C2C

Man it bums me out we still have topics about new endurance runs. They cover the same exact ground every single friggin' time.

Its been dead, mentioning it makes the situation worse, and you are beating a horse that has been dead for the past couple of years. Oh, but changed circumstances makes the horse really dead. NO. Leave the poor dead horse in peace ffs.

Hey guys, how about another endur-Gets Beat over the head.

But seriously I like it when they play multiplayer games every once in a while. While I wouldn't want TNT all over again, I wouldn't mind seeing some smack talk from the duders.

To answer whether the P1 and the P2 Duo feel like the modern Persona's, I would say that they do not. They share some common themes, but the feel is super different.

The way the older persona games handle characters is different compared to the more modern persona's. There are no S. Links in the older games, and they have less of a spotlight individually. While the characters were pretty well developed for their time, the P1/2 characters feel basic compared to the character in P3/4.

While I have no experience with the P2 remake, I did play P1 to completion. The audio/visual presentation has been updated dramatically. I say Atlus did a pretty good job with updating the game on that department. Just don't expect P3/4 levels of presentation. However, there are some issues with music repetition since the enemy encounter rate is high.

While the P3/4 stories kinda isolated the conflict into somewhere other than Japan (Inside televisions/Tartarus), the older don't do that. From a tone level, you have mass amounts of people freaking out making the older games a bit darker. Instead of shadows you also fight demons in the older games, kinda amplifying why people are freaking out. While there is levity in the older games, you are not gonna have the campy lightheartedness form P4. The older persona's have light shades of SMT: Nocturne if I had to make a comparison.

If you are looking for the light hearted character driven story of the later personas, I wouldn't recommend the older games. Strictly looking at the story, the older personas make for a nice bridge between the later personas and the proper SMT series. The stories are also pretty good in their own right, if you go in with the mindset that those games are very much a product of their time.

I agree. Transistor was overall very clumsy in the way it told the story, to the point where it was detrimental to everything else. It hid crucial narrative points on purpose. I love it when a story doesn't give you the entire picture and leaves something to the imagination. I don't like it when I am left confused as to some basic character motivations from the two main characters (The sword and Red). It is a balance, and Transistor erred by hiding some very basic character motivations until it was too late at times.

Even trying to get to the parts that clear up the story is a bit of a hassle. While I appreciate a lot of the clever text that was written, it created a lot of points where you had to stop and read it. Even the few bits of audio from Asher stopped the action. There is a lot of rich narrative in transistor, but looking for it slows you down. If there was a game that makes a good argument for audio-log pickups as not being as bad as people make them out to be, it is this game.

Once they subverted the whole "here are the bosses" thing by killing of two of the Camarata, I was really bummed out as a player since I actually liked the boss encounters in the game. Narratively it made sense, but at that point it kinda clued me in that Royce was probably going to be the last boss. I couldn't help feel as a player, the narrative at that point got in the way of making a better game.

EDIT: Grammar

Sin and Punishment. That game is the type of weird 90's anime aesthetic I really like. Its also a pretty cool arcade style game.

You know, this type of thread always comes out on the lull before E3. And it always has the same things over and over (Not enough content, Jeff is jaded, Brad is bad, Patrick is pushing an agenda, heck I even remember people moaning about Ryan). If its not worth the money don't renew. That sends a clearer message at this point than making a forum topic, since it comes up almost every single year season at this point. These type of threads are starting to become the new "they should do X endurance run," in terms of how stale that idea is.

Am I concerned with the GB expansion and the potential loss of Vinny? Sure am. But until I stop getting my moneys worth it (UNP is still a nice side program, the powerbombcast is great, and Vinnyvania was pretty great, no ads), I am probably going to renew. These are not the bad days when they barely moved into the office, and I am cautiously optimistic.

I gave myself like an hour after beating it to really gather my thoughts about the game. I think I will make a review/blog thing that will be very spoilerriffic since a lot of my biggest gripes come from later on in the game and could involve story. the tl;dr version Transistor is a good game with good atmosphere, but I feel the direct narrative wasn't what I was looking for out of the creators of Bastion. I'm going to go through the game once more, to see what the new game + adds before writing anything out.

@gunslingerpanda: Nah, there are a couple of hitches here and there on my rig if I play it for longer than 10ish minutes. Not unplayable, but I don't think that it is the optimal way to play it.

Wishing you the best Vinny. While I am still weirded out by a Vinny-less GiantBomb in SanFran, I am super excited to see what GB New Yorlk looks like!