alcharagia posted:

Instead of arguing about Persona, you guys should be playing Raidou vs. King Abaddon, the best SMT game.

Kurtofan posted:

It's not out here yet.

hubris.height posted:

laplace posted:

What I'm saying is it doesn't matter if you're good at games in P1 because player input doesn't actually matter at all whatsoever in that game. I'm fine at games, P1 barely qualifies as a game.

Comparing the difficulty of P1 to the other games is a really dumb comparison because P1's difficulty almost all comes from arbitrarium whereas other SMT games, for the most part, have difficulty related to skill and planning.

MonsieurChoc posted:

I think you overstate things just a bit. Like, there's a lot of terrible stuff about P1, but I think there's also good stuff and overall I like the game. It's still the Persona game with the best Atmosphere, for example.

TurnipFritter posted:

Instead of arguing about Persona, you guys should be playing Criminal Girls, which is basically what Persona 5 is going to be anyway.

MonsieurChoc posted:

Much as I like the remake for the improved UI and better translation, it does a few things wrong: the original music is better. Compare the original opening to the new one. All the heavy foreboding atmosphre is lost and replaced with jpop. The original also had almost double the number of songs as the remake, a lot were removed. Awakening Legend and The Snow Queen are probably the most notorious removals.

Another mistake I think was the removal of the huge map. While the huge empty map could be a pain to navigate, it helped make Mikage feel like a real city, and contributed to the strong sense of atmosphre the game had. Removing it to replace it with six still screens jsut made the whole place feel artificial and unreal.

epitasis posted:

whats criminal girls

Butt Ghost posted:

NIS straight-up removed a lot of stuff, as far as I'm aware. The original version had a lot of creepy BDSM minigames or some poo poo, and I'm not sure how much of that made it into the international release. Point of the matter is, 4chan made a big stink about it. They're not gonna give a poo poo a couple months after release.

Policenaut posted:

We live in an unjust world, such that Criminal Girls can be localized while The Legend of Heroes remains in purgatory.

asvodel posted:

I will agree for sure that the characters and much of the overall story are flat, mostly what I like about Persona 1 story wise relates to the nature of the two worlds in the game and their interaction.

Mostly in that most of the game takes place in the idealized fairytale version of the world that exists inside the mind of Mary / Maki due to her isolation from the outside world, and that most of the supernatural elements of the game's main plot come from the archetypes inside one person's conscious coming into contact with the real world. What is neat about them is that this isn't something stated outright when they were first introduced, like is more the case with Persona 4 for example, but just a mystery which is clued in many places but not explained until much later in the game. A big example of this is the version of Mary / Maki who is in the party and has the most screen time in the game, who is the "idealized" version of herself that exists in the ideal world and has leaked out into the real world. This is only learned until much later, and for much of the game we are just introduced to the mystery of why she appears to the party perfectly healthy after being seen in the hospital earlier, and seems to lack knowledge of certain recent events. Similarly, the otherworld which is inside her mind at first seems to be identical to the real world except for certain clues like buildings which weren't yet constructed or remodeled when she was put into the hospital. The other differences stand out at first but make sense upon later applying the same dream-logic, like that the police station and hospital don't exist since there would be no need for them in an idealized world. And similarly that all the enemies in the game were the result of the emotional distress of the idealized world being visited by an outside force, and then leaking into the real world.
Even some of the main MacGuffins of the game, the magic compacts, work on a similar idea, where they are magic wish-granting artifacts that just work because they're literally a part of somebody's fictional idealized world, and they still literally work when transplanted into the real world. Their form is a neat touch also since being from the mind of a contemporary girl they are fairy-tale magic mirrors that take the form of a more ordinary object.
Everything in the game is based on the particular dream logic of "what if one person's fantasy version of the world collided with reality" and it is dealt with in a fairly organic way of slowly discovering things which doesn't have too much front-loaded exposition or rigid formulaic structure to it that the PS2 games tend to have for example.

I think all of it is a pretty neat framing for a fantasy based game, as relating to the Persona themes, and it isn't done in quite the same way in the other games.
Persona 2 mostly deals with this theme in a collective sense with the rumors becoming reality, but not quite the same thing.
Persona 3 barely deals with this, only in the vaguest of senses relating to "the overall population" by saying that Nyx and Tartarus were formed out of the population's general desire for death and apathy.
Persona 4 deals more closely with the theme of entering worlds based on other's thoughts but the boundary between them is made immediately obvious and not crossed as much.

To me Persona 3 is the worst game story wise when taken in the context of the rest of the series, as it doesn't deal with any of the main themes of the series that the others do in any substantial way.

Again the atmosphere is unique, granted a lot of the atmosphere also comes from camp and absurd stuff, like the original game's poorly 3D modeled Philemon talking to you in his booming announcer voice, the school level where you fight toilet monsters and basketballs, etc.

The music in the PSP game isn't all that bad; it is better in instrument quality but the problem with it is that it cuts down the wide variety of music that mid-90s Atlus games have and pares it down to a very small number of tracks, in doing so taking out a lot of the cool ambient ones... and also that many of the new arrangements take most of the life out of the song leaving not much (biggest example is original Deva Yuga theme versus remake), and some new music doesn't fit the mood as well as the original (otherworld map theme for example).

The PS1 US version cut down the encounter rate and difficulty from the JP version, it's very possible that the PSP release did not do this. So I might have a different impression with that.
Though of course the PSP version did fix a lot of other gameplay issues like the clunky 3D overworld and the English translated spell names that are somehow much more confusing than the SMT style names.

Granted it should be mentioned that Persona 1 was my very first SMT game so I have a large soft spot for it despite all its flaws. Given that I bought Soul Hackers on 3DS and couldn't get very far in it, I doubt I could stand to replay it today.

I think the story/atmosphere does have some worth in it to not completely discount the game, but these days it is certainly "a game that would be better to watch an LP of than to actually play". Though I don't know of a good LP of it that exists.

edit: Sorry the only way I can explain why I think the Persona 1 story/atmosphere is worthwhile is a bunch of about The Persona Lore

alcharagia posted:

Instead of arguing about Persona, you guys should be playing Raidou vs. King Abaddon, the best SMT game.

alcharagia posted:

Instead of arguing about Persona, you guys should be playing Raidou vs. King Abaddon, the best SMT game.

ChaosArgate posted:

Also you may want to hold off on Devi Survivor 2 if you have a 3DS because Break Record, the enhanced port with a whole new second story, is finally seeing the light of day. Also you should totally consider Devil Survivor Overclocked because it has better writing and the tone is a lot better than Devil Survivor 2.

ChaosArgate posted:

Saying the DS2 anime is better than Persona Trinity Soul isn't really saying much in terms of how good it is. DS2's anime barely follows the plot of the game and kills off almost everybody to make an Evangelion clone.

Dehry posted:

If I recall correctly, even the base game was jokingly called SMT:Evangelion.

Ibram Gaunt posted:

Please play the first devil survivor, preferably overclocked, instead of DeSu2.

Ibram Gaunt posted:

Please play the first devil survivor, preferably overclocked, instead of DeSu2.