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Persona 4
Topic Started: Dec 21 2008, 02:37 PM (230 Views)
Exalted
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Ziggy had a ray gun.
I purchased Persona 4 last week. Due to a new job I haven't had much time to play, but I am enjoying it considerably more than Persona 3 or its expansion.

I'll start with the bad. Melee damage is no longer split into different sub groups, which basically undoes one of the few things I liked about P3's combat. Also graphically the game seems like a complete rehash at times.

Fortunately the art direction helps with this a great deal. The town itself is intentionally drab. Everything seems mundane, simple. Like a small town really. It works. It's when you enter into the other dimension that the art direction seems complete. Everything is brightly colored; the dungeons at times almost have a childish veneer to them. Which at first masks the truly sinister nature of the events and areas. It reminds me of Legend of Mana: the simple and innocent visuals are used for depictions which are truly horrifying and disturbing.

The gameplay, with the exception of the simplification of melee damage types, is better in every way. You now have complete control over every party member. All of the difficulty levels are available from the start, the game does a much better job of warning you about time limits. Even if the time limit restarts you can opt to reset the game to one month ago and try again. Although it is very unlikely that you will ever have to do this.

The dungeons crawling is better now too in both variety and design. All of the dungeons are directly tied into the games events; as opposed to Persona 3, which used one random dungeon that felt at best abstractly related to the actual plot until the end of the game. Now there are many dungeons that are directly tied into what you are doing at the time. Exhaustion has been removed. This time around SP and HP are just at a premium, and very expensive to heal up regularly. There is now an item that lets you teleport out of the dungeon at any time, you can use the same item to return to the floor you were last on. This is helpful, but you still end up losing a day to heal up

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Darkstalker
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~ The QUEEN ~
Another thing to note is that you can now actually finish dungeons anytime you wanted, as opposed to P3 where you couldn't progress after a certain point because of an arbitrary wall that blocked your progress (another thing that improves both day to day stuff as well as gameplay progression).

There's also more incentive to return to dungeons.*

* I say dungeons, I've only completed one dungeon.
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RiotGrrl
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Errant Dreamer
I'm getting this and FES for Christmas, so I'll probably start out on FES first (having never played P3). One of my friends is playing P4, and he says that it's really very good, but that the beginning of the game was a slow, ala Kingdom Hearts II.
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Darkstalker
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~ The QUEEN ~
It'll take you about 5-6 hours to get a full party.

>_>
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Pervan
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Genetic Failure
Yeah, I was watching a friend play last night, and holy crap it has the longest start up time of any RPG in recent memory. He played almost 2.5 hours before getting a persona, and he rarely let the actors finish saying their lines.
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Darkstalker
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~ The QUEEN ~
Yeah, that 5-6 hours estimate assumes that you're not actually listening to all of the dialogue and just pressing X the moment you finish reading the line, and that you don't linger in dungeons and rush straight through them.
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Johnnygo
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Myopic Islander fan. Thread Killer. Empty Glimmer.
Am I the only one who found it incredibly difficult to go back to P3 after playing P4?

I bought FES when it came out and played through the main game. Put it on the shelf with the intent to go back and play through the bonus chapter later on.

I tried to start it a few months later, but I was in a bad place and watching kids shoot themselves in the head repeatedly wasn't really helping so I shelved it again.

After beating P4 I got the itch, and tried to start it again.

That sound you may have heard was me, screaming obscenities at my team-mates AI. Could only last an hour or so because I was getting so frustrated by the length of fights and watching the AI F$#@ me over left and right.

I dunno, maybe it's just me.

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Darkstalker
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~ The QUEEN ~
It's not just you, P3 does suck like that.

I'd say P4 kinda sucks too, but controllable party members make things so much better, at least for the dungeon crawling parts.
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Johnnygo
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Myopic Islander fan. Thread Killer. Empty Glimmer.
Don't get me wrong, I rather liked P3 the first time through, and thoroughly enjoyed P4. It's just strange how hair-pulling-ly irritating it is to go from 4 to 3.
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