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.

#oneaday Day 961: I am Thou

I wrote a piece about Persona 3 over on Games Are Evil earlier today. Go read it, please.

I have, as you may have guessed from the fact I chose to write about Persona 3 today, been playing Persona 3. I have been meaning to play the extended FES version for many, many years now and have started several times. This time I intend to finish it, including battling my way through The Answer, which I understand is a bit of an ordeal. Then, if I’m feeling particularly masochistic, I will proceed to play Persona 3 Portable as the female protagonist.

I fucking love Persona 3 and 4. They are still my favourite games of all time. I own the first two for PSP/Vita, too, but found the first one a little hard to follow plot-wise and haven’t delved particularly deeply into 2 yet. Fortunately, each one stands quite nicely by itself — though 3 and 4 are nicely interconnected, even if certain aspects clash (why do the kids in P3 need Evokers to summon their Personas, but the ones in P4 don’t?).

My love for these games stems primarily from the fact that they push all my gaming happy buttons. I love JRPGs and I love visual novels, and Persona 3 and 4 combine the best bits of both genres. You have a simple-to-understand, hard-to-master combat and character development system; you have an in-depth storyline tackling very “human” issues. You have “saving the world” drama; you have characters dealing with personal crises that can, at times, seem more important than impending disaster. Somehow the game manages to avoid pretty much every cliché that critics of JRPGs hate to create an emotional, mature experience with an absolutely badass soundtrack.

The highlight is, of course, the cast of characters throughout. And as I said in my piece over on Games Are Evil, the interesting thing about Persona is that it’s not only the heroes and villains who “matter” in the grand scheme of things. The “Social Link” mini-stories that arise as the protagonist gets to know his new school friends and people in the community are fascinating plotlines to follow through in their own right, and help to lend a greater sense of poignancy to the overarching narrative of the Persona-users attempting to Sort Shit Out. In other words, everyone has their own demons to deal with — sometimes these are literal demons, others they are the barriers we create for ourselves: fear, anxiety, shyness, a lack of self-belief. Watching the protagonist touch the lives of these people and be there with them as they come to terms with their own issues gives the small game world a much greater feeling of “life” than almost any other RPG I’ve played.

It also, once again, highlights the difference between Eastern and Western game design philosophy. When it comes to RPGs, I am firmly in the Eastern camp. I am yet to come across a Western RPG that has captivated me in the same way as the Persona series. You can rant and rave all you like about the beautifully-rendered worlds of Bethesda adventures or BioWare’s (increasingly questionable) storytelling chops, but, for me anyway, no-one has the Japanese beat when it comes to interpersonal relationships and a sense of “human” drama amid supernatural chaos.

Ode to Game Music 2: The Art of the Final Boss

This is going to be a somewhat self-indulgent (and lengthy) gush on one of my favourite topics to do with video games in general, and with their music in particular. But I promise that I won’t mention One Winged Angel at all in this post after this paragraph as I’m sure most people who are familiar with that of which I speak below will be overly familiar with this track already.

Oh, and if you’re reading this on Facebook come and read this on my proper page. It has streaming audio and everything.

Everyone ready? Let’s begin.

So, the final boss confrontation. To me, this can make or break a game. I remember learning very early on at school both when writing essays and preparing for performances that “people remember the beginnings and the ends of things more than anything else”. And it’s true. For me, by far the most memorable parts of many games are the very beginning and the very end. Sure, if the middle is interesting, compelling and/or fun I’ll be more inclined to make it from the beginning to the end, but I’ll be even more inclined to remember a game fondly if its finale is aurally spectacular. Conversely, if a final battle is somewhat underwhelming in terms of presentation, I’ll be less inclined to think of it favourably.

Take Diablo II, for example – I think most people agree that Diablo is a fantastic game, but for me that final battle with Diablo was utterly underwhelming, and it was the music that killed it completely. Or rather, it was the lack of the music that killed it completely. Diablo has an eerie, ethereal sort of soundtrack that doesn’t have much in the way of memorable tunes. Sure, it’s atmospheric and sure, its production values are higher than for many games (it is a Blizzard title after all) but dammit if I didn’t want something a bit more dramatic for battling the most evil thing in the history of ever!

So it is with this in mind that I want to share with you some of my favourite final boss confrontation soundtracks. The overdramatic climactic music may be something of a cliché to many people but I can’t get enough of it. If it involves “scary choirs”, a phrase a similarly-inclined friend and I coined a while back to describe the chorus in One Wi… I mean that song at the end of Final Fantasy VII… so much the better.

These are presented in no particular order, I should probably say. And if you have any similar examples, please feel free to share them in the comments.

Final Fantasy I (Origins Version): Last Battle (Nobuo Uematsu)

Start as you mean to go on, with a bit of Uematsu. While he is probably one of the first composers that people get interested in when they start looking into video game music, his “mainstream” (for want of a better word) doesn’t mean that his music isn’t worth looking at. On the contrary, in fact – the Final Fantasy series has typically had spectacular finales and a huge amount of this can be attributed to the music.

This piece is from the remake of Final Fantasy I for the PS1. If you’re unfamiliar with the first FF, the battle system consists of your party members standing on one side of the screen wafting their weapons around at a monster or monsters on the other side of the screen. There’s very little apparent physical interaction between them, and said monsters don’t animate at all.

That didn’t stop this piece of music making the final battle with Chaos (incidentally, just how many unimaginative RPG designers have used something as generic as “Chaos” for their final bosses since FFI?) super-dramatic and exciting.

This piece takes in all the JRPG finale clichés. Pipe organ? Check. Tinkly piano breaks? Check. Loosely based on the game’s main battle theme? Check. But I still love it.

Final Fantasy II (Origins Version): Battle Scene 2 (Nobuo Uematsu)

I’ll say now that I’m getting all the FF music out of the way first so those who think it’s been done to death (which, to be fair, it probably has) can happily skip to the later tracks.

Who’s still here? Oh good. This theme is from battling the Emperor at the close of Final Fantasy II, one of the less well-known FF games because many people hate, loathe and despise it with a passion. Me? I enjoyed it, and this music, while simple, was pleasant to experience at finale time.

The interesting thing (well, to me anyway) about this one is that the main motif of the theme also made a reappearance in the final confrontation of Final Fantasy IV when battling Zeromus. This also happened a couple of other times, with the chord sequence for Exdeath’s (still a dumb name) theme in Final Fantasy V bearing more than a passing resemblance to Sephiroth’s theme in Final Fantasy VII.

Talking of which…

Final Fantasy VII (Nobuo Uematsu)

I have two tracks to share for this one for the reason that it does one of the things I love best in a good final confrontation soundtrack – it takes one of the earlier themes in the game and expands on it. The next few tracks in this post revolve around this kind of idea.

So this track (Those Chosen by the Planet)…

…becomes this track (The Birth of a God).

Eventually, anyway. Give it time. At about 1:25 in, we get that Sephiroth theme coming back to kick some ass. I remember the first time I heard this it was one of those moments where you get an involuntary shiver down your spine. I know for a fact this doesn’t happen to anyone, but this one particular musical technique at work here – using a simple motif from an earlier piece of music in a completely different one, particularly if they are of markedly different styles – always has that effect on me, particularly if it’s used at a dramatic moment.

Then, of course, after this track, you get that other one that I’m not mentioning.

Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark (Jeremy Soule)

Mr Soule is very fond of the technique I mention above, as is clearly demonstrated by both his work on Neverwinter Nights and Dungeon Siege (up next). The moody, creepy opening track from Hordes of the Underdark (which, so far as I’m aware at least, has no title other than “x2_title”) sets the scene for a descent into darkness with faint undertones of potential heroism ahead:

Slog your way through to the end of the game through its many traps, challenges and monsters and, musically, you end up almost right back where you started, but in a slightly different key at a slightly faster tempo with more screechy strings and clangy percussion:

There’s even some pipe organ in there. Well done that man.

Dungeon Siege (Jeremy Soule)

Dungeon Siege as a game was, to many people, a relatively forgettable action-RPG. It wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination bad, but most people seemed to think it was a fairly unremarkable game still riding the remnants of the Diablo II wave. Still, I remember it fondly for its music – in this case, both the very first and last tracks of the game providing strong “bookends” to the action.

Here’s the track you get for setting out on your journey:

This being Jeremy Soule, there’s more than a passing resemblance to the “sound” of Neverwinter Nights – if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, eh? – but to me, the main theme of Dungeon Siege is much more memorable. I know of people who have restarted the game many times simply to hear this music again. I was also delighted to discover that Dungeon Siege II also started with an alternative version of this theme.

Get to the end of the game (assuming it holds your attention, of course – and I maintain that it’s actually an entertaining experience worth playing through) and your battle with the final boss is accompanied by this stirring soundtrack:

Scary choirs, clangy percussion, a hurdy-gurdy break and… there it is, lurking around the 1:08 mark, that opening theme. Once I heard that, any trace of gaming fatigue I had was immediately gone and I had to finish this game to do justice to the excellent soundtrack. It’s strange. The adrenaline rush of the simple re-use of a musical motif – I often wonder if I’m the only one that this particular technique has an effect on. But then I think about how many composers out there do it and I know it can’t just be me.

Space Channel 5 (Hataya, Tokoi, Nanba, Ohtani featuring Ken Woodman and His Orchestra)

My love for Space Channel 5 has, of course, been well documented in the past but I feel it’s worth mentioning here simply because it’s a completely different soundtrack to what we’ve heard above – and yet it still uses that same technique, and it has that same effect on me.

Space Channel 5’s main theme, Mexican Flyer, is the basis for much of the rest of the game’s soundtrack – if not in terms of reusing motifs then at least stylistically, with the blaring horns and Sixties stylings providing a backdrop to many scenes in the two games in the series. It’s certainly a memorable, toe-tapping theme that sums up the “Gays In Space!” aesthetic nicely. So when I got to the end of Space Channel 5 Part 2 after, oh, the mighty 45 minutes of game that preceded it, I was immensely gratified to be dealing with the extremely bizarre and surreal finale accompanied by this piece:

This piece has everything I want from a finale – a bit of drama (0:33), a bit of cheesy false-hope “Yay! You did it!” (1:03) and cap it all with an ending that takes the main theme and builds on it from a simple vocal (1:20) up to everyone in the galaxy singing along with you (2:15). This is the kind of piece that makes you feel rotten if you fuck it up halfway through.

Persona 3 (Shoji Meguro)

There’s just one more example of what you have probably surmised is one of my favourite musical clichés to fall back on, and that is the great and brilliant Persona 3. I’m not sure much more needs to be said about this at this time other than the fact that The Poem for Everyone’s Souls…

…becomes, after 90+ hours, The Battle for Everyone’s Souls.

It, of course, is them followed by the final battle mix of Burn My Dread featuring, in Beige‘s own words, some Japanese guy “rapping the fuck out”.

Beyond Good and Evil (Christophe Heral)

Just two more, you’ll be pleased to know. First up is the spectacular soundtrack of Beyond Good and Evil which I want to draw attention to simply for its high production values and the great “bookending” of the game that these two tracks achieve.

Shortly after starting the game, you are thrust right into combat with a mysterious enemy you don’t know much about. During said battle, you are accompanied by this incredible piece of music that everyone who has played Beyond Good and Evil seems to comment on when describing the game’s amazingly strong opening sequence. Dancing with Domz certainly sets the scene for an epic battle.

The return to this style at the end of the game with the piece Sins of the Father is made all the more effective by the fact that much of the music in the middle of the game has been either of a somewhat “gentler” style, or when things did get hectic, a more “electronic”, “technological” sound. A return to the orchestral/choral stylings of the opening for the final confrontation helped, for me at least, to diminish the “Umm… what the fuck happened at the end of this game?” nonsense.

Trauma Center: New Blood (Atsushi Kitajoh)

I draw particular attention to Trauma Center here because I still find it utterly bizarre. I mean, we’re talking about a surgical action/puzzle/shooter game here. And let’s not forget the fact that the first Trauma Center game ended with you battling an illness that was “a form of Death itself” that had wrapped itself around the human heart.

I don’t know about you, but when I think about doctors, nurses and surgeons, pipe organs and scary choirs (there they are again) don’t spring immediately to mind. Neither do electric guitars. But what the hey. If you’ve played Trauma Center, you’ll know that it’s a sweaty-palmed and utterly terrifying experience, which these two pieces, heard during the final “battle” with the Cardia disease, reflect perfectly.

And on that note, it’s good night from me. Congratulations if you made it through all that, and I hope you’ve enjoyed some of my picks. If you have any other final boss musics that you’d like to share, please post ’em in the comments.

My next post on game music (which will happen when it happens and not before, dammit!) will likely revolve around the art of the end credits music.

SquadCast: Persona 3

It’s the first of our irregular special side-mission podcasts today as we explore the world of teenagers pointing guns at their heads, the tarot and giant penises riding chariots. Yes, you read that correctly. Persona 3 is an incredibly long game – too long, perhaps, for a Squad main mission, so those of us who have played, finished (or “almost” finished) it decided to get together for a chat and a chin-stroke.

This podcast also features Beige and Pishu’s report from PAX 08, our regular Personal Piles of Shame section and selections from the soundtrack of the game.

Featuring: Chris “RocGaude” Whittington, Mark “Beige” Whiting, Chris “Papapishu” Person and Pete “Angry_Jedi” Davison.

Subscribe using one of the links below:

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