Take That, Full Moon Boss!

Insert copious maniacal laughter here. After copping out and restarting Persona 3 on Easy, I finally got back to where I was and beat that damned boss that was making me hit my head on the coffee table! I’m sure it helped that I was a full two levels higher than the last time I tried too. I still wish I could have skipped all the cutscenes and assorted related nonsense that was involved in getting to the actual fight but it doesn’t matter anymore because I am now officially past that roadblock. Next stop: the floor 36 guardian. Let’s hope my favorite Persona is strong enough to take it out because I’m really not looking forward to being let down again so quickly.

That is my entire happy. Yes, I know it was a tragic one but I just about danced around the living room when I beat it last night and there were many, many fist pumps. Only ten more big bosses to go. Let’s hope I’m able to keep up the leveling and beat the hell out of the ones to come as well!

What’s your happy for today? Come on, you’ve gotta have something! Go on over to Band Back Together and share your joy, we’d love to hear from you!

The Cop Out

So I ended up not breaking up with Persona 3. Instead, I decided to think about it rationally and came up with a very good solution. Copping out by starting over and playing it on Easy difficulty.

There is one big reason for this. I’m really not in it to achieve some lofty battle goal, I want to see the story unfold. I like the story and where it seems to be going, and I like the characters. I think I’d be pretty happy with a visual novel type experience like Persona 4 Arena with occasional battles, as a matter of fact. Like most other JRPGs, the battles to me are necessary but secondary because I really love the stories they tell.

Apparently the differences between the Easy and Normal games are pretty big. There’s very little grinding necessary from what I’ve heard (not a problem with me, I don’t mind grinding) and you get 10 items that allow you to continue if you die instead of just being sent back to the opening movie. Although I have heard that unless you’ve really screwed up your armor or Personas, the chances of dying from a one-shot or similar are pretty low.

I was only 15 hours into the game anyway, so it wasn’t like I was losing a terrible amount of progress and I don’t mind seeing the story up to then again. It’s not that I mind anything in particular about the mechanics of the game or the battles in general (except that Reaper bastard), I just wasn’t having very much fun knowing that if I died I was going to have to play an entire scenario over again. If I’d had those continue items, it would have been a lot more fun because I could have just tried again instead of being tossed back to the start.

That’s pretty much my entire reason for starting over on Easy, as a matter of fact. I’ll probably still grind and I’ll use the strategy I would have used before, fuse the good Personas and weapons, do Elizabeth’s requests and everything, but I’ll be able to continue if something terrible happens (three times) like it did with the second full moon.

I also thought to myself “if I’m having this much trouble with the second full moon, I’ll never make it through the other ones.” And that was enough to make me depressed for days. I had heard that Persona 3 was much less forgiving than Persona 4 and I discovered that to my immense sadness. When I play Persona 4, I’ll have to make the big decision whether I want to play it on Easy or Normal, but that’s a question for another time.

So yeah, I’m copping out. It happens. Like I said, I just want to see the story and have fun playing the game. I think I’ll be able to do that now.

Games Are Supposed to Be Fun, Right?

Let me tell you something. I am this close to breaking up with Persona 3.

I bought the game because I love Persona 4 so much, and I haven’t even actually played it myself. I’ve only watched the guys at Giant Bomb do the playing but I formed this weird attachment to the characters and I really wanted to play the game myself, but we haven’t had a chance to buy it. When I found Persona 3 at the game store I thought it was the natural thing to get so I could have a different Persona experience.

Boy, am I ever having a different experience.

The main dungeon (the only dungeon) is called Tartarus and it shows up at midnight every night. It has a zillion floors and you travel up them fighting all manner of terrible monsters in the way you do in JRPGs. There are two problems, though, and they’re both sources of stress to me. They’re also both The Reaper, a super-hard enemy/boss that can wipe out your party in one hit. One way for him to show up is if you draw a “cursed” card, the other way is staying on one floor too long. I spend a good portion of my time in Tartarus stressed out that he’s going to show up, wipe my party, and I’ll lose all the progress I’ve made for the last half hour or so. Did I mention there’s only two save points in the whole game?

My recent we’re-breaking-up moment came the other day when I was playing the “full moon operation” for this part of the game. I’d already had a seriously stressful time trying to beat one of the other bosses in the game and repeatedly getting wiped out, but I finally beat him and was super-excited about it. Then the full moon started and my troubles began. You see, you get to save the night before the full moon but not any time during it. This means that you have to either win the fight the first time around or get prepared to do the entire thing over.

Here’s the deal. I have played enough JRPGs to get wiped out by a lot of bosses. It happens. Depending on the boss, it can happen multiple times. What I haven’t had to deal with is 15+ minutes of unskippable cutscenes and maneuvering to get to the fight, during which I get wiped out and then have to restart and go back through ANOTHER 15+ minutes of the same cutscenes to get back where I was.

It’s not too much to ask for a save point before the boss battle, you know. Persona 4 has one. Games as far back as Chrono Trigger have them. Pretty much every JRPG in history has had them. It’s standard to see one beside a door and know that – oh, damn! – a boss fight is coming. It’s so standard it’s become a trope.

I’m not giving up on Persona 3 just yet because I like the story and the characters (even if Sexy Shirtless Akihiko from P4 Arena is three years younger, shirted, and kind of weedy here), but I’m getting progressively more frustrated with it as time goes on. Games are supposed to be fun, you know, not stressful, and I’m slowly creeping up on my breaking point.

Persona 4 Arena AND Player Attack Review

Hey, remember how completely hyped I was about playing Persona 4 Arena? Well, it was all worth it. Every last second of waiting was worth it. Atlas and Arc Systemworks have gotten together behind the takoyaki stand and made a beautiful, beautiful baby.

I finally got my sweaty little Persona-obsessed hands on it the day before my wedding thanks to RJ, who made me swear I wouldn’t open it until after the wedding. This was difficult because even through the box I could see that the instruction booklet was big enough to beat rats to death. This was going to be epic.

The night of my wedding, I played it with my new husband and my ex-husband for about three hours of button-mashing mayhem because we didn’t have time for things like “instructions” and “learning modes” and we just wanted to beat the hell out of each other. This was fun. Once I was in post-wedding mode, I went into some training and discovered that yes, there are combinations that lend a method to the mayhem. This was even more fun.

In spite of everyone saying that Kanji – my favorite guy from Persona 4 and your basic brawler character in P4A – is hard to play with, I took it upon myself to try him out and apparently have learned how to play with him pretty well. All you’ve gotta do is get in there and start hitting things, and it builds from there, but getting in there is sometimes harder than anything. Also, he’s slow and his Persona hits fewer times, but I’ve managed some spectacular wins with him against a moderately difficult computer opponent and even an instant kill twice.

The Story Mode is super-fun too. You have to work through the threads of everyone’s story before you can gather them up into the full epic, and sometimes they’re a little repetitive with the main characters, but I enjoyed reading it all. It’s a lot like a visual novel (which is just what it sounds like: lots of story on screen with some voice acting and music) with some fighting thrown in to make it even more interesting. Even though they’re reduced to one round battles between story chunks, I found myself looking forward to them just as much as the story in a very JRPG fashion.

Persona 4 Arena is just an all-around fun game for Persona-obsessives like me who also like to beat the crap out of things sometimes. If you’re into that sort of thing (I AM SO INTO THIS SORT OF THING), there’s also a $5 DLC pack that lets you wear glasses from the P4 original game. Mister E thinks I am out of my mind for wanting this:

Me: And for $5, you can get glasses for everyone to wear while they fight!
Mister E: Really. That’s the $5 DLC?
Me: ::nod::
Mister E: You know what the $5 DLC is for Skyrim? You can build a freaking house. To live in. With servants.
Me: …
Mister E: Oh, right. I forgot. Glasses fetish.

You can read a much more in-depth review at Player Attack, which I also wrote because I’m awesome like that. So is P4A. You should play it. Or play Persona 4, then play it. Whichever floats your boat, really. But go read my review! Like I said: awesome.

Step Away From the Spoilers

Well, it looks like I’m not getting Persona 4 Arena today. Dammit.

So close…yet so far away…

However, I thought this would be a good time to talk about spoilers. This is very important because unlike some fighting games, P4A has an approximate 30 hours of story involving characters from both Persona 3 and 4 that has been confirmed by Atlus as being canon instead of a side story. Basically, I’m staying the hell away from anything and everything P4A at least until I get my hands on it and play a little of it because I want to find out for myself.

I know that some of the spoilering about certain things is completely accidental, and there is no guarantee that everyone in the world is going to adhere to the common courtesy of placing a spoiler alert in the form of a tag, banner or even just a line of text and a couple of hard returns. However, some people out there are just trolling through spoilers and it’s a little annoying, particularly when you see something like “Who would have thought that XX was the murderer at the end of Movie X! LOL I feel sorry for people who haven’t seen it!” on the very day the movie came out.

There is a small amount of tolerance in my angry little brain for spoilers of movies or books that are decades old and considered classics. I’m not saying that we should all go around shouting what happens at the end of Frankenstein but don’t get all shirty with people who let it slip.

Recently I found myself the unwitting victim of a spoiler on Nico Nico Douga because I found a video that was a MAD of Persona 4 x Soul Eater. Sadly, I do not know the word for “spoiler” in Japanese (I just learned the word for a frame of animation, though, so there’s that) and so found out something about the ending of P4 that I wasn’t expecting. Now I understand that P4 has been out since 2008 and that probably everyone in Japan has played it, but I might not have signed on if I’d known a huge plot point was going to be given away. Worse yet, I watched it with Mister E because we both love P4 and we both love Soul Eater so I thought it was going to be super-awesome. Not that it wasn’t, of course, it was well done and looked great but you know. Spoilers for all.

Mister E has promised me that we’re going to get P4 Arena as soon as possible, and that he’s planning on getting me the tiny controller so I can play it comfortably. Until I get my hands on the disc, though, I’m staying the hell away from anything that might spoil it for me.

There are some things I just don’t want to know. Yet.