Dear Internet,
I
attempted to try and find some playthrough video for a specific boss encounter
for "Revelations: Persona" today.
Now, the information regarding this game is already close to zip
considering that I am playing through the original localized version rather
than the portable re-translation remake for the Playstation Portable. If you try for a web search for game guides
for this game you will only find about three online texts. One of these guides actually only goes as far
as about my day four to five of playing this game. Another one is for the remake, and the last
has a walkthrough that has so little information concerning the bosses that it
makes them come across as being relatively easy. Perhaps this is because of what I realized
today.
I
eventually found a video that I was looking for. Viewing it, I realized that my characters
were five to ten levels lower than what they should be. That can be a huge gap in this game, especially
considering that my lowest character, Mark, is eight levels lower than my
highest, Brad. It all comes back to the
way the game handles the experience levels that makes the game somewhat broken. A character levels up with either how much
damage they do or how helpful they are in the battle. One character seemed to get some experience
for buffing the others, but the majority of the experience is because of damage
dealt. If the character does not deal
damage but lives to the end of the battle, they get a set minimum. If they die before being useful and stay dead,
they get nothing. If they earn some but
then die, they still get what they earn.
The problem arises as when there is a character that is considerably
faster than the rest. He or she will get
off a great attack that can wipe off all the enemies at once. That character gets all the experience and
leaves the rest in the dust. If this
continues for a while, that one character is far ahead of the rest. To combat this problem, you can make that one
character just defend for a few matches and allow the rest of the team to get
in a few attacks. But this creates a new
problem, or at least for me it does.
What happens is that without that one character dealing heavy damage,
the rest must fend off monsters that they are now poorly suited for because of
the level gap. It is possible to do and
make the rest level up to meet that one character, but at that point, the game
is a grindfest, which the game proudly boasts.
The
game is centered on the concept of grinding.
The fact that the localized version is changed so that there are less enemy
encounters and those encounters earn more experience points is just the
starting point of why this game is a grindfest.
It means that if I had played the game in the original format, I would
probably have taken twice as long as I have already done so. On top of that is the lack of dungeon save
points. If one truly feared about losing
all their hard earned work from going through the dungeon, one would backtrack
out and find a savespot. This would mean
going through most dungeons at least twice.
One can make the encounters less difficult by forcing the monsters to
flee by first gaining their Spell Cards, but getting those Spell Cards are
already a grind because one has to play Russian Roulette to get them. Grinding should not be the point of a
game. Anyone can grind in a game. All it takes is lots of time and patience to
do rather than planning things ahead of time and understanding the game
mechanics. There are only two acceptable
camps when it comes to grinding. The
first is what I already described because the player is admitting to his lack
of understanding the way the game wants to be played. There is no shame for doing so as long as the
player realizes that they are banging their head against a wall to get through
a segment. The other acceptable reason,
and the one least questionable on, is that the gameplay is actually fun and
enjoyable. The player is grinding not
for some little token or for experience but because the game is a thrill to
play. "Persona" is not this by
a long shot, especially since grinding is an almost mandatory aspect of the
game.
I want
to address the way the dungeon is presented to the player for a minute. I have already said how the dungeon crawling
is presented in a first person view.
This is almost pointless considering that I spend about 95% of the time
looking at the mini map to figure out where I want to go. There is pretty much no point in even looking
at what the dungeon looks like because it is just repeated walls for the most
part. I have finally come across a
second time where he game decides to put something to switch on and off. The game was also generous in putting a pressure-plate
puzzle for the player to solve. All in
all, it feels like a whole waste of potential since for the majority of the
game, the player does not even have to look where he is going. I wanted to like the art direction because of
how well it tries to create different looking dungeons. But despite this, one rat maze is the same as
another. I am especially torn with the
game's Xanadu castle level and its use of Mesopotamian art styles.
I am
probably going to be forced to grind in this game in the coming days. Am I being forced to grind because I am too good
and can get through a dungeon with enough ease until I hit the boss? Maybe.
This is just the kind of game that would punish the player for not
grinding periodically.
 |
| That is a three level jump for my character after defeating a boss. |
Yours in digital,
BeepBoop
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