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joiedecombatSo, I recently finished Persona 3.
I'd actually picked up the game quite a while back and never quite got into it at the time... I got a little bit past the Yakushima summer trip and then just never picked it back up again. I found some things about the premise interesting, but the whole dating sim/dungeon crawl setup kind of dragged.
But I was looking forward to the PSP re-release, which adds the option of playing as a female main character - always a plus. And, indeed, it made a world of difference for my level of interest in the game's progress, not only because of playing as a female protagonist, but because unlike the male one she gets Social Links with all of her teammates, not just the girls.
For the record, the period from between October 4 through about December 20ish makes P3P the most depressing video game I have ever played.
The one thing about P3P that I don't like in comparison to the PS2 version is that all of the animated cutscenes are gone. The original version has cel-animated sequences for important cutscenes and animates the rest with the little 3D character sprites; the PSP version does everything except the dungeon crawl / combat part in full visual novel mode, with a couple of stills capped from the anime cutscenes mostly as backgrounds. Which is a bummer. No actual content seems to be lost that way - mostly - but after I finished the game I looked up the ending of the original to make sure I wasn't missing something, and having the actual visuals really gives it a bit more emotional impact. I can't tell if this was done because of the PSP's different capabilities, because they couldn't be bothered / didn't have time or budget to re-do the cutscenes for the girl protagonist, or both.
P3P does not include The Answer, so I didn't realize until I looked things up online that apparently the protagonist dies at the end. I am not sure quite how I feel about this. I am not necessarily opposed to a heroic-sacrifice-hero-dies-at-the-end kind of bittersweet ending... but I do feel as though if they're going to do that, it shouldn't be so ambiguously implied. I mean, I want to see how the characters react to it, and I'd have liked more to indicate whether or not the protagonist knew, in the end, what was going to happen.
Which I guess is the purpose of The Answer, but I don't have FES, I don't feel like buying the same game three times, and even if I did, it'd involve playing as the male protagonist, which I don't know that I can muster that much interest in.
So on the one hand, I'd kind of prefer to imagine that after the fade to white at the end of my game, the rest of the characters arrived, Protagonist-chan woke up, and they all lived more or less happily ever after. On the other hand, knowing that's not the ending intended by the game (even if it's not stated in the ending as it played out in my version) makes me feel like I can't do that.
Bah.
Other points of casual interest:
The one thing that the change from animated cutscenes to VN cutscenes completely dropped from the P3P experience is Koromaru's big moment foiling Ikutsuki's plans, which, again, I had no idea about until I read it online. I have no idea why that got left out; the scene ends up just looking like Aigis having a moment of free will and heroic willpower.
The S.Links are mixed around quite a bit. Some are still the same - mostly the ones entirely unconnected to the school, such as the old couple at the bookstore and the little girl at the shrine - but all of the school-based ones except for the SEES girls are different, and as previously mentioned, every SEES member has their own S.Link. I didn't finish them all, and I didn't get far enough in the original version to compare the experience, but I imagine that it gives more insight into the characters who didn't have S.Links in the original. (Shinjiro in particular is freaking adorable.) And the girls' S.Links are kind of amusing since they're not adapted much from the original version (at least, Mitsuru's wasn't) and therefore read as kind of romantic.
I also notice that where in the original version, Protagonist-kun didn't really have to go out of his way to get the various girls in his S.Links to fall in love with him, Protagonist-chan does have to be pretty proactive about romances with her male S.Links (except for Ryoji, but he's a little messed-up to start with). I'd wonder how I should take this if it weren't honestly generally appropriate to the particular characters involved: namely, a guy who is already established as being shy and awkward around girls, a guy who thinks he's going to be dead soon, a ten-year-old, and, well, Ryoji and Theo aren't even human so who even knows.
(I feel like I should object to Shinjiro's romantic scene, which isn't so much romantic as basically "I love you!" "No you don't." "Yes I do." "No you don't." "Would you like to come to my room?" "No!" "Then I'll come to your room." "No you won't." "Yes I will." "No you won't." "Yes I will." "No you won't." "Yes I will." "OKAY FINE." This is only slightly paraphrased. But Shinji trying to restrain himself because he knows he's a dead man walking three times over makes sense, so mostly I can't help but giggle a little at his exasperation. This might make me a bad person.)
It's probably actually just so that male players can play Protagonist-chan without having to worry about their male teammates falling in love with them if they don't want them to, but whatever.
Overall, I ended up enjoying the game pretty well, in spite of (or, probably more likely, because of) the emotional wringer of the last third of the storyline. Naturally I am immediately beginning a replay to try to actually max out all the S.Links this time.
Favorite character: Akihiko, which is not surprising; he was my favorite the first time I tried to play the game, too. The little sister issues pretty much did it.
Times a teammate flung themselves across the screen to shove Protagonist-chan out of the way of a death blow: about three.
Hours spent making the entire female side of the team run around Tartarus in maid outfits: too many. This wasn't intentional, the maid costumes were actually the best armor that they had for quite a while there. Go figure.
Times I paused in the middle of Tartarus to chat with Akihiko just to watch him fluster over the maid outfit: also too many. At least I didn't actually buy the swimsuit.
I'd actually picked up the game quite a while back and never quite got into it at the time... I got a little bit past the Yakushima summer trip and then just never picked it back up again. I found some things about the premise interesting, but the whole dating sim/dungeon crawl setup kind of dragged.
But I was looking forward to the PSP re-release, which adds the option of playing as a female main character - always a plus. And, indeed, it made a world of difference for my level of interest in the game's progress, not only because of playing as a female protagonist, but because unlike the male one she gets Social Links with all of her teammates, not just the girls.
For the record, the period from between October 4 through about December 20ish makes P3P the most depressing video game I have ever played.
The one thing about P3P that I don't like in comparison to the PS2 version is that all of the animated cutscenes are gone. The original version has cel-animated sequences for important cutscenes and animates the rest with the little 3D character sprites; the PSP version does everything except the dungeon crawl / combat part in full visual novel mode, with a couple of stills capped from the anime cutscenes mostly as backgrounds. Which is a bummer. No actual content seems to be lost that way - mostly - but after I finished the game I looked up the ending of the original to make sure I wasn't missing something, and having the actual visuals really gives it a bit more emotional impact. I can't tell if this was done because of the PSP's different capabilities, because they couldn't be bothered / didn't have time or budget to re-do the cutscenes for the girl protagonist, or both.
P3P does not include The Answer, so I didn't realize until I looked things up online that apparently the protagonist dies at the end. I am not sure quite how I feel about this. I am not necessarily opposed to a heroic-sacrifice-hero-dies-at-the-end kind of bittersweet ending... but I do feel as though if they're going to do that, it shouldn't be so ambiguously implied. I mean, I want to see how the characters react to it, and I'd have liked more to indicate whether or not the protagonist knew, in the end, what was going to happen.
Which I guess is the purpose of The Answer, but I don't have FES, I don't feel like buying the same game three times, and even if I did, it'd involve playing as the male protagonist, which I don't know that I can muster that much interest in.
So on the one hand, I'd kind of prefer to imagine that after the fade to white at the end of my game, the rest of the characters arrived, Protagonist-chan woke up, and they all lived more or less happily ever after. On the other hand, knowing that's not the ending intended by the game (even if it's not stated in the ending as it played out in my version) makes me feel like I can't do that.
Bah.
Other points of casual interest:
The one thing that the change from animated cutscenes to VN cutscenes completely dropped from the P3P experience is Koromaru's big moment foiling Ikutsuki's plans, which, again, I had no idea about until I read it online. I have no idea why that got left out; the scene ends up just looking like Aigis having a moment of free will and heroic willpower.
The S.Links are mixed around quite a bit. Some are still the same - mostly the ones entirely unconnected to the school, such as the old couple at the bookstore and the little girl at the shrine - but all of the school-based ones except for the SEES girls are different, and as previously mentioned, every SEES member has their own S.Link. I didn't finish them all, and I didn't get far enough in the original version to compare the experience, but I imagine that it gives more insight into the characters who didn't have S.Links in the original. (Shinjiro in particular is freaking adorable.) And the girls' S.Links are kind of amusing since they're not adapted much from the original version (at least, Mitsuru's wasn't) and therefore read as kind of romantic.
I also notice that where in the original version, Protagonist-kun didn't really have to go out of his way to get the various girls in his S.Links to fall in love with him, Protagonist-chan does have to be pretty proactive about romances with her male S.Links (except for Ryoji, but he's a little messed-up to start with). I'd wonder how I should take this if it weren't honestly generally appropriate to the particular characters involved: namely, a guy who is already established as being shy and awkward around girls, a guy who thinks he's going to be dead soon, a ten-year-old, and, well, Ryoji and Theo aren't even human so who even knows.
(I feel like I should object to Shinjiro's romantic scene, which isn't so much romantic as basically "I love you!" "No you don't." "Yes I do." "No you don't." "Would you like to come to my room?" "No!" "Then I'll come to your room." "No you won't." "Yes I will." "No you won't." "Yes I will." "No you won't." "Yes I will." "OKAY FINE." This is only slightly paraphrased. But Shinji trying to restrain himself because he knows he's a dead man walking three times over makes sense, so mostly I can't help but giggle a little at his exasperation. This might make me a bad person.)
It's probably actually just so that male players can play Protagonist-chan without having to worry about their male teammates falling in love with them if they don't want them to, but whatever.
Overall, I ended up enjoying the game pretty well, in spite of (or, probably more likely, because of) the emotional wringer of the last third of the storyline. Naturally I am immediately beginning a replay to try to actually max out all the S.Links this time.
Favorite character: Akihiko, which is not surprising; he was my favorite the first time I tried to play the game, too. The little sister issues pretty much did it.
Times a teammate flung themselves across the screen to shove Protagonist-chan out of the way of a death blow: about three.
Hours spent making the entire female side of the team run around Tartarus in maid outfits: too many. This wasn't intentional, the maid costumes were actually the best armor that they had for quite a while there. Go figure.
Times I paused in the middle of Tartarus to chat with Akihiko just to watch him fluster over the maid outfit: also too many. At least I didn't actually buy the swimsuit.
