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| Emphasis is on the "fin" part. And that is supposed to be "cogito ergo sum." Three words not two. |
Dear Internet,
I am
finally done with this pile of broken mechanics and out dated game
structure. "Revelations:
Persona" is a bad game. It is the
kind of bad game that decides to rip apart your curtains while you were away at
work, so you make it sleep outside that night except it decides to get into
your garbage cans and throw everything all over your driveway. Then you have to clean up the entire mess and
wash it down in a bath, but it then gets free and leaves a soapy slathering all
over the walls where it chose to shake dry.
In the end, you spent a good deal amount of time fixing a bunch of
problems that the game creates only for the game to then turn to you and say,
"You now have new curtains, a cleaned driveway, and washed walls. Look at what you accomplished." It wants you to be impressed about the fact
that it can now speak your language and how you are now better off than before,
but it ignores the fact that it made a whole bunch of problems instead of helping
to fix them in the first place. That is
what "Persona" is, a talking dog that has read a little philosophy
but is still a dog at the end of the day.
To the
bitter end, "Persona" is about pointless grinding that is not in the
least fun. I was able to get to the
final boss with my team being at an average of level 50. The monsters that I was encountering were in
the 70's easily. The final boss was at
level 99. I am still trying to figure
out how in the world I was able to get so far to the boss with neither dying
nor leveling up accordingly. Even when I
tried to raise the level of my weakest member by only letting him attack, the
game was still frugal with how the experience was being handed out. It would have taken me a good 2 hours to get
everyone at the same level as my best character. Why is it that if I go through a dungeon and
battle every enemy that comes across my way, that I am not sufficiently able to
go toe to toe level wise against the dudgeon boss? It would make sense that if I ran away from
those battles that I would be too low a level to go against the boss, but
"Persona" does nothing akin to this at all. It makes grinding for experience a mandatory
chore rather than an alternative to strategy.
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| Even when facing high level monsters, the EXP payout can be less than substantial. |
The "strategy"
in "Persona" comes in two halves. There is the strategy when fighting common
monsters and the kind when facing the dungeon boss. When fighting common grunts, one has to try
and minimize possible reflection attack, since numerous enemies near the end have
abilities to send back certain types of attacks back at the player. You need to do low damage the first time, and
once the data on the monster is collected, the player can act accordingly. When going against the bosses, the only
viable way to inject strategy into the game at that point is to fight the boss
with the intention of losing. Then the
player can get a grasp of how the boss is going to fight. This is the only viable reason because trying
to figure out a strategy in the middle of a boss fight, even the reserved
firepower kind when fighting grunts, will end with the boss going full out
while the player is collecting information about the boss. This is made exponentially worse by the
game's lack of a competent save system.
I have
said time and time again how the save system of "Persona" is pretty
much broken. There is no possible reason
for making save spots an hour or two apart in games. It just does not make sense and is plain nonsensical. To make a game have such long stretches
between saves is like saying that this game is meant to have a day dedicated to
it. You have to set everything aside to
be able to play this game. You got to
clear your whole schedule for the day to be able to play a game like this
because otherwise you can end up losing an hour or more worth of work. If something comes up, someone calls you on
the phone, or you need to leave the house, you will have to second guess your
priorities because that hour or more of work is going down the drain. This is not a game to be played in your free time.
It is something that takes dedication
that borders on a job. And it is work in
my mind, not a game because a game would not be as tedious as this without some
sort of reward. If you want proof at how
broken this game is, look at the untranslated Snow Queen quest, which has save
points even farther apart from what I can gather. It all comes together to question what exactly
the developers thought was going to happen by putting save points so far
apart. Did they want their customers to
sit for hours on end glued to a game because otherwise they would lose so much
effort, or was the audience actually asking for games to last hours on end to
begin with?
The
story is now finished up and was nothing all that amazing in my opinion. The big reveal in the latter parts was going
for existentialism but came across as trying too hard. A story with just some guy trying to create
his Xanadu palace was good enough for me until the game thought he should have
a personal crisis right before the party wanted to fight him. After that, the plot switched to one
character manifesting their emotional problems into reality that felt more teen
angst than anything else. The only thing
it had going for itself is the art style which liked to delve into a little symbolism
a little too much. But all of this never
got me to care much about playing the game to find out about what happens
next. Instead, I just wanted the ride to
be over.
"Revelations:
Persona" is not a game that can be played in most formats. I understand that the remake for the PSP
included a bunch of new save spots to solve some of these problems, but I
suspect a bit this was more due to the game being put on a portable device
rather than trying to fix the game. There
were a few other changes here and there to fix the game, but the Playstation
version stands as a testament of how bad a game can be. It got to the point where the only way to
even complete the game sanely was to use cheat codes at the very end rather
than spend another countless amount hours of doing the same thing over and over
with next to no variety to level up my party.
In the end, "Persona" should be avoided because of its
perpetual cycle of grinding from one section to the next rather than rewarding
strategy.
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| This is the point where I just stopped caring and wanted it to be over. |
Yours in digital,
BeepBoop
P.S. Tomorrow is "Godzilla Destroy All Monsters"
(1968).
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