What are you playing?

[Guest]

It's literally the worst pissona game. Its gameplay can't hold a candle to propah SMT.

Said as if SMT had good gameplay.

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

Found a guest that got pwnd in the first dungeon of Nocturne.

[rabidtictac]

It's literally the worst pissona game. Its gameplay can't hold a candle to propah SMT.

Said as if SMT had good gameplay.

>thinks pissona has good gameplay
>thinks smt has bad gameplay

Holy shit, king of the bad taste guests. Nice to meet you, your majesty.

[Complicity]

Most of my time has gone into Persona 4 Golden. Great game even for someone not into anime, the game mechanics alone make it good

Find the weakness between 4 WHOLE ELEMENTS, hama/mudo and normal attacks.
And unlike 3 and 5, you can stay in the dungeon as much as you want using the fox and the respawning chests, removing any sense of urgency.

The plot may be the worst i ever saw in a Megaten; with that setting they could have made something like Higurashi, instead they went full Scooby Doo.

In 3, you had characters obtaining their Personas by becoming guinea pigs, shooting themselves in the head in order to force the summon out, and having their Personas evolved after the death of their loved ones.

In 5, you had characters obtaining their Personas after enduring the destruction of their lives.

In 4 you had characters obtaining their Personas after overcoming hardcore drama like "Inaba bores me", "i'm secretly jealous of my bff", "i want to be saved from my dull life by prince charming, and i sound like a literal middle aged cunt with a drinking problem", "i might be a faggot voiced by Soy Baker", "i might be a troon but not really", "i might be a Doraemon clone" and "i'm an idol and i'm secretly an attention whore, what were the odds?".

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

P4's concept of suppressed feelings turning into monsters is basically ripped off from magical girl shows. Except in dumb. That whole idea has been perfected by HeartCatch Pretty Cure a bit later. My personal favorites are "I'm afraid this risky operation that might allow me to walk again will kill me" and "Playing replacement mom for my little sister while I'm not over her death myself is making me go crazy".

[rabidtictac]

Add to that the bosses in pissona 4 are mostly hp sponges. Weakness/strength don't matter as much as they normally would (and you aren't able to cover your weaknesses like a traditional SMT game anyway, since 3/4 party members are preset and can't have their weaknesses modified). You just spam damage while healing. Do that for 40 minutes and you win. Not like SMT, where you can be destroyed in the first round, or absolutely fuck the boss by trolling it with nulls, reflects and stat ups. I think stat ups in pissona are even temporary (turn-limited). Absolutely haram.

Pissona doesn't let you build a squad, either. They give you a sophie's choice between various shitty jrpg cliches. Chad SMT trusts you to build your own party of kickass demons, and the only character you must take into battle is the player insert MC. Who is usually overpowered as fuck to make up for the fact he's not allowed to die. Demon fusing in pissona almost doesn't make sense, considering only 1 out of 4 characters in your party can benefit from it. You can never use 4 kickass demons at once, only 1 at a time. You're not allowed to come up with your own strategies, only discover synergies between MC and various party combinations. You can't truly create your own party.

But mainly pissona sucks because you can't have a party consisting of main character + 3 penis demons.

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

Add to that the bosses in pissona 4 are mostly hp sponges. Weakness/strength don't matter as much as they normally would (and you aren't able to cover your weaknesses like a traditional SMT game anyway, since 3/4 party members are preset and can't have their weaknesses modified).

Except P4 has a "Defend" command which lets you temporarily ignore any Weakness you have, just in case you brought the wrong team to a boss fight.

[Guest]

It's literally the worst pissona game. Its gameplay can't hold a candle to propah SMT.

Said as if SMT had good gameplay.

>thinks pissona has good gameplay
>thinks smt has bad gameplay

Holy shit, king of the bad taste guests. Nice to meet you, your majesty.

fuck you liar, i never said that and you know i didnt

all JRPGs are trash

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

You have obviously never touched Blue Reflection, a RPG so revolutionary that it doesn't even have XP. The only way for you to become stronger is to deepen your bonds with your friends, which all ties back to the overal theme of connecting with others and understanding their feelings, all delivered with a delicate subtlety that these brutish walking simulators just lack.

It also uses an ingenious and downright surreal way of telling a Slice-of-Life story by never showing any adults. They might be in a scene, but you never see them. Turning them into strange, faceless entities just highlights that magical girls, with all their demon-slaying power, are incapable of affecting the world ruled by adults.

[rabidtictac]

Add to that the bosses in pissona 4 are mostly hp sponges. Weakness/strength don't matter as much as they normally would (and you aren't able to cover your weaknesses like a traditional SMT game anyway, since 3/4 party members are preset and can't have their weaknesses modified).

Except P4 has a "Defend" command which lets you temporarily ignore any Weakness you have, just in case you brought the wrong team to a boss fight.

Lazy and shitty attempt to hotfix poor design. A better fix would be to make all pissona characters' personas customizable, if we MUST have party members at all (rather than demons.)

Soul Hackers has a persona-like story, but with propa SMT gameplay and demon party members. I wish they would have just gone that route for the more mainstream jrpg titles like pissona.

SpoilerShow

And yes, Nemissa is a demon, not a human.

Or they could have gone the Devil Survivor route and give you static party members without fixed personas or fixed elemental alignments. Maybe each party member could have had an empty "persona" slot, to be filled by whatever demon you want.