They want to eat a nut of Laerma

I keep thinking my next post will be about AWA 2014 or my Japan trip, but I'm way too lazy to go through my pictures. But I feel like posting something now.

Very rarely, I'll decide to pick up a really old game and play it. One time it was Summon Night, which was an okay game. This time, I'm playing Persona... as in, the old 1996 Playstation version of Persona 1. Dang, this game is old, and it shows. To be honest, I keep hearing good things about the game, but I'm betting most of those reviews I saw were made when the game first came out, or a few years afterwards.

See, I'm not sure this game aged too well. Playing it now, I'm not sure I can say it's a good game. I'm a little under halfway through the Sebec quest... I think... and I'll say it has a few interesting mechanics. Overall though? There are a lot of design decisions that in today's day and age, are simply quite bad. In fact, some of them are quite bad in any day and age.

I can imagine it when it first came out, though. "Oh, these characters shout battle cries! That's awesome!" Or, "Lookit me summon this big dude and... maybe do something cool if this spell doesn't suck!" And, "Oooooh, a 3D overworld! 3D dungeons! And 3D movies! With voice acting!" And I can see why they did this - the game was released in the early days of the Playstation, when 3D became reality and everyone was wondering how to make games with 3D graphics. So, sticking a few 3D movies in with some voice acting would be cool, and making the world map into a 3D stage would be impressive. And eventually someone would reach way back into the first forays into 3D dungeons (like Phantasy Star), and make the players navigate tile dungeons in first-person. And none of that is bad.

But this is just aesthetics. It's just how it looks. When you get past that and into the gameplay, there are some interesting things in the game, but ultimately it's dragged down by how much the game drags on - about 40% through the game, I've racked up around 30 hours, but that's only because the game eats up that much time. With what I've done (about 5 dungeons), any game now I should have passed anywhere from 16 to 20 hours worth of gameplay.

And the reason why is just because the game wants you to fight a lot, and the game wants you to use your Persona a lot. See, every character has two levels: their character level, and their persona level. The latter of these goes up faster when you use persona, and your persona level determines the highest level persona you can equip.

But that's not all: each individual Persona has a rank, which always starts at 1 when they're created. When they're at rank 1, they have one skill and some basic stats. They'll gain more skills and get stronger stats when their rank increases, but you can only do that how? That's right - by using that Persona. So even when you have regular attacks that are a lot quicker than sitting through a Persona summon, the game encourages you to use and abuse your Persona. You even recover SP at the start of every battle. The game hammers this into you - it's okay to use your Persona, in fact you should use it every turn you get.

The problem is that summoning a Persona, and watching it cast its spell or whack your enemies takes a bit of time - maybe about 6 to 8 seconds for the faster attacks. You have five characters in your party. Enemy attacks take just as long, if not longer. Add all that up, and by the time one combat turn has passed, it's been a whole minute, and you're still not done fighting. You get into a battle, and it takes a few minutes for the thing to play out... and then when you finally make it back to the dungeon, you'll remember that the encounter rate is ridiculously high and your step count can be, like... one. A single step. It's got so bad that I've been browsing the internet while the fight plays out, or playing Cinderella Girls or something.

Let me get to the real cardinal sin though: characters gain experience only when they take their turn. Not when you decide what the guy's going to do, but when they actually cast that spell, or use that item, or whatever... that's when they get experience. They'll get more or less experience depending on what they do, and I'm not even sure how the game doles the stuff out other than by how much damage you do, or how many targets you hit at once. What does this mean?

Characters with better Persona skills will get more experience than characters who say, only have single target skills. Characters that are slower will take less turns, and thus they'll lag behind the faster characters in level ups.

Is this fair? No... it's not. I don't even know why they thought this was a good idea, but your slow, hulking tank is going to miss out on some Exp. just because everyone else gets one more turn than him. If he's better at soaking hits than dishing out damage, he's also going to miss out on Exp. because you get more by making quality hits, rather than eating quality hits and turning them into nothing.

I mean, the extra Playstation muscle power doesn't have anything to do with this - it's just bad gameplay, and it fights what the game does well. There's a portion of this game that's just brilliant, with all the talking you can do with your enemies, and the spell card fusion... but at the end of the day, the fact that it takes like, an hour just to walk from one end of the city to the other (due to all the fights along the way) makes it so you don't want to deal with this stuff if you can possibly help it.

And then there's the battle formations that make it so that you can't target just anything you want. If there's any melee attack you want to do, and some Persona have them, both you and the enemy you want to beat up have to be on certain points of the grid. If you're on the left part of the grid, and they're on the right... well, too bad, you can't hit him unless you burn an entire turn moving.

Add this to the fact that the game isn't very well written. I realize I'm saying this without speaking Japanese natively, but the scenes aren't very engaging, and the dialogue is a little generic. Interesting things might happen, but well... real people might talk the way these characters talk like, but very often real people aren't as interesting as fictional characters can be.

Maybe I should have gotten the portable remake of this instead, but for some reason, I feel obligated to sit through the game as it was first made, to see the real beginnings of the Persona series. Eventually, I'll skip these first releases and go straight to the remakes, but for now...

... Sometimes I wonder why I'm like this. I'm only doing the Sebec quest though. Not going to touch the Ice Queen quest at all... so my party is:

Cael - The protagonist, me, who wants to get away from Emperor cards and into World or Moon cards.
Maki - The healer, because she has to be in the party.
Mark - Because he's forced in the party.
Nanjou - Don't like him, but guess what? He's also a forced include.
Eri - The only free choice I have, and the character I like most.