Gladly. Someone who's more in the know should fish up the proper contact stuff.

I think the battle system is good because:

A) Given that you can split up, it also works as a single-character battle system.

B) The party AI is good.

It's not like the AI party members was some cute idea tacked on the last minute. It's balanced around it entirely.

sgf did sort of bug me in that every character basically had the same subquests. i mean, that applies to the series as a whole actually, but SGF's were just the magic-related ones.

what's neat with romancing saga is the way the skill system's set up, you'll be doing moderately different stuff in the missions with different characters. SGF's skillset was sort of limitted in this regard.

i also liked how in unlimited saga you had the swimming and climbing skills so that, similarly, the same dungeon would play differently for different characters <:(

er, anyway. It's not worth worrying about the event rank. Do so and you'll just get a bunch of finicky numbers games going on. Play normally, let whatever happens happen, and go with it. trying to do every single mission in every game is also going to get repetitive as hell, by the way.

That's also how i feel about playing persona 3 again ;)

I got his name from a list of japanese boys names so its inadvertantly really similar to that grey-haired kids' name.

Here's hoping other people like it a lot and that we get FES.

Didn't it also come out in the same two week period as Shadow of the colossus and dds2?

buh. they're not similar at all.



Depends on the character.

In general though the only NPCs you can talk to are the ones that are involved in the 'active' quest, and then you have a few other townie NPCs (who I think vary per character?). In any case as long as you check the bars and explore a little, you should find the questgivers alright. They're actually quiiiite easy to find. If you're having trouble finding a quest then the most likely case is that there aren't any open at that given moment.

Story quests usually get shoved on you after a certain event rank though, I believe. It's relatively hard/impossible to miss these ones.

i like unclear objectives myself personally, but im not the sort of person who's obsessed with completing everything. i like being surprised by stuff. its like how in the persona 3 how i think that if you know exactly how to get all of the characters to like you and trigger all the little sidestories... well, there's no real fun in exploring the game or playing it on your own.

anyway that sort of exploratory mindset was really prevelant with old pc games and i really like it and thats why i like kawazu games so much (!?"). for another example of what i mean, the game sundog: frozen legacy had intentionally sparse documentation so that the player could discover things on their own.

Anyway, I've noticed that someone mentioned the proper choices for making friends are easy to figure out, which is true, but I think it's more fun to occaisionally take the wrong choices just to see what happens. doing this dating sim stuff JUST for the sake of the experience ups on persona creation just seems sort of the wrong reason to me. i mean it's a nice gameplay centric bonus, but the stuff's just neat to do for the sake of seeing what happens.

Also it's a neat metaphor, with the social links. The more people know you, the more personas you have cause you've got more people to... er, put on your different personas in front of. Likewise, the way you make choices? Same thing. The game sort of coerces you into acting differently around the different characters. You might GIVE nice responses, not cause you, say, really like the ramen that Kenji does, but just because it's polite or whatever.

I like the characters more than Eternal Punishment's too. They're more like Persona 1's and relatively normal and pretty realistic. I mean, sure, eventually you get a robot girl, but besides her.

I would't mind more variation in the dungeon appearance though :x

So it's less like a strategy RPG and more like normal D&D then, with the dungeon crawl elements and lack of grinding?

What's the overarching structure, outside of battles? Is it like FFT where you have a worldmap thing? FE where you're just sort of scuttled along?

When your party members are seperated, how are individual battle wins/losses calculated? Do they take into account elemental strengths and weaknesses at all

What is it that makes Suik 2 so special? I played a fairly big part of 1 (Ten hours or so?) but it seemed like pretty much generic late 16-bit era RPG.

If I actually had an attention span, I'd be learning Russian and writing novels.

Sure, but the intro was still too long.

It's a videogame. Barely-interactive, half-hour long opening sequences sort of go against the whole 'game' concept.

Sticking a half-hour long non-interactive bit towards the middle or end is alright, but *not* at the beginning. That does *not* hook the player.

Anyway, Iori sort of looks like US Mark, sans for the whole 'being black' thing. Outfit's almost the same, only grey, and the attitude is similar.

This game sort of has a Nintendo-game feel to it in the sense that it seems like there's more stuff to do as you go along, which I rather like.

anyway, gamespot's review mentioned it can get a bit tedious to trek through the dungeons repeatedly. Something I've noticed, though, is that using the 'split up' option can greatly reduce the time you need, in addition to leading to some interesting one-on-three situations and the like.

---yeditye---

Also, I keep seeing little parallels to devil summoner, gameplay wise (though, isn't the cop in P3 named Kuzunoha? Or aren't pretty much all of the cops in the SMT games named that or something?) The ability to split up is sort of like how you could control a single demon in DS, as is the AI control in battles (Though, Persona 3's guys are thankfully a lot better working, although it seemed inDS that some demons just had better AI than others. Was there some stat behind this?)

I'm sort of worried people migth, say, play the first two hours of Persona 3 and give up because nothing really happens till past that. I mean, hell, I almost gave up on it.

Anyway, I definitely feel the battle system is more balanced than Persona 2's.

BTW, are there any story/setting connections to the first three games?