person of three f's

so like Persona 3 came out and everyone said it was the greatest JRPG of all time, and then FES came out, and then I got a PS2, and then Persona 4 came out and everyone said THAT was the greatest JRPG of all time, but I was like "ehh, I still need to play 3", and then Persona 5 c

so apparently this is now the 5th-greatest JRPG of all time, because 4 and then 4-Golden and then 5 and then 5-Royal have each been roundly proclaimed superior to each of their predecessors

so I've never played any personae or shins megami tensei bc I spent the last 13 years sorta vaguely intending to get around to playing 3 lol

also everyone grew up over those 13 years and went "uhh yall notice Atlus, like, REALLY hates gay people" so guess we'll see how that goes

HOW THE HELL AM I SUPPOSED TO PICK SEPARATE FIRST AND LAST NAMES

I'm always just Thew in videogames this is a crisis

normal conversation

listen I already had anxiety *before* the pandemic

when I post screenshots of PS2 games instead of my own creative work

This game is dubbed in English but it's also from 2007, i.e. peak "keikaku means plan" era of translations, so they kept all the senpais and honorifics and it's just absolutely brain-melting hearing this American-ass American dude calling his friend "Yuka-tan"

Me: "A bunch of UI elements are subtle ovals and I can't tell if they're ACTUALLY ovals or if I've very slightly screwed up the aspect ratio on my scaler. Lemme check screenshots"

Every video on youtube:

tfw

lmao the weapons shop is a cop who's like "there's clearly weird supernatural stuff going on so I'd better sell weaponry to high schoolers"

Thew-kun

microtransactions are completely out of hand apparently I'd have to buy a PSP to play as a girl

wow uhhhh dying means losing like 30 minutes of progress in this the greatest JRPG of all time

wait why is there school on saturday

this seems more hellish than the part where everyone transforms into coffins and has their minds eaten by ghosts

Dark Souls but every time you whack a skeleton it starts playing BABY BABY BABY BABY BABY b'BABY

this game is... extremely slow-moving

like even by JRPG standards

I had to look up if Shaft animated this lol

they didn't, but I'd completely forgotten about his particular aesthetic and how incredibly cutting-edge this sort of thing looked in the late 2000s

wow okay damn

Yukari: "So at midnight there's a secret 25th hour where everyone transforms into coffins except for us"

Protagonist: "Oh cool. Hey do you know anything about this glowing door or the weird voices that keep talking about cards"

Yukari: "What? No. Those must not be real things"

I immediately strongly disliked Junpei and then it turns out he's voiced by vic mignogna so like.......... lol

I'm ten hours into this game and a robot girl has not joined my party

I know this game has a robot girl where is she

give robot girl

if this were Xenoblade Chronicles 2 a robot girl AND a sword girl *AND* a cat girl would be here by now

I guess that's the sort of advancement that ten years' worth of linear progress in game design has accomplished

on second thought 2007 was bad and should not have been permitted to occur

all of the male characters in this game are insufferable lol

if you buy a PSP in order to be a girl do they let you be gay or are you cursed to date Junpei the Gamer Bro or Kenji the Milf Hunter or Whatsisface the Student Council Cop Asshole or whoever else

I guess Akihiko doesn't suck but that's only because he's hot and so far his only dialogue consists of being sad that Mitsuru won't let him punch ghosts

Trying to wrap my head around how this game balances its progression systems given that most things you spend time on are completely optional

got as far as it would let me go in the dungeon and ran completely out of things to do for a few days before Plot started happening again

dungeon monsters yield like 2 XP each, and now that I'm in the Plot Zone every enemy is worth like 30+ XP lol

seems like they want to keep a pretty tight leash on the player's level range? to the extent of making dungeon grinding effectively worthless...

I was thinking you could probably ruin the game by just going straight to bed every day. Since there's no way to grind that doesn't consume time you'd effectively softlock from being too underleveled

...but I guess technically the designers could solve that by structuring reward curves such that NOTHING you do between mandatory plot sequences matters much, and every Big Event just levels you to wherever the designers want

seems.... inelegant

That's probably not what's actually going on here; I'm still early enough that there are probably a lot more progression systems that haven't been introduced yet

it's a really complicated design space to think about though, and seeing a 1500% XP bump out of nowhere was wild lol

narrator that is absolutely false; I hate this kid's guts and I am talking to him solely so that my various mind-pokemon can become more powerful

making casual smalltalk in 2020 like

oh hell yeah

becoming enraged every time the protagonist visits the mall by getting on a monorail to the wrong island instead of just walking across the bridge that's literally right there

ahhhhh junpei sucks so bad I cannot handle this

"This character's Whole Deal is he constantly flirts with every girl in a way that makes them visibly uncomfortable! This is intended to be funny and/or endearing!" fuck offffffff

Yukari's casual outfit is very cute and also exudes immense 2007 energy

note uggs

okay yeah fair enough

it's spring now so yukari has swapped uggs for flare jeans

this is truly the two thousand sevenmost videogame of all time

Mitsuru is in high school and is also clearly like 25

oh NO I accidentally started flirting with the swim-team manager girl because I was trying to be friendly and the dialogue options are tonally all over the place

gonna be like... incredibly paranoid about every dialog choice for the rest of this game probably lol

Every conversation needs a fourth option that's just I WOULD LIKE TO BE FRIENDS WITH YOU BUT ALSO I AM SAVING MYSELF FOR A ROBOT PROBABLY

I feel like Fire Emblem Three Different Plots had the best approach to this problem, where you just become rad best friends with everyone in your class/death-squad and then towards the end God's just like HEY SO WHO'S YOUR CRUSH and gives you a dropdown

honestly huge props to the environment artists for this just utterly miserable grody-ass dorm carpet lol

like the game's set in 2009 but the TV in the dorm common room is this huge wooden tube console, and the whole place has this gross musty ashtrays-and-doilies aesthetic bc it was built in like 1955 and never touched since, because why would the school pay to update it

genuinely effective environmental storytelling haha

twenty six hours in and I can FINALLY eject vic mignogna from the party

There's like a 30% chance that attempting to study results in you getting sick for the next two days

I have never played a more realistic videogame

>:3

Akihiko Kitty Mouth is an extremely strong contender but I think Smug Mitsuru is prob my favorite character portrait right now

The music in this game is very good but I'm like 30 hours in and there have been like... five pieces of music this entire time

I like how the constrained camera angles mean they can do cute stuff like like these flare particles for the sun glinting off the bike racks

v i d e o g a m e

growing increasingly paranoid about dialog options and braved spoilers to do some googling

apparently this game follows the Mass Effect model, where every conversation is just a linear progression towards a terminal point labeled We'll Bang OK

there are no platonic relationships, there are only increasingly awkwardly romantic relationships, and your only options are
- Hurt Everyone
- Never Talk to Girls
- Date Everyone in Carefully Planned Sequential Order Because Once you Reach the Terminus They Have No Further Dialog

Apparently if you skipped the first version of this game and then also skipped the second version of this game and then bought a PSP and then bought the THIRD version of this game and then chose the female protagonist, they added non-romantic friendship routes lol

INTERESTINGLY: The writing has set things up in a way that COULD make this an intentional thematic decision

Personas are supposedly reflections of one's inner self, and yet the protagonist is mysteriously able to just swap them out like pokemon

Nearly-silent-protagonist VN mechanics result in a character who's like a personality black hole; a void that somehow pulls everyone into his orbit

all things to all people, a chameleon with no true self

This is already happening mechanically because it's A Videogame, but the narrative COULD actually be acknowledging it? The idea being he really IS a magnetic void, constantly swapping personas to gain advantages over every scenario, with nothing behind the mask

(masks also being a big motif in the game)

If this is actually where the writing is going I'm super impressed

I'm afraid it's gonna go totally unexamined bc it's just Game Mechanics though. Virtually every other game with this type of protagonist suffers from this, and I've never seen it addressed or even acknowledged

See Also:

methodically peeing exactly once each evening to maintain my physical condition

HEY EXCUSE ME I'LL HAVE YOU KNOW THE PENCIL THING SERVES AN ACTUAL AND SPECIFIC FUNCTION AND I DON'T JUST DO IT TO LOOK COOL EVEN THOUGH IT DOES IN FACT MAKE ME LOOK INCREDIBLY COOL ALSO

The pop quizzes in this game are hilarious because they're all mostly basic physics/math stuff you'd probably know in high school, except then you get history questions and uhhhhhhhhhhhh I did not go to school in Japan I am not familiar with the particulars of the Heian Period

It's time for an important plot revelation, so everyone has transformed into mid-2000s noodle people

WHHOOOOO HOW ABOUT A DISTRESSINGLY LONG SECTION DEDICATED TO JUNPEI MAKING WOMEN UNCOMFORTABLE FOLLOWED BY CASUAL TRANSPHOBIA INTENDED AS COMEDY

seriously why is junpei even in this game

the writers hate him, he never does anything that doesn't suck, everyone IN the game hates him and is constantly telling him off for being a gross asshole

ROBOT 🤖 GIRL 👩 ROBOT 🤖 GIRL 👩 ROBOT 🤖 GIRL 👩 ROBOT 🤖 GIRL 👩 ROBOT 🤖 GIRL 👩 ROBOT 🤖 GIRL 👩 ROBOT 🤖 GIRL 👩

This is really neat little environment

the subtle green penumbra on the shadows is pretty inspired

hey so uhh

does this game have a plot

like....... I'm not being snarky here

my save file says 41 hours; nothing resembling a plot has started yet

She has standards

this game is... boring

:(

like I dunno I really want to like it; the art's rad and it's got cool ideas but like... I've played 45 hours of the same like six screens and nothing is happening

there's literally a calendar that tells you plot occurs exactly once per month, which is about 10 IRL hours

it's not like..... *bad*, but it is exceedingly dull

not sure why people acted like it was some kind of high-water mark for the genre when it came out; there were definitely several much better JRPGs in 2007...

under normal circumstances I'd probably just drop it but uhhhh due to Current Events I don't think my brain is capable of doing anything even slightly productive with my time so I guess whenever I finish this tedious videogame we'll be that much closer to being able to go outside

a dog with a knife joined my party maybe this game is good after all

YARANAIKA?

glad to have discovered this game's version of byleth eating five dinners every day, which is personadude watching nine hours of movies every afternoon for the entirety of summer break

First day back at school after summer break and these two girls are still having the same conversation they were having in June

oh geez it's not just those girls it's the whole school

everyone's been on break for a month and a half and now they're all back standing in the same corners saying the same lines

this is kind of terrifying

I'm assuming later entries fixed this but this game REALLY suffers from the Mass Effect 2 problem, where it clearly intends for you to talk to all of your friends every day, but there isn't enough dialog so people get stuck repeating the same things for weeks at a time

"Can it wait for a bit? Every person in this entire high school in the middle of some calibrations"

it's extremely funny that Akihiko and Shinjiro are supposed to have Dark Mysterious Troubled Pasts while they're like... 16

just lost like two hours due to dying three times in a row in tartarus

hama/mudo skills are some serious Game Design Is My Passion bs lol

they work like FF's Death spells, i.e. no damage but flat 30% probability of instakilling the target

however this game ALSO works like pokemon, in that if you're not attacking weaknesses you may as well not be attacking at all

consider the above facts

now consider that the designers have suddenly introduced a ton of enemies that are ONLY weak to the 30%-chance-of-hitting death spells

combat suddenly changes from "kinda boring" to "utterly miserable" lmao

like you'll go into a fight against four enemies and they either go down in a couple turns if your spells proc, OR you can just burn like fifteen turns and all of your MP and all of your [phoenix downs] as they just shred your whole party while you inflict zero damage every turn

for bonus misery some of these enemies CAST those spells too

30% chance of killing an enemy every turn is frustrating. 30% chance of the enemy INSTAKILLING YOU AND SENDING YOU 40 MINUTES BACK TO YOUR LAST SAVE is next-level

sometimes I forget that "JRPG fans" in the 90s/00s were a very niche group less because they had obscure/discerning tastes and more because they resembled the 4PM Dick Flattening dude

at this point this popup appears every time for almost every social link in the game and I become Enraged because THAT'S LITERALLY NOT HOW THE MECHANICS WORK WHY ARE YOU TELLING ME THIS

Social links have no effect on the personas that you HAVE! They gain power from the link when you CREATE them but then once they're created and just sitting in your pokeballs nothing else happens

why are you giving me tips that lie about how the systems work aaaaa

okay my bad; turns out it IS hinting at a mechanic: The speed at which social links improve is apparently VARIABLE and is affected by which personas you have

you get unique dialogue almost every time; I had no idea it could level at different speeds lol

JRPGs man

a really wild thing about this game is that since it was fairly niche when it released (at least in comparison big-name stuff like KH and FF), and since it ALSO has three slightly different versions, it's INCREDIBLY hard to find concrete answers to things via google

like I just searched whether equipped personas affect social link leveling and the first result was a 10-year-old gamefaqs post with exactly two replies: the first one says Yes and the second says No

this happens... a lot lol

mitsuru had better appreciate the sheer amount of effort I'm putting into being allowed to hang out with her

62 hours into this game I have just noticed the logo for the takoyaki place is an octopus with a martini glass and a gun

by studying almost every night for 9 straight months I have achieved the maximum possible intelligence and therefore no longer need to pee

so I'm still slogging my way through Persona 3 and hey uh, do the later games actually interrogate any of their own themes around personas and what using/collecting them is supposed to mean?

bc boy howdy 65 hours in and this one sure doesn't

Like the setting establishes:
- Personas are manifestations of one's inner self
- They're clearly demonic though?
- Some people's personas can't be "controlled" and actively try to harm them
- The protagonist has hundreds of personas (inner selves!) and can swap them out at will

- There are drugs that suppress personas, but this is eventually fatal
- YOU MANIFEST A PERSONA BY SHOOTING YOURSELF IN THE HEAD WITH GUN

None of this means anything??? 65 hours and so far they're literally just Weird Pokemon, a game mechanic with no narrative meaning

There's like so much potentially interesting stuff going on that's just completely ignored/wasted?

I mean maybe the Third Act, which has def not started yet, goes hard on actually addressing its own themes, but at this point they've wasted so much time I have no goodwill left

whoa fuuka's fall outfit is cool as hell

bonding with my robot friend over not understanding teens

so at hour 75 this game finally dropped the MIND BLOWING REVELATION that the dude who's been conscripting teens to hunt monsters without telling them why or what the monsters are and who has never been questioned in any way is SECRETLY EVIL

WHO COULD POSSIBLY HAVE PREDICTED THIS

this game is like... astonishingly badly paced. like even by "bad PS2 JRPG pacing" standards. just absolutely miserable

you could have dropped this twist 40 hours ago and missed nothing whatsoever

why did we even have that whole ken/shinjiro arc who even cares they suck

really wonder how tolerable this game would be on an emulator with save states and fast-forward

like, no exaggeration, this game is probably at LEAST 30% loading and transition screens, and another huge chunk is just walking between characters checking if they have dialogue

I DUNNO ATLUS A 90-HOUR JRPG MIGHT BE WORSE THERE

oh no

oh no oh no oh no

are you kidding me

is this game seriously about to do a Hot Springs episode at hour EIGHTY

this door swings open from one side and slides open from the other

PERSONA 3 FES, RELEASED IN 2007 FOR THE SONY PLAYSTATION 2, CONTAINS ONE (1) NIPPLE

an extremely goofy aspect of this combat system is that none of the AIs have the slightest idea how it works

most enemies could easily stunlock your entire party into oblivion and the only reason the game is playable at ALL is the fact that usually they just... don't

*The embodiment of Death given human form transfers to our school*

Characters: "Who is this mysterious boy"

Me: he's the embodiment of Death given human form

*15 hours later*
Game: "The mysterious boy is secretly tHE EMBODIMENT OF DEATH GIVEN HUMAN FORM!!"

Dog Upgrade

lmao

lmaon

lmaodyne

there aren't a lot of notable graphics things going on in this game but here's one odd detail: There are two different shadowing implementations

Rendered to low-res shadow maps in most environments, but pixel-sharp polygon shadows in combat

Lots of interesting details in the combat shadows. They appear to be an actual plane, because meshes can sometimes intersect them. They support arbitrary light positions, and correctly handle overlapping tris/meshes

Did stencil volume shadowing work on the PS2?

My first instinct is to say they just took all the mesh verts and projected them flat onto the floor plane, then did some Cool Blending Tricks so they have a uniform darkness (which is variable; notably. They can fade shadows in and out, but only for everything at once)

This approach would work fine for triangles but would get Weird for alpha textures. I thought for a long time that the game just doesn't USE alpha cards; they're remarkably (perhaps tellingly) rare on enemy models

Found an exception though, the chains here do cast shadows:

notably though, they're WEIRD shadows. Really hard to get a good look since they're so uncommon, but look at this:

can def imagine something like this arising from pancaking all the geo onto a plane, rasterizing to main camera (there's definitely no shadow map involved it'd be need to be gigantic) and then doing Weird Blending Tricks to avoid artifacts from overlapping tris

anyway this is going to remain idle speculation because this game is boring as hell and there's no way I'm hooking it up to an emulator and running it through renderdoc like I did for KH2 lol

Bonus artifact: odd sorting issue in one of the rare cases where shadows and alpha textures directly interact

transparency is so hard regardless of hardware man why can't games just be opaque

game design is my passion

PLEASE
END

I do not recommend playing persona 3 under any circumstances

I mean ok maybe play it since the circumstances are "literally just trying to kill as much time as possible so I don't have to think about the fact that lockdown's probably at least another entire year" but even then

the in-game calendar still has 2.5 months left, so unless the pace picks up dramatically that's roughly another 20 hours

oh cool I can craft Jesus now

ROBOT 🤖 DATE 💘 ROBOT 🤖 DATE 💘 ROBOT 🤖 DATE 💘 ROBOT 🤖 DATE 💘 ROBOT 🤖 DATE 💘 ROBOT 🤖 DATE 💘 ROBOT 🤖 DATE 💘

so this game's systems are designed such that:
- Talking to girls inevitably approaches Romance, but at unpredictable speeds
- You have no say in this
- They get mad at you if you don't talk to them in a while
- They can also get mad at you if you talk to other girls

the end result of this is that half the character arcs are miserable because you can't complete them because they're all in competition with each other, and this is completely unavoidable

at this point almost every girl in the game hates me because I spoke to them like six times

...also you can't just ignore them altogether because that's skipping like half the content in the game, and also you NEED to talk to them to make your pokemon stronger

"android dysphoria arc" is the first genuinely interesting idea in this game; too bad it doesn't start until over 100 hours in

Multiple forum posts I've encountered over the past 100+ hours: "You're eventually going to need Narcissus or the final boss is nearly impossible"

*googles narcissus as I approach the final boss*

Literally IGN Dot Com: "Don't use Narcissus. He is useless."

me, at my job, trying to read siggraph papers in 2020

character levels are a direct measure of how much I like them

in this house vic mignogna does not receive experience points

this is every central dilemma in every sci-fi story involving androids and it rules every time

robot: I wish to become human but I do not know my purpose, only that I have learned to fear loss

robot's friends: Yeah that's existential anxiety. It's like, the defining characteristic of humans and is basically proof that you ARE one already

robot: wait, really? fuck

"Priestress" is no longer reversed.

geeeEEEZ all the relationship arcs are written like you're a complete psychopath lmao

you get these super emotional scenes of your friends pouring out their hearts while you just stand there in complete silence and then it's like CONGRATULATIONS YOU CAN MAKE STRONGER POKEMON NOW

I think the intent of the Social Link system was SUPPOSED bridge narrative and gameplay, so that "the power of friendship" is made explicit in the combat system, but in this implementation all it really does is make every interaction feel utterly transactional

the player doesn't have a personality; hell he's not even a PERSON. He's a walking engine of systems optimization twisting everyone else's emotions to his benefit, without them ever even realizing

it honestly feels awful, even though I really doubt that was the designers' intent

I was musing about this problem waaaay earlier in the thread. The setting actually does, initially, suggest there's a REASON the protagonist seems like a series of masks with no face

but, nope. It's a videogame; it has no idea what its own themes are

I haven't finished it yet so I'm sure there's one more Big Twist at the upcoming boss but at this point I'm pretty certain it'll just be more flashy Lore, rather than a narrative payoff for all the thematic contradictions it's been building for 100 hours

I guess there's a CHANCE

this dude has the most JRPG-ass idle animation in the history of the medium

not much point in grabbing a video but this one boss battle has, like, DRAMATICALLY higher framerate than the entire game up to this point?

everything's suddenly incredibly smooth for no obvious reason lol

soooo I finished Persona Threefes last night

not convinced that was remotely a good use of the last 2.5 months but boy it sure was *a* use of the last 2.5 months

the ending, unsurprisingly, pretty much just goes "the point of this story is The Power of Friendship" and drops all other concerns on the floor

as far as Power of Friendship endings go it was p hype, but I still wish it had put, like, any thought whatsoever into its own themes

Like hey you know that thing where
- Personas are people's innermost selves, but they're literally demons
- You invoke your persona by SHOOTING YOURSELF IN THE HEAD WITH A GUN?

yeah that.... means nothing. At all.

it's just there to look badass; videogames don't have themes

in its defense it does look incredibly bad ass

thinking about how almost every social link besides Aigis felt like a complete waste of time

- they tell you their deal
- they are faced with a tragic dilemma
- they make the obviously-correct choice while thanking you for giving them the courage to choose

that said I did experience Feels at the end when you get to wander around and talk to everyone after saving the world

An actual denouement! In a videogame! This rules!

It actually gives you time to, like, feel that you've reached a conclusion instead of FINAL BOSS DEAD CREDITS

anyway I may be trapped in my apartment by a viral miasma for the next several years while watching the accelerating collapse of american social order and feeling awful 24/7 but there's no way I hate myself enough to play the 30+ additional hours of the FES epilogue lol

so uhhh yeah my review of Persona 3 is you probably shouldn't play Persona 3 tbh

if you played Persona 3 as an impressionable youth in 2007 and enjoyed it I am happy for you