Video Game Commentary: Persona 3/The World Ends With You

The World Ends With You (TWEWY) [DS]: The basic premise of this game is simple. You can choose between different attack methods (called "pins" in game) that allow different methods of drawing on the bottom touchpad to work. Example: Main character gets three pins early on. One allows him to create fire by dragging a line across empty space on the battlefield into the opponent, one allows the main to shoot bullets of force by tapping empty space, and one attacks when you effectively "scratch" on the enemy. While this sounds basic, there's a fair few more complex ones (tap multiple different enemies, then draw a line between them; also a few that apparently use the microphone).

Plotwise, you're in Tokyo's Shibuya district, amnesiac (though you not only regain your memory, it's fairly early in the game that it happens), and living graffiti, called Noise, is attacking you. You and the friends you meet essentially need to survive seven days. Oddly enough, the translation's quite good, and the storyline is actually one of the more interesting ones I've run into, which is... pretty high praise, considering my usual disinclination to like video game plot.

It could be better options-wise; you get pin points (PP) from battle, as well as two other methods:

1. Leaving the game on in "Mingle" mode; you slowly gain PP at random from this, but gain more PP if you're near other DSes that are currently on;
2. When you take a break and turn the game off, once you turn it on you get a small amount of what's called "Shutdown PP".

Sounds convenient, but... there's a catch. Some pins only improve IF the PP on them is, by majority, of a certain type. Example: Pin "Tom Is Giving An Example" requires majority Mingle PP to upgrade to "Tom Has Finished Giving The Example". If, out of 100 PP max on the pin, the pin has 51 Mingle PP, 25 Battle PP, and 24 Shutdown PP, the pin will upgrade. However, if the pin has 49 Mingle and 26 Shutdown, it won't upgrade.

Now, even this wouldn't be terrible.

Except they don't tell you which pins need what PP to upgrade.

It's a somewhat bizarre and rather frustrating flaw in the setup; while it's not terribly difficult to get more copies of the same pin, it's annoying to level them up with a completely different PP the next time around. (This is glaringly annoying for Shutdown, which is very slow to accumulate.)

Granted, there is one advantage here that Square-Enix put in: Mingle and Shutdown PP, the two more annoying PP types to get, are worth 9 times Battle PP when it comes to upgrading. So, for a more accurate example, if, on a pin with 90 PP to upgrade, you have 10 Shutdown and 80 Battle PP, it will upgrade if it's Shutdown based: 10*9=90 Shutdown PP>80 Battle PP. It doesn't help how -fast- your pin upgrades, mind: the 9x modifier is only calculated in when you're figuring out what PP type is in the majority.

Rant on TWEWY over. I'm about halfway done, I'll make more notes as I go along (probably going to address food/equips next post). Oh, one other thing: the music/voice acting is actually rather impressive, especially for a DS game.

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Persona 3: FES.

As an avid fan of Persona 2, I had high hopes when I heard this was coming out (I had thought the series dead in the water).

For the most part, I'm not disappointed. The characters are pretty awesome and with some good lines, the voice acting is not half bad (Atlus has issues sometimes with voice actors), the battles are pretty good, if definitely Shin Megami Tensei-style battles (harsh/unforgiving at its best of moments) and the story is actually far crisper and involving than I expected.

This having been said, it really does feel like two games in one.

The first section of the game is the dungeon crawling up the Random Tower Tartarus, and the random side events about once a month. This is fun, though frustrating at first and somewhat pointless, since you can't go far without your teammates getting tired and unwilling to go any further. (This improves as they level up, so.)

The second section is the effective dating sim section, though only a few options are along those lines; it's the socialize and improve your links with people section, which can take up an astonishing amount of time.

The way these two interact: as you get to know people in the second part better, the Persona (an equipment type, effectively) you use are improved, and better ones are slowly unlocked. And what you find in the random dungeon Tartarus can help you improve relationships with the people in the outside world.

Still, the complete gameplay shift when you go from one to the other is honestly disorienting a bit, and it's slowed me down in playing the game. I'm about a month in: for reference, I think the game is a little under 12 months long. Remember, you play most all the days, although irrelevant stuff is skipped, as would be expected. (This has some issues as well; some activities seem to take a full day but in description only sound like they should take a few hours. It's annoying, a bit.)