"Revelations: Persona" Announcement

Dear Internet,

          I will not be streaming "Revelations: Persona" today due to technical difficulties.  Please expect this to be the same situation for the rest of the review of the game unless I state otherwise.

Yours in digital,
BeepBoop

"Entry 073: "Revelations: Persona" Pt. 4

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.   

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

Entry 073: "Revelations: Persona" Pt. 3

Dear Internet,

                I am not so small that I cannot admit when I am wrong.  It would behoove me to say that my observation is inaccurate when it is such.  During today's five or so hours of "revelations: Persona," I came across a number of things that contradict my previous letters to you.  Some of them flat out make me rescind a criticism, while others only alter the criticism a minor amount.  

                For starters, one of the big things I did not like was the exclusion of a world map to navigate the overworld.  I said this because opening up the menu and navigating to the "Map" option would yield nothing.  However, there is indeed a world map included in the game.  It is even fully labeled.  To bring it up I had to use one of the trigger buttons.  Sadly, since I have to play the game without any included manual, I am relying solely upon the instructions included in the game.  The game does not tell you that you have the ability to look at a map, so I am assuming that the instruction manual explicitly stated as such.  If the instruction manual does not say as such, then the criticism against the game stands just as firm as when I said it.  However, the fact that the game does nothing to let the player know about such a feature at any part of the game is still a strike against it.  

At least I leveled up quite a bit by wandering an hour around and around.

                Then there is the game mechanic where the player recruits the demons to join the player.  I mistakenly used the term "soul cards" throughout the previous entry.  The correct term is "Spell Card."  Either way, the game still handles interacting with the demons as being awkward and unreliable.  One moment dancing is pleasing to the demon.  In the next moment, the same demon thinks you are mocking it by dancing.  Only after grinding for these cards can the player begin to get a feel for what would be a successful interaction.  By spending a little time grinding today, I was able to find a few things that the game does right concerning this mechanic.  The foremost is the various interactions that the demons respond with.  Until they begin to repeat, which is not occurring too much right now, each demon has a rather individual personality.  What makes it entertaining is their reactions to your prompts.  When one of my male characters begins to hit on another male demon, the demon will reply with a rather timid response wondering if the player character is sane or just plain weird.  Some of the responses can be downright funny and sometimes worth exploring the various interactions.  The best thing about the mechanic that I discovered today was that trying to interact with demons whose spell cards you already have in your possession flee upon being talked to.  On top of that, they will sometimes give the player a bonus item.  The reason that I like this feature is that when the player is spending time to grind for cards, they can clear away the monsters that they do not need for the battle.  If an interaction goes sour and the demon is enraged, the player is only then forced to battle the one monster type that he failed to interact instead of having to fight all the monsters in the battle.  It is important to remember that when an interaction goes sour, the player can lose a whole turn because of it or get a status effect.  Being able to clear away the unneeded monsters lowers the ante that the player is forced to make.

                I am not sure if I mentioned money yet, Internet.  At the end of a battle that the player won by defeating the enemy through fighting, instead of talking to the demons, money is awarded.  Sometimes demons will ask for some cash.  The player can give it to them to placate the monsters.  Other than that, I am more than ten hours in, and I have just finally found a store to buy things to spend the three grand that I have accumulated.  The problem is that when I go to buy equipment for my characters, the store has no way of informing me as to whether or not the equipment will be better or worse than my equipped items.  This means that I am buying blind and cannot know if the item I am buying is better or worse without writing all the information down to determine the truth.  I would have to write down all the stats for the equipment I currently have and cross reference that with the items in the store.  It gets worse because not all items can be equipped to all the characters.  Some characters can only wield certain weapons.  Again, I am buying rather blind and cannot seem to find vital information about the items until I have already bought the equipment.  Because of this, I am sticking to whatever I pick up along the way.

                There are a few things that I liked about today's playthrough.  RoboRat, the cause of my forty-five minute loss of time, apparently chose not to use "Nuke" on me.  I am not sure if this is because I mixed p my equipped Persona or because I was able to kill it before it got a chance.  Since I had a much easier time against the mechanical rodent, I was able to enjoy the background music that played while the battle was fought.  The game has a nice selection of music so far, at least when it decides to try.  Short of the hospital's creepy screaming track, the dungeons are echoing hallways where footsteps sound like a cross between cymbals and clogs.  The Velvet Room song and those that play in the stores do a great job of creating a unique setting within the game.

Now this is satisfying.

                So there you have it, Internet, a few rescinded criticisms, a few new ones, and a dash of praise to make it all bittersweet.  The story is still rather hollow and more than a bit uninteresting.  The fact that it continues to progress now that I make use of different Personas is about the all that makes me continue to play.  The game is still handing me more Persona combinations that I am unable to use than those that I can, which makes the game annoying rather than difficult.  Let us hope tomorrow is a bit more fun.

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop

Entry 072: "Revelations: Persona" Pt. 2

I have never seen so many loading screens, and at the same time them last so little.

Dear Internet,

                Well, I was wondering how soon it would be before I got a "game over."  I think it happened around the six hour mark, or maybe the seven hour mark.  I am not sure.  What I am sure about is the forty-five minutes of gameplay I lost because the game does not like to give you savepoints among other things.  I can understand a game having only a few savepoints to make the player more conscience about their actions.  Rougelike games have this aspect hardwired into the gameplay.  They are made so that the player losses either all their data or a large chuck of it because of a lack of consistent save points.  That is understandable, but only to a point.  The point that I get upset about is when the game decides that added game mechanics that had been left out are suddenly vital to forwarding the game while at the same time punishing the player for not learning quick enough.  That is a bit to say and should be broken up a bit.

                I want to recall my review about "Brutal Legend."  In it, I mentioned a simple thing: do not teach in the middle of a test."  That means that a game should not try to instruct the player about a game mechanic while at the same time testing the player either on that same mechanic or some older one.  "Persona" does this with its demon card mechanic.  About five hours in, the game decides to let me on in a little secret.  I can talk to the demons that I am fighting and get soul cards.  I can then merge these cards together and gain access to stronger Persona, or magical creatures that fight for me if you want to simplify it.  Since up to that point I had absolutely no trouble in defeating anything that came my way, I decided to keep banging my head against the wall, I mean attack head on with a few magic attacks scattered here and there.  However, eventually I came across an enemy that had an attack that could take out half my team in one go and leave me struggling to stand back up.  Doing my normal thing could not cut it and forced a game over.  Forty five minutes down the drain.

                Why do I mention the two together?  Is it because at that point I lost all the calluses that my head banging worked up?  No, it is because the game pretty much was saying that I needed to start grinding for soul cards and Personas because it was attacking with methods specifically targeted towards players who did not change up their team's mechanics.  I do not mind this too much in some games.  Games are supposed to make the player think about different ways to solve a puzzle or overcome an obstacle.  But when they begin to attach a forty plus minute penalty because the player is given a challenge that they cannot prepare for, I call unfairness.  This example of loss time is not even the worst example.  Twice now, I have noticed that the amount of time between available savespots was about an hour and a half.  If I had died for any little thing, that would have been an hour plus down the drain.  Maybe I would not mind it if the game did not have so many things lined up to shoot down the player.

                There are the interactions with the enemy for starters.  I said you can talk to the demons to get them to hand over soul cards.  To do this, you have to select one of your five team members and select one of their four unique options.  Each of these twenty options will interact differently with the demons.  The demons themselves have different properties like happy, strong, weak and so forth.  You are supposed to think about how the various interactions would appeal to the demons and make them side with you.  However, the way it works out is like a cross between Russian Roulette and Old Maid.  Each of the various demons acts nearly completely different than those that have similar characteristics.  While "Sing" might work on one "Happy" demon, it will have the opposite effect on another "Happy" demon.  Sometimes using "Sing" on the same demon will have different effects.  There is supposed to be some sort of influence during the fazes of the moon, which is an in game time keeper, but the game does nothing to tell you about what is the best time to do so.  Is a full moon better than a new moon?  There is nothing to suggest either because the game is extremely frugal with its instructions.  So the player has to almost choose at random from the twenty different interactions hoping that they are not going to incite the demon.  This is where the Russian Roulette part comes in.  If you make the wrong interaction, which is more likely than a neutral interaction or a positive one, the demon will get upset enough that something will occur to affect the battle.  The character might be stricken with terror and cannot move or something to that effect.  What is much more likely to occur is that the demon will become enraged and have its stats boosted.  Afterwards, the demon will begin to scrub the floor with the player.

                At that point, unless you want to risk coming across an enemy that you might tick off by dancing within its vicinity, the best option is to grind for a soul card right next to a save and healing spot.  Between never venturing more than five spaces away from a save spot and trying to sing to demons, I finally was able to chance getting two soul cards.  Then I was able to merge them and get a really strong Persona to fight by my side.  I go to equip the demon thing and what happens?  The game will not let me equip it because it is too strong for any of my characters.  What is the point of even letting me get the Persona if the game will not let me use it?  The point of finally figuring out how the blasted system works and getting it to do what I want seems to be moot because the game decides to hand me things it will not allow me to use.  This is as bad as "Borderlands," which would hand you countless weapons that you could not use until you leveled up.  You would hold onto that gun until you could use it, only to find that the randomly dropped common weapons by that time greatly overshadowed the special gun you wasted an inventory space for hours.  "Persona" is perhaps the inverse of that plus more.  Instead of spending an hour waiting to get to use a weapon, you spend an hour trying to get a weapon you cannot use and then spend another few hours waiting to use it.  From what I read online, you might end up with a Persona that none of your characters can use, but I am unsure of that.

Perhaps it is all a subtle "Blue Velvet" reference.

                The whole thing just feels like a tumbling mess of problems.  You can easily get to the point that you are surrounded by enemies with no added Personas because the game makes no push for you to make use of the side game mechanic until it is too late.  The difficulty curve comes out of nowhere come post-factory levels.  It was only after seven hours did I start to actually think seriously about the fights because I began to worry about losing.  Suddenly, the dungeons become like truly pointless mazes with no point in going down the dead ends, the kind meant for mice.  Sadly, the cheese at the end of the maze is not quite worth it, and the maze is not fun either.  The story gets boring rather quickly and begins to completely ignore some aspects.

                For example, after fainting early in the story, the school nurse, who is actually a doctor, clears you as medically fit.  A teacher, who does not believe the expertise of a medical doctor in inspecting whether or not a person is medically fit, tells you and your group to go to a hospital.   In the hospital, you are placed in a position to either aid a woman trapped under a bookcase or leave her.  I tried to help her and was forced into a battle.  After the battle, the woman disappears and is not even mentioned.  Nobody talks about her and the issue is brushed under the rug, or bookshelf in this case.  The rest of the story seems to be threadbare.  Demons are escaping into the world and Guido Sardenia is the cause.  The protagonists believe that killing him will stop the demons.  This makes as much sense as saying that killing an arsonist will stop the wildfire.  Perhaps the rest of the story will elaborate upon the various ends that the characters are aiming for, but I find myself not even caring about either them or the story.

                I will try for one more day to get through this game.  If nothing causes me to even want to continue to play this game, I might have to drop it in favor of continuing the Backlog.  This is a last resort, I assure you.  I do not want to skimp on what I said I would do.  However, this game truly is trying to test my patience between slow and boring gameplay that is either too easy or too broken and a story that is only half there.  

Did I mention that experience is based on how useful the character was in battle?

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop

Entry 071: "Revelations: Persona" Pt. 1

Japan needs to learn to make their games with shorter titles.

Dear Internet,

                Well, "Shin Megami Tensei: Persona" is not near as depressing as I feared it might be.  Actually I am using the wrong title for the game I am playing and should probably call it by its correct name, less because it is proper to call a dog a dog and more because it is easier to spell than canine.  "Revelations: Persona" was made back in the '90s and released here in North America in 1997 for the Playstation.  Do you remember the Playstation, Internet?  No, not the ones with numbers afterwards that kept talking to you, I mean the first one, the one that at first did not have control sticks.  "Persona" is a spinoff game series from the "Shin Megami Tensei" series, both of which are seeing a greater fan following in recent years.

                "Persona" is a dungeon type RPG that harkens back to video game mechanics that are rarely seen now-a-days.  You move in a two dimensional dungeon with the occasional stairway leading to a new plane.  The dungeon is rendered in 3D but the player moves along a grid track with the camera at the character's eye height.  There are turn based battles where the player chooses a set of actions that determine how the character team acts against the monsters.  Melee attacks, magic and item usage area all there waiting for the player.  The over world is broken down in a similar method by making the player move along a grid based map, moving one square at a time.  There are a few special rooms here and there, where the player can move in a pre-rendered environment that turns 45 degrees to make the player move along a diamond type environment.  There, the player can interact with the few NPCs of the game and look for the occasional item.

As you can see, even the characters feel at odds with the 45 degree rooms.

                So, Internet, you are probably asking what the big twist is since much of what I have described says more about a whole genre of dungeon crawlers rather than "Persona" specifically.  Well, it is set in the modern day world with high school students in either Japan or the US, depending on who you ask.  From the depths of their psyche they summon spirits to fight for them as they battle through demon filled streets and zombie filled hospitals.  They use everything from scalpels and mops to fight, until they get to use Uzis and rifles.  So far, it is a rather interesting experience to be making a rag-tag group of teenagers using everything from police grade firearms to common gym equipment to fight spirits wishing to create ruin upon man.  You can also negotiate with the ghosts and such, but I will get to that some other time.

                In the first four to five hours, there are a few things off the back that need to be addressed.  The most problematic is the overworld, or the one that the player uses to get from dungeon to dungeon.  There is no map to let you know where you are or where you are supposed to go.  While I might not usually count this against the game, especially since it is coming from a long line of games that would not even give a map to the player but instead make the player draw it out on real paper with a pencil, the fact remains that there is sometimes nothing for the player to go off of to find what they are looking for.  I can give two examples of this.  The first location that the player has to navigate to is the hospital.  The player is told that it is not far away and is towards the north east direction.  What the game does not say is that the hospital is on the other side of the map and is the farthest location from the school where you start from.  The second example is when the player must go to the local shrine.  None of the characters, when talked to, tell the player where it is, what direction it is located towards, or even what it is near.  What happened was I wandered for the better half of an hour going in circles looking for a place that I could not even identify if I walked past it.  In fact, the only way that I could know if I was near it was when I was walking right next to the shrine.  The overworld camera gives the player very little to be able to see.  You see right ahead, and only about five or so spaces forward.  With no overworld map, you can even get completely lost and forced to find some nearby location to find your bearing.  Again, I would not mind this and see it as a part of the game mechanic if it were not for the fact that when you are in a dungeon a map is generated for you to examine when playing.  I cannot look over the fact that the game completely forgets to tell you where the place you need to go is located.  When you have to look for the abandoned factory, the same thing happens with all the characters telling you to go to there and making some great assumption that you know what they are talking about.

Notice that the game tells you which direction you are facing twice in this picture.

                The dungeons themselves do not strike me as very interesting in general.  The dungeons, which the game actually labels as such, so far are the school, hospital, police station, and abandoned factory.  All of them feel terribly linear, minus the school which is more a hub rather than a dungeon.  It is not "one long hallway with no turnoffs" linear mind you.  That is much worse than this.  The dungeons in "Persona" are linear because there is no point in going off into dead ends.  The player is given a mini-map in the top right corner that gives ample warning that turning off into one direction will lead to a dead end.  The problem is that so far there is no reason to even go down those dead ends.  There is almost nothing to interact with while dungeon crawling.  There are no items scattered around or little bits of information at those dead ends.  Why make dead ends if you can see them coming and refuse to warrant exploring them?  It is only at the factory that the game finally makes a reason to explore the full dungeon by making the player activate switches to advance.  By that time, the game has conditioned the player to not even look for anything in the dungeon other than the exit that one might think the game is being clever to make the player forget to explore, but I will hold my judgment about that until later.

This is the only thing in four hours that I had to look for that was not a door.

                I really want to like the dungeon, too.  After going through the hospital, the first real dungeon, I was hoping that the rest would feel as interesting.  What made me think this is most likely because as the player moves about the hospital, terrible shrieks of people echo the hallways as the dead rise from their slumber, attacking any who get in their way.  The screams really added to the atmosphere and make me hesitate to move since it created a sense of panic.  However, as I continued to play the game, one particular problem with the audio continued to make itself known.  I can hear the character's footsteps echoing constantly.  There are only about four or so foley sounds that the game recycles over and over.  The constant sounds of footsteps are so loud that they became annoying fast.  

                I'll stop here for now, Internet.  There are a few other things that I want to cover about the game mechanics that I want to talk about, but I will refrain from doing so because I want to keep playing before touching upon them.

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop