Dear Internet,
It is
now day four of "Revelations: Persona." Has it overstayed its welcome? Not yet, but it runs a fine line
constantly. It has both feet on the line
right now, but it teeters constantly between being either boring or
frustrating. On one hand is the threat
of being boring because the minor enemies can be easy to the point where the
player just needs to spam the strongest attacks to wipe out the opposition. The only time when the minor enemies are not
being monster fodder is when the player first comes across a new one. After beating an enemy, the player gains the
ability to see the complete stats for that monster, with strengths and
weaknesses being shown. After that, the
player can look up the info instantly before issuing orders. While this is a nice mechanic that I am
grateful for, the problem is that when it comes to the smaller enemies, they
are not all that enjoyable to beat. I am
on pins and needles when fighting them the first time, never using a very
strong technique for fear of it being reflected back on me. After that, it is less about trying to work a
system than it is to responding to prompts.
If the monster has a weakness to fire, you use fire if you can. If you have no fire option, you just go back
to hitting the wall with your head. Both
options are viable.
The
opposite side is the frustrating aspect.
I have already mentioned how every time an enemy appears, one has to
slow down the game to a crawl to prevent using the wrong attack on an unknown
enemy. This I do not mind too much since
using caution is a staple of this kind of game.
What makes the game frustrating are the bosses and how they are handled. The player will typically faces against a
dungeon boss having played twenty minutes plus since the last save. Unlike games that are smart enough to put
save spots right before the dungeon boss, "Persona" chooses to make
the player slog through a maze and then face a boss with the consequence of losing
being the loss of a substantial loss of time.
I have already detailed my exploits with RoboRat. Today, the game decided to do a double screw
to the player. The first came with the
worst dungeon so far, being the Harem Queen dungeon. It is a headache of immense proportions. The dungeon is filled with mandatory pitfalls
that drop the player down the floor beneath.
There is also an elevator that the player has to use to make matters
more difficult. It probably would have
taken me two to three hours to navigate the maze if I had not consulted a
guide, but I will get to that in a minute.
Once you finally get to the bottom of the maze, the game throws you back
to the top and makes you do it again. I
guess the second time is supposed to be easier or something, but it only adds
useless filler to the game. When you get
to the dungeon boss a second time, you have to then fight it with only two of
your five members. All your best laid
plans are then thrown out the door because of this. Luckily, I was able to switch up my main
attacker as the healer and the healer as the main attacker. Otherwise, that would have been another
twenty minutes down the drain. After
that, the game decides to not throw you out to the start of the dungeon like
nearly every other dungeon, but that is only a minor annoyance.
 |
| This is what happens when the correct action just makes more handicaps for the player. |
The
next big annoyance is then made from forcing the player to travel to a
location, only to learn that they must backtrack across town and through a
dungeon. When the player gets the plot
item, they must then retrace their steps to the first location, but that is for
tomorrow. This pretty much sums up a lot
about "Persona." The game has
a lot of backtracking that only adds filler to a game that should not take so
long to play. On top of that is the bare
bones information that is given to the player.
You should never take a day break while playing this game because you
will most likely forget what you were doing.
You will have next to no help in being reminded about where you should
be going. It is because of games like
this that later games started to utilize "synopsis" items in the menu
to remind the player what they should be doing.
Giving only a single line about the next objective does not encourage
the player to pay attention if the rest of the dialog is drivel filled teenage
drama. I am looking straight at the
Harem Queen side-plot when I say this. What
makes it extra annoying is how these side-plots seem to be shoveled in like
they were implanted at the last second.
A character is introduced in a split second and then a dungeon or
side-pot is introduced to capitalize upon it despite it being a clear deviation
away from the central plot. Did the
Harem Queen have anything to do with Guido, the currently primary
antagonist? No, it was a three hour
detour to showcase a monkey-paw plot about the girl in the black dress.
All
this add up to the fine line I was mentioning before. I also mentioned about a guide, and I should
address this before getting much farther.
This game requires a guide. There
is no way around this fact. Unless you
are reading a guide to determine the best course of action, you will spend
hours painlessly going in circles. This
game came out in a time where games had to maximize the amount of time that a
player could pour into the game. It was
not uncommon for games to take a hundred hours or more to get through. The problem with those hundred or more hours
was that most of that time was useless empty of content and made up of grinding
and getting lost. Unless the game is
constantly throwing interesting content at the player, it is just the same
thing over and over ad nauseam. "Persona"
is a game that I might have taken twice as long to get through to get at this
point. This is not even mentioning the
instances that I know about where the player can give the wrong answer to a
question and lock themselves into a bad end.
If the player does not have a guide to let them know this, they can get
caught only having a save from after they make this game ending decision. When they realize that they have no
pre-decision save, they will be forced to start the whole game over. If that is not artificial lengthening, I do
not know what it. This is not a game
that encourages another play through to see the other possibilities. This is a game that can force a forty plus
replay because the player made a wrong decision, which is understandable
considering nearly every decision made prior has had no real consequences and
is usually badly translated.
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| An example of the translation job. |
I will
stop there for today, Internet. We shall
see how tomorrow is. And it looks like I
have officially passed the 1000 view now.
I guess that is worth a celebration.
Time to break open the good bottle of water.
Yours in digital,
BeepBoop
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