!/3 better engine 1/3 less story
Start up and synopsis:
You are a second year transfer student to Inaba High School. Your parents are both "working overseas" and you've been shipped off to live with your Uncle - Dojima Ryotaro and cousin Dojima Nanako for a year. You are met at the station by your Uncle and his daughter Nanako. Seems you have not seen him since you were in diapers. He has to explain his relationship to your mother to you - ok I want to know the story there! Why has she not seen her brother since you were a baby?
You guys head back to the house, Inaba seems to be a sleepy town. You get back to the Dojima residence, sit down for dinner and Dojima's cell rings. He has to go to work leaving you and Nanko alone. You find out he is a detective and that he is gone a lot. You go upstairs go to bed and have a freaky dream that involves a figure shrouded in fog that keeps asking you if you want to find the truth. You chase it through the fog, find you can throw lightning and use some sword techniques against it. It laughs at you and tells you come on then, and you awaken.
Turns out the stown might not be so sleepy after all, there is a murder your forst day of school. Chie - one of your classmates - tells you all some weird story about the midnight channel where you supposedly see your soulmate at midnight if the tv is turned off and it is raining. She makes you all promise to watch it, Of course you do and see something. Turns out there is another murder and it is the person you saw, thus starts fth forays into the TV world where shadows dwell in an effort to discover the culprit.
Gameplay:
The game again combines a card fighter with a High School RPG. By day you attend classes -except holidays. You fight shadows to level up and use the Velvet room to fuse personas. Your time however is limited and you must balance your after school time trips into the TV, with school clubs, working and other social activities to raise your social links.The social links affect the types of Persona you can fuse. It is better to complete a social link than to have multiple ones almost complete. Only completed ones count in the end. Part time jobs and books help raise your courage, understanding, knowledge, diligence and expression. Some of these must be at certain levels before you can start a social link with some individuals. Some can be done at night. Also there are the usual side quests and this time there is fishing added which raises diligence and gets you things you need for some quests or just better eq.
Battle in the TV world is easy enough each persona has different strengths and weaknesses. Like any RPG of this nature, you gain more party members as you rescue more people. . You can bring 3 into the zone with you and each has their strengths and weaknesses as well. You an set characters to act as they see fit or to support or to play them a individuals and you set their actions. The latter is definitely suggested for boss battles after the first one maybe even for that one and I found some characters I wanted to control because they are SP hogs and blow through all the SP in the first few levels.
With a little forethought and enough personas of your own to choose from, you can have a party ready for almost anything. Boss battles take place on the highest level of a zone and most have a mid boss of some type. You have a time limit to save each person based on the weather forecast. The person must be out of the TV world before it becomes foggy in Inaba. Fog usually occurs after "several days" of rain. Which can give you anywhere from a week playtime upward. Your real life intrudes frequently in the form of exams and school trips so you sometimes have less time than you think.
You gain money so through quests, defeating shadows, from your part time jobs and from selling things you gain in the TV world. There is a shop that makes interesting weapons for you. And the usual supply store that sells healing things. Correct answers in crucial scenes move the plot along - most are pretty obvious. But a few are not. The wrong one at the wrong time ends the game with no solution revealed. The Boss battle at the end is good and hard.
Technical issues:
None - GOOD Job!
Complaints:
I preferred having the weapon types to the streamlining of just physical.
It is not as dark as I like - less for mature audiences than the previous one.
Teddy is ANNOYING, I hated when he was my support as soon as I got Rise I move him off. He is just as annoying if not more so in your party. I refused to use him.
To much grinding needed still and you have to spend longer bouts of time in the World.
The music wears on your ear after a while thank goodness for my ZEN Mp3 Player. Celldweller and Five Finger Death Punch worked well as background music in the dungeons when grinding.
Having to enter the velvet room to save persona, leave to dismiss persona then come back in to take others out of the compendium STILL.
The start took too long. Almost 2 hours before your real first fight and I was blasting through the choices when I timed this, having already done it once.
I liked the combo persona specials in 3 and am sorry they took them out of this one.
Sometimes the forced story portions went on too long. I needed places to break or save. Sometimes I got them, usually I did not.
Likes:
The multiple endings and the fact you can fail.
The part time jobs made a nice change from the reading to raise the stats.
The gameplay was solid and consistent. No technical issues
Lots of slots for saving. I like this in an RPG lets me branch decisions.
Engine for battle seems better, I prefer not having my time set by Death or being tired.
The fact I can SKIP the card shuffle THANK YOU!
The fact that when I fuse a persona it is now immediately added to to compendium.
Upshot:
I liked the game. I will play it again and see how many social links I can get done. The boss is good and hard, not a cop out. The story is good and the solution odd enough but it is just not dark enough nor is it anything innovative, I mean a bunch of kids outsmarting the police department in their investigations - how scooby doo . The protagonist and the people are not as mysterious overall and most of the social links were not as interesting in their stories, too pat, set seen it before. Where Persona 3 had Bebe, the girl whose parents were getting divorced, the drinking monk and Tanaka - this had only Kanji and the nurse that I actually enjoyed the story on the links. The rest were rather ho hum and I felt like slapping the a few of them for being idiots and not seeing the answer.
The battle engine is much smoother and the annoyances that detracted from Persona 3 are for the most part gone. I do recommend it. Out 10 I give Persona 4 a 8.