02.02.12 / Atlus, RPG, Sony PSP, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (0)
Tags: innocent sin, persona 2
I thought I’d be done by now, but this game is longer than I’d thought. I checked the time and I’m 19 hours in, but it feels like 190.
Part of it is my fault for just not having the time, and for spending what little time I got on the theater missions.
This shit. Cut it out.
Some of it is also just Innocent Sin taking for-f’ing-ever to get to the point. And they’ve been doing that thing I hate: “Is she…no, don’t tell me…” “It must be… no, it couldn’t be… could it?” WTF JUST SPIT IT OUT ALREADY, DAMMIT! I hate cryptic hints. If IS were a book or a movie I would have skipped to the end by now.
Not that I’m not enjoying myself or anything, now that the story has finally gotten going. Just finished the Aerospace Museum (with Pegasus Strike taking 415HP per round off the boss’s life, that didn’t take long), about to head off to the Alaya Shrine, where Lisa promises to tell me “everything”. If it turns out to be some FF8-style bullshit about how they all played together as kids but then they all got *gasp* amnesia, I swear I’ll murder something small and fluffy.
In any case, I think the game wasted far too much time in the beginning with Eikichi and Ginko’s stories. As far as I can tell, the bulk of the story revolves around Tatsuya and Maya and whatever relationship they had or didn’t have in the past. The other party members are just bit players, so it’s annoying that I had to spend the first 15 or so hours on them.
SPOILERS
Turns out "dependant" is the bastardized American spelling of "dependent." What are journalism schools teaching their students these days?
Ginko’s was especially bad because she’s such an idiot. “I don’t want to be an idol, I don’t want to be an idol” but she ended up debuting anyway. And she was supposed to root out information about the Masked Circle in the process, but instead she nearly got taken in by them. I thought it would turn out that she was just pretending to be going along with the whole thing, but she acted genuinely shocked when the producer turned out to be bad. Just how stupid can one be?
Then with her friends she was all like “They’re not really my friends, they’re just using me” but then when the dumb cows get turned into shadowmen, she goes “Oh no, if only I’d believed in them!” If only you’d believed in them, then what? Newsflash, they may be your friends, but they were just using you. Plus! On top of all her other sins, she also helped the bad guys get one step closer to their evil goal by singing their “foreign song.” Girl, iz you crazy? Guess what they say about dumb blondes was true all along.
SPOILERS OVER
Anyway, so far so good. I think I finally “paid my dues” by slogging through the dross, so soon I should be rewarded with that “wonderful story” that everyone keeps going on about. To be honest I care a lot when stories turn out to be bad but otherwise *shrug*. Just don’t piss me off in the end, that’s all I ask.
28.01.12 / Atlus, RPG, Sony PSP, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (15)
Tags: innocent sin, persona 2
Back to my roots~ Back to my roo-woo-woo-woo-woots~ It’s time to go back to… wait, where was I going again?
I totally forgot what I was supposed to do after beating the headmaster, and I didn’t want to check a FAQ. So I just spent several hours playing poker in the casino and doing a sidequest in the movie theater.
The sidequest was a little on the long drawn-out side, but the Demon Headmaster-like scenario was several shades more interesting than what’s currently going on in the game. I’m getting dizzy trying to keep up with all the rumors in the main story, plus all that whining about which school badmouthed which is childish and trivial beyond words. I’ll go back and play “part two” of the sidequest once I clear the dungeon I’m currently in.
The quest confirmed one thing for me though: Innocent Sin is the easiest jRPG ever made. Not the easiest Persona, not the easiest Atlus game. It’s the easiest RPG on Planet Earth. Ar Tonelico and Rhapsody DS are like The 7th Saga compared to this game. I’d challenge you to find an easier game, but then the universe would explode and I’d never be able to get this done.
In what other RPG can you go into a dungeon at level 6 armed only with your starting armor and personae, with 6 medicines and 1 antidote to your name, and curb-stomp enemies 3 or 4 times your level wit da greatest of ease? On the Hard setting, no less? Sure I was using the shockingly overpowered fusion spells, but in a normal RPG I wouldn’t even survive long enough to get one of those off. In IS, when an enemy manages to hit me for 10 damage I’m like “Whoa, he’s a strong one,” it’s that bad.
I’m kinda happy about this though, since it means I won’t have to grind. I just have to look into enemy repelling items so I can focus on where the story is going/not going. See you all in a couple of days.
19.10.11 / Atlus, RPG, Sony PSP, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (4)
Tags: digital devil saga, innocent sin, nocturne, persona 2, shin megami tensei
Every once in a while, you should do something you don’t usually do, just to remind yourself why you don’t usually do it. I started Persona 2: Innocent Sin several days ago, and now I remember exactly why I don’t play games in a series too quickly after each other: it’s boring! Especially when they’re very similar in terms of settings and gameplay.
I’m sure P1 and P2 will have very different stories, but at the beginning it’s the same high school setting, same “demons from out of nowhere” thing, same-ish kind of city and many of the same stores. I fought the first boss (Principal Hanya) right before stopping, and at about two hours in P2 is just P1 with more annoying party members and much, much easier battles. I seriously can’t believe how easy, I’m thinking of switching to the Hard setting, which I have never done in an Atlus game before.
Well, I guess it’s not the whole party that’s annoying. Just this ditzy reporter girl named Maya and this American girl with a kung fu fetish in my party named Lisa. Oh gawd, Lisa. And she keeps spouting out this bad Cantonese. Like “Kaumenna” instead of “Gaau meng a” or “Holeen” instead of “Ho lin”, it is so painful to read. It’s probably meant to be, and it’s working like a charm. Do I have a fixed party in this game or can I get rid of her? *fingers crossed*
P2 has also brought back the crazy number of options for contacting demons so I’m going to need a FAQ again before too long. =_= It’s much funnier this time round though, because when it says “Sing” or “Dance”, they actually do sing and dance. Even when “Sing” doesn’t work I keep picking that option just to see Michel’s act. Man, I thought it would be bad, but this is just incredible. If there’s one video game character who cannot afford to drop out of school, it’s him.
Dang, talking about this made me want to continue the game. But I know I’d just end up frustrated and bored so I’m going to wait at least another month.
Besides, you know how in Persona the town just went crazy out of the blue through no fault of yours? In Innocent Sin the main character Tatsuya seems like a bit of twat. I wouldn’t be surprised if he really did do something bad, with that attitude. I won’t be amused if I put in all that effort just to find out he was asking for it </understatement>.
What I’m even more worried about is that the “Sin” will turn out to be some ambiguous bullshit that doesn’t make any sense at all. I haven’t had that problem with the other Persona games so far, but I can’t say that of some of the SMT games. Nocturne for example, all I know is the world went kablooey, then I went around killing lots of demons as well as some of my friends, then at some point Dante from Devil May Cry joined me because of my ravishing shirtless torso (there can be no other reason), and then the last thing I remember was sinking down into some depths Terminator 2-style. Awesome game, but I still don’t know what it was all about. Digital Devil Saga wasn’t much better. The first game was good, the second game was doing well until suddenly, fwoop, we flew into the sun. And then Serph was a hermaphrodite.
So I’ll play something else and come back later. Prepare myself mentally, and all that. For better or for worse, Persona 2 isn’t going anywhere.
12.09.11 / Atlus, RPG, Sony PSP, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (0)
Tags: persona, review, shin megami tensei
I beat Pandora. As far as SMT/spin-off bosses go, she was by far the easiest I’ve ever faced. The only reason she killed me the first time was because I didn’t know the fight was coming up, so I didn’t have enough Balms of Life and most of my personae were weak to magic. All I had to do was regroup, buy about 50 BoLs and Beads and give Armaiti to Maki so she could have Mediarahan. Everything after that was a mere formality.
Aside: Speaking of buying Beads, I had about ¥3 million at the end of the game. I’ve always wondered what game characters do with their massive piles of cash once it’s all over. Let’s see, that’s about $35,000 USD… If they split it equally that’s about $7,000 each. Pfft, puny. I should’ve wasted a few more demons and bought me a nice condo or two.
But I digress. So I beat Pandora in a long but relatively simple battle and restored Mikage-cho to normal. We gave her the usual “Loners are losers” speech and and she was like “Oh. Okay.” Then Maki kissed me on the cheek and some old guy turned into butterflies. *roll credits*
Yeah, that was a totally…uh…great ending. W-wait, why is my nose growing? Stop that! …I kid, I kid. It was a fairly straightforward, easily understood and well wrapped-up story. That’s rare for an Atlus game. At the end the only question I had was, “How the heck did this ever get a sequel?”
You know, when people ask me which game in a series to play, I almost always advice them to start with the very first one and work their way up. I formed this theory after beating the Breath of Fire II before I and doing the same with Shining Force I and II. In both cases I was able to finish the original, but I know I would have fully enjoyed and appreciated both games if I’d done them the other way round.
Going later-to-earlier is so much harder, because while earlier games may have their own charm, they are usually far less polished and thus much harder to enjoy for fans of the later installments. For example I urge people to play Persona 3 before 4 (even though I honestly think P3 >>>> P4 and I liked it that your party wouldn’t always do what you wanted) simply because the interface and the gameplay are seriously improved.
So, looong story short, I’m not going to ascribe any of my lack of enjoyment to Persona itself. Heck, to be honest I did enjoy much of the game. Uhh, the, uhh, music…was too poppy and annoying. In fact I had the music turned off 90% of the time, so that can’t have been it. The graphics…were okay. The CG bits were nice. The characters were memorable, in their own way. I thought the MC this time was particularly colorless, but he was the first so it’s understandable. The story? As near as I can gather, the message was: “Be true to yourself,” and “If you turn your city into a monster-filled hell, you’ll turn into a penis-monster and your friends will come and kick the crap out of you.” Words to live by.
Holy typo, Atlus!
But seriously, I know I enjoyed something, I just can’t remember what right now. It must have been the dungeon crawling, since that’s what 90% of the game consisted of. I like dungeon crawling, especially if the maps are fixed and just need exploring, i.e. not random. It was easy to go down the wrong path, but hard to get permanently lost, and apart from one puzzle and a few switches to pull, Persona‘s dungeon crawling was largely pain-free.
What’s more, I almost never had to do the same dungeon twice. I hate backtracking. It smacks of lack of imagination on the developers’ part. Where it’s present, I prefer it to be largely optional. So I’m grateful that apart from the Lost Forest and the subway, progress in Persona is all about the new. The game even records the paths you take, so you can withdraw, restock and then come back and proceed faster than ever. Bliss.
Battles were fairly good too. I think ALL games should have an auto-battle system, no exceptions. At the same time there was enough variety in the enemies that you couldn’t blindly select Auto for every single fight. You have to use your Personas as much as possible so they rank up, and there’s EXP (determined by damage dealt) to consider, so it’s never a “Mash X to win” fest.
It’s not all good news, though. There were a number of clumsy and inconvenient elements as well. For one thing you could only stock 3 personae per party member, and you couldn’t switch personae between party members except in the Velvet Room. Recruiting most of the later demons without a FAQ or a very, very, very good memory is an exercise in futility. The five second pause before the game decides not to allow you to escape a battle was adding insult to (inevitable) injury. Weapon shops are few and far between, and most of the stuff they sell is crappy anyway. “Gather three compacts” to unlock the final dungeon door was dumb, but understandable for a 1996 game, etc etc.
As for why it took me a while to finish it after my last post, it’s because I was suffering from the Sunken Cost Fallacy. I thought I’d spent almost 200 hours on it, so I was all like, “OMG, I have to finish this thing, I can’t let all that time go to waste!” Once anon informed me that wasn’t actually the case, finishing it took a massive backseat to all manner of other games. If I hadn’t already been in the final dungeon, it might never have gotten finished. But finished it is, and it was a decent experience, all things considered. Now I’m looking forward to the Persona 2 PSP English remake, which should be out next week on September 20th.