Game Log #7

Most of my gaming attention has been dividing between two games over the past couple weeks:

- Still chugging through Persona 3 FES with constantly shifting feelings on the game. The high points are high, and the low points are very, very low. I think what's really kept me in the game has been the combat and dungeon exploration side of the game which, ironically, is the part of the game I hear a lot of people disliking. In particular, there's a pretty vocal contingent of the internet that can't stand how exploitable the battle system is. I, however, find that the main draw. It's not the most strategic JRPG I've ever played, but exploiting the enemies various weakness and managing your 2 Persona-per-turn limit is a welcome change of pace in a genre where grinding is a central component. There's something truly beautiful in being able to drop a boss in more ways then simply leveling up for hours on end. I want to find time to tweak with the Persona fusion and weapon creation systems at some point as well.

I do feel that the game does have a bizarre difficulty balance throughout, but I'm not sure it really bothers me all that much. You could do battle with a boss weak to Zio and finish him off in a couple minutes, and a couple floors later get brutally raped by a tower boss with no weakness to anything. I do have to begrudge the game for how it handles death. I've really reached the point where it's hard for me to handle games where I can lose hours of progress by dying once (something I'll get to in my second game.) The nature of Persona 3 makes it difficult to simply leave Tarturus to save, as you would have to restart again from the last warp floor. I've found myself longing for Dragon Quest's idea of halving your gold and sending you back to the next town. Couldn't just take some of my Yen, but leave me my new persona's and gained XP?

But what really gets under my skin with this game is the story. I've come to reconcile how awful the majority of the social link conversations are. I'll just skip through them and get my next rank. But then there's the dialog that's more difficult to skip, as it pertains to the main story. And I WANT to like the main story, I really do. There's a sort of feeling of wrongness under the surface; it's the same type of feeling I got from watching series like Evangelion or Revolutionary Girl Utena. The story seems like it's going to morph into something entirely different, and I anxiously await it's transformation. But I do this at the cost of a boring quasi mini-game where I have to go hit on girls at some stupid beach.

-My handheld experience as of late has been a used copy of Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer. After hearing some good things on the game from an episode of Retronauts, I found a used copy at my local Vintage Stock and gave it a go. I'd have to say that other than a few experiences with Nethack, Shiren is probably the first hardcore roguelike I've really played. I got used to the global turn concept pretty quickly, but I'm still trying to figure out all of the exploits therein.

It's a game where dieing once means it's game over. No matter how much you have leveled up your character, it's all gone. It's not as scary as it sounds, however. The leveling up is far faster than your average RPG; I've gotten Shiren to level 15 several times, and none of my single play throughs have been much longer than an hour. There is also an element of item persistence as well. Blacksmiths in the game can level up weapons for a price, so you could find a weapon to level up, even if you loose your own.you can find warehouses in the game at which to store items. This means that you can play it safe and store your Katana +6 for a future playthrough.

Another interesting concept is that the game really encourages you to, well, die. Various characters and events, such as the aforementioned blacksmiths, can only do their job once per play through. The sidequests you accomplish stay accomplished even after your death. If helping someone allowed him to join you as a party member, he can join you again on subsequent playthroughs. So far, it's been an interesting experience. Now if only I could figure out how to keep my food reliably stocked.