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The Persona Series


DarkeSword
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A year or two ago I played Persona 4 Golden on my Vita and I absolutely fell in love with it. The characters, the story, like aesthetics, the music, and the game mechanics all come together in a really awesome package. Since then I've been a fan of the series, dabbling in some of the other games. I've started in on P3P for PSP and also Persona Q for 3DS. I also really like the Persona 4 Arena games for PS3 (I've done two remixes already!) and really like the visual-novel-story-mode that both the first one and Ultimax have.

 

Persona 5 is also coming out next year and that game looks pretty wild. I can't wait.

 

Is anyone else a fan of these games?

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Yeah they're great. I finished the storylines in P4AU a couple weeks ago (also got the P4A storyline DLC so I could have the full story, completed that too). Really need to get a PSTV so I can play P4G (don't want to experience P4 unless it's the full version, and PSTVs are ridiculously cheap compared to Vitas so yeah).

I've beaten P3P, and I need to get back into Persona Q. Great games though.

And I always fondly think of your remixes of the tracks when I hear the originals, Darke haha

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Persona 4 is in my top three favorite JRPGs. There's so much about it I can throw praise at from the characters and the story, the music and the art direction, as well as, the gameplay mechanics. Persona 3 is good as well, though the only version of it I can stand to play is the PSP one. I like being able to give commands to the whole party. I have Persona Q but I've yet to actually play it. The Persona 4 Arena games are also pretty fun. 

 

I have physical copies of some of the Persona soundtracks as well, including a live band arrangement album. The music in these games is really great, I can't say enough nice things about the soundtracks. I wouldn't put Shoji Meguro on the same level as someone like Uematsu or Mitsuda, but he is definitely good at what he does. 

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I am a HUGE fan. :D Fell in love with Persona 3 FES six years ago, preordered Persona 4 that same year, fell in love with that too!

 

I'm so stoked for Persona 5...and that lovely, lovely GUI design. I wonder if they hired any web designers to design their menus? So gorgeous!

 

I'd like to get Persona Q, but my disposable income is nonexistent so :x

 

The music is definitely one of my favorite things about it. I have the entire Persona 3, Persona 3 FES, and Persona 3 Portable soundtrack, as well as the Persona 4 and Persona 4 Golden soundtracks!

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I picked up old copies of Persona 3 FES and vanilla Persona 4 for the PS2 about a year ago (on the advice of someone on the #OCRemix IRC channel, actually) and I've been slowly playing through them.  Finished Persona 3 and thought it was fantastic, playing through Persona 4 right now (but I'm not very far in yet).

 

I sort of have a love-hate relationship with the games.  The story, the characters, the setting, the visual design, the music (the music!) -- all of that is fantastic.  Even coming into it nearly 10 years after the fact, I'd still call it one of the best games I've ever played in terms of all of that.  The time management aspect adds a twist that is pretty much unique as far as JRPGs that I'm aware of

 

The actual combat though...?  Urgh.  It's grindy and irritating.  Either the enemy has a weakness you can exploit, in which case you knock them down and then annihilate them with an all-out attack, or else they don't and even random battles turn into a boring slugfest where an unlucky crit or just getting targeted a few times in a row can kill your main character and cause a game over without there being a damn thing you can do about it.  Persona 4 is better in that regard than Persona 3 is, because you can manually control your allies and they'll save you from one would-be-fatal blow apiece (assuming it's a single-target attack, they're not dead, knocked down, stunned, or otherwise incapacitated, etc), but still.  And for boss battles?  Even looking up strategies and stuff online, it's still not uncommon for me to have to fight a boss 5 or 10 times before I find a strategy that works and/or get a lucky break that allows me to beat it.  I'm not the sort of guy who enjoys challenge for challenge's sake, so Persona's combat tests my patience.  A lot.

 

Also!  As I mentioned, I'm only partway through Persona 4 at the moment.  Given that the whole thing is a murder mystery and I've managed to avoid getting spoiler'd on it so far, PLEASE don't ruin that for me now.  We have spoiler tags!  I know they're old games, but please use them!

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Yeah I gotta agree on spoilers guys. I know the games have been around but let's keep in mind that this is still a pretty niche series.

 

I will agree on the subject of boss battles in Persona 4. I found some bosses to be overwhelmingly hard at first, even after looking at guides. A lot of times you do exactly what you're supposed to do in terms of strategy and it still takes a long time to kill a boss because they just have so much HP. There were a few times where I got pretty frustrated with some of the boss battles and I ended up spending some time grinding hard to make my skills stronger. Interestingly enough, the final boss turned out to be a piece of cake for me. I ended up using a strategy that wasn't in any guides or FAQs that I looked up either. It was pretty satisfying.

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Yeah it's chronological. They all technically take place in the same world with a shared mythology. Persona 4 Arena, which is a canonical story sequel to Persona 4, overtly crosses the game over with Persona 3, with a lot of the cast of P3 showing up and figuring prominently into the storyline.

 

HOWEVER, you don't need to play P3 to understand anything in P4. The main numbered RPGs are basically stand-alone (I haven't played P1 or P2, so I'm not 100% sure). They have different casts, take place in different parts of Japan, and are essentially independent of each other. The references to other games are mostly cameos or fan-servicey mentions of events or locations from previous games.

 

When P5 comes out next year, you can just play that game without ever having played another Persona game. You won't be lost or missing anything.

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Well, my girlfriend is actually a HUGE fan of the series, so I will probably get into it at some point. Just got the 'Dancing All Night' game for her a little while back, and the music seems to actually be really, really good, to boot. Personally I recently beat Shin Megami Tensei IV for the 3DS, and I loved it. Persona is a sub-series of SMT (both utilize similar mechanics & conventions, and are made by Atlus), so I guess I'm somewhat a fan.

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Yeah it's chronological. They all technically take place in the same world with a shared mythology. Persona 4 Arena, which is a canonical story sequel to Persona 4, overtly crosses the game over with Persona 3, with a lot of the cast of P3 showing up and figuring prominently into the storyline.

 

HOWEVER, you don't need to play P3 to understand anything in P4. The main numbered RPGs are basically stand-alone (I haven't played P1 or P2, so I'm not 100% sure). They have different casts, take place in different parts of Japan, and are essentially independent of each other. The references to other games are mostly cameos or fan-servicey mentions of events or locations from previous games.

 

When P5 comes out next year, you can just play that game without ever having played another Persona game. You won't be lost or missing anything.

Cool.  Good to know :D

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I started with with Devil Survivor and got hooked. I'm now playing Soul Hackers after picking it up on 3ds for $10 in the eShop. I definitely enjoy what I've experience so far.

 

Started with Devil Survivor as well. Then Persona 4, then 3 and Strange Journey, for which I created those maps on Gamefaqs... I must have been very, very bored at that time. The last one I played was SMT4 on the 3DS. Awesome game.

I tried Soul Hackers and Persona 2 and they somehow just didn't grab me. At all. Might give them another chance, but the quality of the other games I've played has been so high that those seemed mediocre at best.

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