AtheistPreacher

Now that I'm finally, actually finished with Dragon's Dogma 2 (and have done my write-up on it), I've picked up P3R again. I'm still not done, but getting there at a pretty good pace now; I'm currently at October 20 on the calendar. But I think I'm ready to share some general thoughts, though I'll have to wait until the end to judge the story as a whole... I'm really interested to see how it all plays out, since it's been long enough that I've forgotten a lot of the details.

The first thing I just want to quickly mention is something that's already been brought up in this thread: the fully voiced Social Links. It's great that they committed to doing all that extra voice-work. It really does add a lot. And the only performances that I'd describe as "bad" are the ones for some of the really young kids (e.g., the kids Yuko coaches, or the kids Koromaru helps), which mostly don't sound like kids at all. That's sometimes a hard one to get right. But fully-voiced Social Links has been some of the lowest-hanging fruit for a while in terms of obvious ways to improve these games, so I'm glad they finally went and did it. Also neat that they got most of the original cast to voice other small roles (save Vic Mignogna, for obvious reasons).

But in general, as I've alluded to already, I just haven't been having quite as good a time with this one as I've recently had re-playing P5R. I used to call P3 my favorite entry in the series, but that's just not the case any more, and I've been trying to pin down for myself exactly why that is. I think now I have a pretty good idea. There are a number of reasons, some more important than others. And P3 does still have some strengths over P5.

I think that probably the biggest reason that I now prefer P5 over P3 is that the former has a much greater sense of urgency and purpose, along with clearly defined stakes and villains. Consider the difference for a moment.

In P3, the dark hour is largely a mystery, none of the individual monthly battles carry any particular sense of urgency, the fights are against anomalous, faceless monsters, and it's not even clear what exactly will happen if your team just... left things alone. More apathy syndrome, I guess? And even walking around the dorm between the mandatory boss battles, your team often doesn't seem that concerned about it; they'll just say something like "I guess we should be prepared to fight that next big shadow in a couple of weeks, huh?" It all just feels... very routine and rote after the first several monthly boss battles. Sort of aimless... you're just fighting these big shadows and seeing what happens next.

By contrast, in P5, not only do you get bespoke dungeons rather than randomized ones, but there is a clear villain for each palace, and clear, specific consequences for what will happen if you fail to steal that villain's heart in time. Each one has its place in P5's larger narrative, but they're all individually urgent and relevant to some particular character, usually a teammate. And an actual embodied villain is always more compelling than a faceless shadow or disembodied thing.

That's a pretty big narrative handicap for P3 to overcome in relation to P5, and the only way it can do it is to lean on its individual Social Links harder. I do remember thinking that P3 had the strongest set of Social Links/Confidants. After re-playing it, it still might (close and very subjective call TBH), but by the very nature of how these work—in which you can stop spending time with someone for literally months and come back to it as if it was only days later—they're still not really a substitute for the narrative urgency P5's palaces provide.

Also, while the fully voiced aspect is a nice improvement, P5 had the new gameplay wrinkle of each Confidant providing additional bonuses as they rank up, which made them more compelling from a gameplay perspective. The only reasons to hang out with particular people in P3 are that (1) you just particularly like that character, or (2) they happen to fit in your schedule that day. But all of them really only provide the same gameplay benefit: more bonus ranks to a fused persona in their arcana, and that's it. Whereas in P5 there are specific benefits to be gained from hanging out with particular Confidants, including a couple that actually help you rank up all the others faster. I found that extra incentive pretty compelling.

Lastly, as I mentioned earlier in this thread, I really like the fact that P5 gives you the tools to max all Confidants by the end of the game without using a guide with plenty of time to spare, whereas P3R still seems to make this nearly impossible. That's frustrating, because it leaves the player to choose between not seeing all the content (unless they want to return for another round of a 100+ hour game, which a lot of people just can't really do), or following a day-by-day guide that sucks most of the joy out of the experience by just turning the whole game into one giant checklist to follow.

All of this is not to say that there aren't things I still like about P3. On balance, I think I still like its cast of characters best. I dig the whole evoker shoot-yourself-in-the-head thing and how it ties in with the game's themes. I think that I still like P3's ending the best (so far as I recall it! TBD!), in terms of its themes and its emotional impact. I also like, in principle, that it doesn't "steal" nearly so many calendar days from you as P5; the latter tends toward having week-long periods (or more) between palaces in which you are somewhat arbitrarily not allowed to hang out with your Confidants while the game tells its main story. Though I also admit that this aspect of P5 bothered me less on subsequent plays, because I just sort of accepted that this was something it did—and that the days weren't "stolen," but didn't actually exist to begin with.

So, yeah. P3R is a good game. But as evidenced by the fact that I put it down twice for long periods to play other things, its narrative just isn't driving me forward, and I really think it's mostly because there's a serious lack of urgency there, not to mention the lack of a discernible villain or even clear stakes. P5 is a page-turner; P3 is not.

Well, this was interesting.

I've been known to enjoy Stephanie Sterling's takes on things, even when I don't always agree with them. But they put up a review for DD2 that I only saw today, and it's... kind of a bad review? It's not that they didn't like the game; Dragon's Dogma was always for a fairly niche audience. But it felt like they were unwilling to really critically engage, except on the most superficial level, or to try to meet the game on its own terms... which I think is really required since its design is so pointedly and intentionally different from basically every other open-world action RPG of the last decade or more.

And then I discovered that someone had written a review of Sterling's DD2 review. I agree with most of it. The line that stuck out to me was that Sterling was "misidentifying developer intent for publisher malice." Yeah, pretty much. I dunno, I though Sterling was a better critic than this.

I was playing this, then got sucked into Helldivers 2, then went back to this, then got sucked into Dragon's Dogma 2, and now I just finished that, so... probably will continue with P3R again?

I had just gotten Aigis in my party and done the next 20 floors of Tartarus with her. Going by the calendar, I think I'm only like 40% of my way through (I'm in early August IIRC). The Persona games really do have ridiculously long hour counts. It seems quaint now that when I first picked up FES (that's the one I started with, never played vanilla P3) I worried that a fixed calendar meant the hour count would be shorter. Oh you sweet summer child...

P3R is definitely good, but as evidenced by the fact that I put it down twice to play other games, I wouldn't say I've been enthralled by it. For quite a while there P3 was my favorite Persona game, including up to my first play of P5. Then I played Royal... a couple of times. At this point I have to say that one's my favorite. I don't really foresee this remake surpassing it for me... I guess it's possible that the back half could do it, but I don't think it's likely based on what I've seen so far.

Small detail, but do you actually keep your level in NG+? I thought you started back at 1, but it didn't really matter anyway because you could just summon high-level personas from the compendium and head straight to Monad to level up quickly again if you wanted. But maybe that's just how P5 handled NG+ and I'm misremembering. In any case, as I think I've already said in this thread, I don't really play the Persona games for challenge/difficulty, I'm sort of fine with being overpowered, so that aspect of NG+ doesn't bother me.

@junkerman: I actually did prefer the standard bow in the first game over the magick archer bow, because while the latter had the lock-on thing, it seemed to do less DPS because the locks were relatively slow; you could do more damage with the regular bow if you were aiming well. But in DD2, there's now a way to switch the magick bow's "mode" from a larger to a smaller circle, and the latter locks faster. Not actually sure that the standard bow out-DPSes the magick one now.

Whirling/Spiral Arrow seems to end up being the Archer's best skill IMO (unlocks at level 6/8). It stunlocks small targets and does good continuous damage on large ones.

Also, with regard to control, it seems to really help to do the dwarven upgrades that increase knockdown power. Suddenly you're flattening enemies that you weren't before.

@junkerman: Whereas I've found the ranged classes are more my bag. I think I've settled fairly firmly into Magick Archer, though I actually found the Sorcerer quite fun to play (unexpectedly, since I remember the casting classes being really boring to play in the first game).

I've fallen deep into this game. I have many thoughts, but I want to get through endgame before I write a bunch about it. Probably going to have to write a blog, there's too much to talk about with this crazy thing.

If it actually auto-sells or dismantles, that would be an improvement. What they've had in previous games was an option to set it so that you wouldn't pick up loot below a certain rarity at all, so it would just sit there on the ground. Yes, less inventory clutter that way, but I could never bring myself to do it because it felt like a waste just leaving items on the ground when I could get mats or money for them.

I started out playing an archer and have stuck with it so far, but IDK... I remember bows feeling better in the first game? And I likewise feel extremely vulnerable; unless I'm missing something there's no button to quickly dodge out of the way of an attack as a ranged character?

Also a bummer that all vocations now just have one weapon, no melee + ranged that you used to have in the first game, with the exception of the one arisen-exclusive hybrid class that I haven't unlocked yet. But for now, as a ranged class you just have no good way of dealing with enemies that get close. Genuinely not sure what vocation I'll ultimately settle into. Mystic Spearhand certainly looks cool, but I have no idea how to unlock it.

Agreed, I hadn't been aware of the microtransactions, looked 'em up, they're definitely gross, but plenty of selective outrage going on here. Most (all?) recent Capcom games have done this kind of nonsense. E.g., the RE4 remake let you buy "golden tickets" that would fully upgrade weapons. But I don't remember that game getting review bombed.

Unrelated: Having played the game a bit, so far the most amusing thing for me is the cutscenes that play when you cook meat at camp. Those videos appear to be just straight-up live action meat, or else they're so ultra-realistic that I can't tell the difference. I was immediately reminded of how good the food looked in Monster Hunter World, and that Monster Hunter devs worked on this. Some of them must have a serious meat fetish.

And another amusing nugget: from what I can tell there's equal opportunity skimpy armor in this game. In so many games the women end up in this ridiculously risqué armor while the men... do not. No great mystery as to the reason why. But in this game, if you want your male arisen/pawn to run around in a thong, well, you can do that. Which just makes me smile.

I've really never understood framerate snobbery. Maybe it's because I grew up playing games in the 80s and 90s when there was no such thing as a 60 fps game. But when I'm weighing whether to pick up a game, the frame rate has never been a thing it had even occurred to me to consider. Why does this even matter to people? E.g., I go back and play the King's Field games on PS1 all the time, which have sub 20 fps. They always look chunky when I first fire them up, but then I play for a few minutes and invariably my eyes adjust and I stop noticing; that's just how the game looks, and it's fine. I still love it.

FWIW I can't help but think when fps comes up as a topic about the fact that films are to this day still usually shown in theaters at 24 fps because that was the standard established literally a century ago as the slowest fps at which people wouldn't notice the individual frames--and hence the cheapest to produce. And it's been that way for so long that when movies like the Hobbit films were shown at some theaters at 48 fps or 60 fps in 2012, people hated it because it didn't look "cinematic"... which is to say, it just didn't look like the thing they'd been conditioned to expect after many years of going to movies. I guess it really is just what you're used to?

Also, sorta related, I was incredibly amused at how pleased Patrick and Cado were over at Remap when they discovered that Lunacid had programmed in the ability to cap its fps at King's Field levels. They then played the whole game at 24 fps, which really does give it a whole different feel.

Thought I'd start a thread for this one since I'll definitely be playing it. As I write this, it'll be out in about 18.5 hours.

In a thread started by @rorie upon the game's announcement about two years ago, I'd said that

However, looking into some of the reviews, it appears that the fear that the DD2 team might not have understood the secret sauce of DD1 really isn't a concern. Dragon's Dogma 2 is apparently just as contrary in its design decisions as its predecessor (on this point, Tom Chick's satirical review of DD1 remains probably my favorite written video game review ever). This time around, the Kotaku review seems to sum the point up nicely:

It's a good piece, and I'd recommend reading the whole thing. The big takeaway is that, like its predecessor, DD2 makes a lot of backasswards design decisions as far as modern open-world RPGs are concerned, including no multiplayer, side-quests that will fail if not completed quickly enough, food that will spoil in your inventory, and the already-mentioned lack of fast travel. For some people all of that will just seem obnoxious (even for me the food spoiling thing seems a little much), but I really admired the heck out of that first game and the way that it really forged its own path, and I suspect that I will also end up liking this second game quite a bit (though I'm not sure how they could possibly top the mind-fuck of the first game's ending).

Too bad I simply have less and less time to play these big, time-consuming triple-A games. Persona 3 Reload came out in early February and I'm less than halfway through it, and I just don't know if I'll be able to find the time to sink as many hours into DD2 as I'd like to. But we'll see. At the very least I'm sure I won't be able to resist dipping my toes into the water tomorrow night and at least forming some first impressions. I've already got my characters created thanks to the character creator they released a little over a week ago (as with the first game, it's an impressive one).