiding any attack with the attributes they are weak to. For example, in one encounter there are three enemies — one is weak against fire, another is weak against ice, another is weak against wind. The one who is weak against fire has the “Evade Fire” skill, which means that on a significant number of occasions when you attack it with fire and attempt to knock it down, you will simply miss. The other two also have the corresponding “Evade [x]” skills, making it very difficult to actually knock them over and deal damage. I’m all for a bit of a challenge factor, but because these mechanics are so heavily based on luck rather than skill or strategy, it just felt incredibly cheap any time I died because of them.

To add insult to injury, The Answer’s final boss, while spectacular to look at as all good final bosses should be, was almost insultingly easy to beat, making the big finale more of a test of patience more than anything else. Actually, I can’t be too mad about this, because if I had to repeat the cutscenes leading up to that final battle as I had to repeat the cutscenes leading up to numerous other boss battles on a number of occasions earlier in the game, I would have probably been very annoyed. As it happened, I was able to take it down in one attempt, meaning the story kept flowing nicely at the moment when it needed to be pacy.

So after completing the whole shebang I am left with somewhat mixed feelings. On the one hand, I am happy that I saw the story end conclusively. I am satisfied that I successfully beat a very difficult game. But at the same time I am a little annoyed that a game as brilliant as Persona 3 has been slightly soured in my memory by the amount of annoyance The Answer gave me.

Am I glad The Answer exists? Yes, I think I am. Will I ever play it again? No fucking way!

1068: Still Waiting for The Answer

I never thought I’d say this, but I’m getting kind of sick of Persona 3.

Actually, that’s not quite true. I still freaking love Persona 3. What I do not love, however, is the “epilogue” sequence The Answer that was added in the “FES” rerelease of the game. The Answer adds 20+ hours of dungeon-crawling in an attempt to resolve some of the story’s loose ends, but in doing so strips out almost all of the things that made the main bit of Persona 3 such an amazingly awesome game.

For those still somehow unfamiliar with Persona 3 in general, allow me to elaborate.

The main part of Persona 3 (known as “The Journey”) is nigh on 100 hours long. You begin the game at the beginning of the Japanese school year in April, and work your way up to the finale nearly a year of in-game time later. With a few exceptions, you “live” every day along the way as a relatively normal Japanese high school student — going to school, dealing with your exams, hanging out with your friends, looking for love. Because of your special Persona-summoning power, however, during the “Dark Hour” that occurs on the stroke of midnight every day, you also get to dungeon-crawl through possibly the biggest single dungeon in any RPG ever — the tower of Tartarus. You have to balance your time effectively between levelling up your “social links” with your friends, which infuse your Personas with power, and levelling up your characters through fighting in Tartarus. It’s a good balance that combines dating sim/visual novel mechanics with more traditional RPG systems to produce something that gives all that fighting a huge sense of “meaning.”

I won’t spoil the ending of The Journey because I maintain that anyone who enjoys RPGs needs to play it, whether that’s on PS2 or PSP. But let’s talk about The Answer.

The Answer unfolds several months after the events of The Journey are concluded. The original protagonist is… indisposed elsewhere, so you are instead placed in the role of robot girl Aigis, a key character in the latter stages of The Journey. The original party (minus the original protagonist, and plus a new member) find themselves trapped in their dormitory, with the same day repeating itself over and over. A mysterious hole opens up in their lounge, and beneath their dormitory they discover “The Desert of Doors,” which leads to “The Abyss of Time” and the answers to all their questions.

As such, the aim of The Answer is to work your way through all the doors in the Desert of Doors and figure out just what the jolly fuck is going on. Behind each door is a dungeon which, like Tartarus, is split into several sections with bosses guarding progress at regular intervals. Unlike exploring Tartarus, you don’t have to manage your fatigue levels — you just keep going for as long as you think you can survive, then head back up for air when you’re running low on items, health or skill points. Then you go back in, perhaps get a little deeper, perhaps beat the boss that’s been giving you difficulty, and then you get a story scene when you reach the very bottom of each door’s dungeon.

This process repeats a number of times over the course of about 20 hours or so, and there is no real break in it. The dungeons are all randomly-generated, and the tiles used to create them are mostly palette-swaps of what you’ve already seen in Tartarus. The enemies are almost all the same as what you’ve seen in Tartarus. And the bosses are all the cheapest, most irritating fucking assholes you will ever encounter, necessitating heavy reliance on either 1) luck or 2) copious amounts of grinding until you are overlevelled.

This is not fun, and it’s starting to test my patience somewhat. Still, now, as a matter of pride I feel I have to get to the end of it for a number of reasons, not least of which is the fact that I actually want to find out what the titular “Answer” is. The Journey’s ending is left nicely ambiguous and open to interpretation, and to be honest I would have been quite happy leaving it as is if The Answer didn’t exist. As it does, however, I find myself really, really wanting to know. And that’s why I’m enduring the suffering of grinding my way through these dungeons in an attempt to discover what’s what.

Don’t get me wrong, Persona 3’s combat system is still great; Shoji Meguro’s music is still J-ghetto fabulous; and the characters are still interesting — there’s just not enough of the things that made The Journey great, and too many of the things that aren’t the reason people play Persona 3 in the first place. I have managed to go this far without having anything spoiled for me relating to The Answer, so I have the joy of discovering what happens at the end still to come.

It had better be worth it!

1004: Thwarting The Fall

I finished Persona 3 FES: The Journey this evening, something I’ve been meaning to do for a very long time and finally got around to. Persona 3 remains one of my favourite games of all time, and the additions to The Journey — the story told in the original version of Persona 3 — are very welcome, offering deeper insight into the characters as well as some good old-fashioned fanservice.

Persona 3’s biggest strength is also one of the reasons why I imagine an awful lot of people won’t finish it: its length. Having played The Last Story earlier this year, I’m very much of the opinion that JRPGs don’t have to be incredibly long to be tell satisfying stories, but in the case of Persona 3 and its sequel, both of which are somewhere in the region of 85-100 hours in length, I can’t help but think that a lot of the respective stories’ impact would be lost if they decided to reign things in a bit and keep them snappy.

Persona 3, for those who haven’t played it, takes place over the course of a school year in Japan. You start in April, increasing amounts of Bad Shit comes to pass as the year progresses and you eventually finish either on New Year’s Eve with a bad ending or on January 31st with a good ending. And you’re expected to play through all the days in between, with only a couple of exceptions.

A day in Persona 3 typically consists of getting up, going to school (assuming it’s a school day), perhaps answering a question or two in class, hanging out with friends after school then either going dungeon-crawling, studying or socialising in the evening. The format occasionally gets shaken up with public holidays (and Sundays) when you don’t have school to worry about, and there’s a couple of trips out of the game’s main Japanese town setting at specific points in the story, but for the most part you are living the life of a Japanese teenager, albeit one who fights monsters after midnight.

It’s a long, slow slog through the game’s days, in short, but it’s only through dealing with this that you truly come to respect the sacrifices the game’s main cast has made in the name of trying to build a better world and beat back the darkness. Sometimes you really want to hang out with that hot girl who seems to have taken an interest in you, but instead you know that you should go shopping with the nice policeman who sells you various sharp implements, then go climbing the mysterious tower that appears after midnight and start twatting some Shadows in the face. Having to find this optimum “work-life balance” means that the time you do actually get to spend with your in-game friends becomes more precious — particularly as each of the “Social Link” stories that is attached to each person ends up being interesting and often emotional.

By the time you reach the game’s final battle, you have been through Hell and back with these characters, both in terms of having to cope with the everyday stresses of teenage life — exams, angst, friendship drama — and in having fought your way through hordes of Shadows to strengthen your party. By the time the final boss appears, you are ready to kick some ass and save the world.

And then the final boss fight takes somewhere in the region of an hour to complete. The game isn’t going to let you win so easily. It’s not an especially difficult fight if you’ve prepared appropriately, but it is long — a test of endurance… and of whether or not you remembered to stock up on items before wandering into the dungeon. It’s not boring, though — it’s paced in such a way that it shakes things up regularly, requiring you to change and adapt your strategies accordingly, particularly as you get closer and closer to final victory. By the time you finally take down the boss and get onto the “home straight”, as it were — and there’s actually a surprising amount still to see even after you’ve kicked its ass — you are physically and mentally exhausted, just like the characters, and the game knows this, hitting you with some intensely emotional scenes while you’re weakened.

Persona 3, then, uses its length to its advantage. While there is plenty of stuff in there that is clearly designed to allow masochistic players to inflate their play time yet further (I didn’t beat the Reaper, for example, and I seriously doubt I will ever see, let alone beat the “Ultimate Opponent” secret boss that only appears in New Game+) for the most part, it’s good stuff that allows you to immerse yourself in the small but very well-realised game world. You’re either doing teenagery things, or you’re fighting Shadows. Fight too many Shadows and you’ll exhaust yourself, meaning you’ll need to make sure you get some rest before you do anything strenuous — but while you recover, all your friends are waiting for you.

There’s always something to do and someone to see, and meanwhile the clock is ticking ever-onwards towards an inevitable conclusion. As time passes, everyone’s life goes on — even the incidental NPCs sitting around in various locations all have their own stories to tell that progress gradually as the seasons turn. Will the shy girl ever talk to the boy she’s stalking? Will the girl who’s obsessed with Mitsuru ever confess her feelings? Will the elementary school student at the station ever stop being a jerk to her obviously-nervous new teacher?

“Bonds of people are the true power,” runs the tagline to the Persona 4 anime, and it’s right. Both Persona 3 and 4 are what they are because of the people in their respective game worlds. After 80+ hours with them, it’s difficult to not feel a sense of attachment to them — even the most seemingly-innocuous incidental character. This sense of “belonging”, of immersion in a game world with realistic, believable characters — that, right there is why I love these games so much.

On to The Answer next, which I know nothing about beyond the fact it’s supposedly very difficult and wraps up the ambiguities left by The Journey’s ending. I’m very intrigued to see how it concludes for real, so doubtless you can expect another post on the subject after another 20 hours of gameplay or so.