PERSONA vs ZELDA,which series is better?

He's a traitor

Sad but True :(

Persona 5 > Zelda > Persona

How are they even comparable?

Both are series I like.

Well, that is a con they both share.

@charizard1605: They're almost polar opposites aesthetics not wisthanding.

Even aesthetically, they are wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy different. Zelda for instance no one would mistake for weeb shit, can't do the same with Persona. Shit's weeb as ****.

you say that like its a bad thing

True but they are not polar opposites in art style.

Champ didn't even enjoy NIER and i always thought Champ had a great taste in gaming over us.Dissapointed with Champ. Atleast Char is faithful to jrpg's inspite moving onto the dark side lol.

Zelda ain't a JRPG, watchu on about

LoZ all day every day

@charizard1605: I meant PERSONA (0_0)

Both look pretty "weeb" to me. Heck, Aonuma even said BoTW was inspired by anime.

The only difference is that BoTW looks more like something you'd see in Princess Mononoke, a Ghibli film, which I know you would argue it's not actually an "anime", but that's a no true scotsman fallacy.

Zelda by a landslide

Being weebshit is the least of the concerns with Persona.

I am more concerned with 4's dumb plot, cliche cast, offensively bad pacing issues, first world problems, banal setting and overall bad writing. Persona 5, from the spoilers that people have told me looks to actually be servicable in the storytelling aspect which is great. But That is not enough for me to be willing to forgive the pacing problems, reskinned enemies and repetitive music of its predecessors. Not to mention, the fact that half of the gameplay is little more than a dating sim with platonic options. but with characters a lot less compelling than you can get elsewhere. Witcher gives us Triss and Jennifer. What does Persona 4 give us?

A freakin' Pikachu who suffers from self esteem issues. And really, the other choices, while less awful. Are all different shades of ugly.

@FireEmblem_Man Persona isn't just weebshit. It is just plain shit. It is a glorified dating sim with repulsive and unlikeable characters.

The difference is. Whereas Breath of the Wild visuals are akin to legit anime, Persona is based on the bottom of the barrel trash... High School Anime. The only medium that is more petty than video games.

@Maroxad: thats why you dont pick music club

and I like all of the main characters...

I picked the music club because that is what my character would have picked.

I picked Basketball/Music. And music girl club was the most cringeworthy character. But ultimately it didnt matter much. I disliked nearly everyone in Inaba, with 4 exceptions. The 4 exceptions were Naoto, the Dojimas and my favorite character in P4, Morooka.

I was going to pick music, but then I found out she was the social link, so I bailed for drama club. I will admit that one was weird. Naoto is obviously the best, but I liked all the party members, Rise was probably my least favorite of the romances between the party members, but I still liked her character. Nanako is awesome too.

As you can probably tell. I didnt romance anyone in Persona 4. Unless you consider the constant hitting on me by Rise to be a romance :P

She gave me a healthy SP recover after each fight though, makign the dungeon crawling a lot less tedious. So I will forgive her for her complete disregard for the whole concept of personal space.

I liked those bits lol. I got a persona with sp regen that I would use for dungeons and focused the rest of my party on physical moves, so I was good to go. Really it was the game trying to make it so you cant run through a dungeon in one go, similar to fatigue in p3.

Each extra day you spent in the dungeon crawling meant one day less for social linking or eating that food at the resturaunt that boosted your stats. Perhaps the devs shouldnt have punished you for using more than one day for dungeon crawling sections.

It was a terrible system. And arguably the biggest offender of the game's mechanics working against eachother.

it really depends on how you tackle it, but it is doable to do in one go. Really unless you are going to go try hard and get everyone's social links to max, I dont think the devs necessarily wanted you to get everyone. It makes the choices of who you spend time with more meaningful. In my first playthrough of 3 and 4 I didnt get all the social links, I replayed 3 and did them all, but that required a guide. Its about choosing what you want to focus on

Yet, there are much more elegant ways to handle this.

In Kichikuou Rance. You can not get a good ending for everyone no matter how hard you try, you can not even get all the party members in a single playthrough, and yet despite that it felt all natural. Persona's social linking, just feels isolated and instanced away from the rest of the world.

In Persona 3 and 4, not only can you get a good ending for everyone, but the game encourages you to try to max every social link. Outside of the 2 clubs. No option is mutually exclusive, and you never really have to do anything at the expense of another. You can eat your cake and have it too. Something the likes of Kichikuou Rance would not allow. That and the fact that there is usually one superior choice really makes it a shitty roleplaying game. Persona 4 PUNISHES you for roleplaying.

Regardless to say, the social linking system just feels terribly thought out in Persona 4. I have no doubt they improved it quite a bit in Persona 5. But the Persona fanbase has been exceptionally good at NOT spoiling anything for Persona 5. I can not speak with any certainty.

Zelda by miles

I think they intended you to be able to talk with everyone, you do get a reward for getting all the social links. You can get orpheus telos in p3 and I think there is a better izanagi in p4. Its just hard, all of it is just time management, Im not totally sure I follow on the good endings though. I actually like that you can max out everyone just because its like you dont feel cheapened that you had to miss things, you only miss things if you arent efficient enough, it doesnt artificially take things away from you. I may have less replay value that way, but I feel like there is enough there to warrant multiple playthroughs. I have played P3 multiple times and its still great imo

Persona 3 and 4 are schedule management and ass kissing simulations. Which isnt exactly compelling gameplay. It is tactically shallow, just as it doesnt really test any of your abilities as a player. Especially due to how overall simple, and unemergent the gameplay is.

Basically in Kichikuou Rance (which is not the more well known Sengoku Rance) a whooping 66 of the characters characters in the game has a good and bad ending seperate from the main ending you get in the game. What ending you get on each character depends on various actions you make throughout the game. Some actions will screw some people over. Some events will only occur when a certain character is dead. Others will only occur on before or after a certain date. There are many other ways, the various interests of all these 66 characters can be mutually exclusive. You can not get everything in a single run.

I could only stomach a single playthrough of Persona 4. And even that was a tough cookie to swallow. When someone urged me to get Persona 4 Golden. I only cleared "Yukiko's castle", before I uninstalled the game off my Vita. I saw that I had a few weeks of social linking ahead of me. And I was like "**** no, not this shit again". Social Linking in Persona doesnt have any depth or actual fun mechanics to it to warrant a replay, the social linking doesnt have any real choices since one choice rules all.

I could see that being cool. My opinion on persona is more that they are taking you on a story, its not really a choose your own adventure kind of game. They have side stories for you to explore and really you dont have to do any social links if you dont want to, though that would be missing half the fun and hindering you in dungeons. The main story is the draw and I personally love it, its one of my favorite stories. I could see lacking of branching paths being irritating and I would welcome that if they wanted to implement it, but I didnt find it necessary to enjoy the game. Its more focusing on what it is than what it isnt and I think it offers an experience that not a lot of other games offer.

I actually like the turn based combat in persona too, I can admit that on face value its kinda simplistic, but there are some battles that are pretty intense. In P3, Elizabeth (P3's Margret) is the hardest boss I think I have ever faced in a video game. Shit was crazy, I literally had to be max level with all the best weapons and it was still hard. The draw in replay value for me has just been completionist stuff, I've started another run in p3p to get 100% compendium.

My issue with the main story of Persona 4 (I am not going to judge Persona 3 for obvious reasons) is how stupid everyone in the main crew was. I found myself asking constantly how the **** people didnt pick up on the most obvious clues. Likewise, the whole search for random information about the person in the world felt like lazy storytelling as well, these are things I would assume the game could have told subtletly in the dungeon crawling aspects (since levels were randomized; dungeon dialogue, shadow design and even items could have told this instead).

I dunno why, but my entire time playing Persona 4 it felt like the game assumed I was mentally deficient. Often having to wait until things were pretty much spelled out to me before I could even remotedly act upon them. I knew who the culprit was within the first 2-3 ingame months. And I knew who the villain was within the first 10 minutes of playing the game. Well, not the true identity of course.

(Edit: Of course, to be fair, this is my perspective as an onlooker. Unlike the investigation team. The characters dont have the privilege of knowing that they are in a story, nor do they have the advantage that the story can be predicted easily using TVTropes (not the Persona 4 page mind you, that is just cheating). But still, they were incredibly slow to pick up on patterns.)

Likewise, I didnt like how the game handled the whole "search for truth" theme. I liked all the fake doors and "shortcuts". But having a definite answer to everything is not how truth or epistemology works. If you ask a scientist how science operates he will most likely tell you that science finds the most likely answers, and that we can never know the absolute truth. Yet Persona 4 broke this law, by giving you just that, the absolute truth.

@Maroxad: did you do the true ending?

Yes.

@Maroxad: ya I think its less about finding truth in the end (which was the main mystery of the game) and more so about finding independence in life at the end, being able to make decisions and questioning your place in society. I thought it evolved very well and personally the twists were decent, more so than p3 imo. I'm sure it hits people in different ways, but I cant think of a time where I thought "this is just stupid". I thought they built up the characters well enough that it was just interesting to see whats happening to these characters and how they deal with the situations. I did like the mystery aspects of P4, it was cool to see them go in that direction after P3

the ending though in P3 is better.

Yeah, I am sure it did, I know that Charizard loves the story as well, it definately hit me really poorly though, and I found the story cringeworthy throughout, not as bad as Ayane's existance though :P

I personally thought everyone was acting stupid constantly, being oblivious to any patterns that I had detected a lot earlier than the rest. Had the characters been better at picking up patterns, they could have "shortened" the game by several in-game months. I like mystery stories when the protagonist and his/her crew are intelligent. The Persona 4 crew would not be able to identify the villain of a scooby doo episode before the actual unmasking.

Ya, always go drama club, her design was just... weird.

For the story I might need to replay it, I cant recall a moment like that personally. It may just be a tone thing too, I would recommend trying out P3. That or are you going to try out P5? Its supposed to be darker than 4, but lighter than 3.

Charizard has always been a sheep first and a cow second. Every time Nintendo does something right, he throws off his cow skin and goes full sheep lol Cows should never trust him.

Considering that Persona 4 was one of the worst jRPGs I have ever played. And the Persona 3 movies were awful-meh (which is to be expected, it was a gaming movie by A-1 Pictures). I will probably refrain from playing more Persona games. Unless Persona 5 ends up being actually not shit. I will see how Persona 5 ends up being though. I love the idea of the games. A princess maker/dungeon crawler hybrid is definately interesting to say the least. I just never really liked the execution. Which I found to be incredibly sloppy in Persona 4. I am more of a gameplay kind of person. I will continue to follow the Persona games until the end of time. Because as stated, their ideas are very fascinating. It is just that Persona 4 just felt like a poor man's dating sim or poor man's Princess Maker in the social gameplay and like a poor man's Shin Megami Tensei in the dungeon crawling aspects.

Go ahead and PM me to tell me how the Persona 5 has improved. I know the dungeon crawling has improved extensively. But I am more curious about the social aspects. Because it is those aspects that makes Persona unplayable for me. Feel free to use spoilers in the PM if you want to. If you dont do it first, someone else will.

As for story... I havent actually played a story driven game since Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky last year. And that was a game I mostly played because of the gameplay aspects. Video game standards are terrible when it comes to storytelling. Only a few storylines actually come across as memorable.

@Maroxad: i'll convert you yet :P

I will give you the chance. But be liberal with spoilers (in the PMs that is). Even if you don't say them, someone else will. I will not be safe from them regardless. These people also spoiled the entirety of BotW's storyline days before the game even released.

@Maroxad: BotW had a story?

Yup, as did The Legend of Zelda. Not a very developed plot or storyline, but one exists regardless. But to be frank. I am glad it is very minimalistic, since I dont know how much of that voice acting I could tolerate. And video game stories are unbearable enough as it is.

Most games have a story no matter how basic it is, even this,

Inb4 you say "Still better writing than BotW" :P

Strangely enough, Persona 4 actually had pretty passable voice overs for most of the part. One of the few cases of a jRPG not completely failing at english dubs.

@Maroxad: im just joking, I just dont like botw's story.

Persona voice acting is awesome

Merely passable. Which is saying something about the rest of the game when I say that the localization was probably Persona 4's greatest strength.