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 before finishing the game.

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 enjoyed and appreciated both games more 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 your butt.” Words to live by.

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 a 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 this 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.