Cataloging the Detritus of my Life
For this entire month my favorite video game podcast, On the Stick, has been covering horror games, or games that have horrifying elements. I was flattered to be asked and happy to contribute this year. I did two pieces, one on The Beast Within: a Gabriel Knight Mystery and another on Phantasmagoria both by Sierra On-line. There are a lot of other great games written up by a lot of great writers, some of whom I’m lucky enough to call friends!
I don’t remember when I picked up Persona 3 Portable. I know it was months after the release and long after everyone else on the internet had stopped talking about the game. The game just sat there in my PSP for a long time as well. I had started the game but set it down after playing maybe 30 minutes, the game just didn’t grab me. And then I forgot all about it. Until a friend decided to do a Let’s Play of Persona 4 earlier this year. Persona 4 looked interesting, the concept of being a group of high school students who can summon beings cribbed from the world’s religions seemed pretty interesting. But, I don’t spend a lot of time in front of a television gaming anymore though and P4 is a PS2 title… That is when I remembered that I had P3P lying around. This is one of the reasons that Let’s Plays are so great! I never would have given P3P another look if I hadn’t been able to see a lot of the content in a game in the franchise without having to invest a lot of time.
Now, I think I’ve gone on the record that I don’t think High School was the best time of my life. I’m of the opinion that if you peaked in high school you’re in a pretty sorry state, seeing as you got around 80 more years of living to do. Anyway, if anything would turn me off in P3P it was going to be the high school “simulation” part of the game. But they really aren’t that bad in this version of the game a lot of the running around has been streamlined out of the game. The high school socializing and story line, except for one part I talk about later, don’t get in the way of the dungeon crawling it was easy enough to get it out of the way quickly. The majority of my time in the game was spent running through randomly generated dungeons and killing monsters.
The demons you summon, or personas as they’re called, are the heart of P3P. “Demons” here is really a generic term used to mean any sort of supernatural being, most of them couldn’t be considered a demon as we in the West understand the word. The cast of summonable personas in the game include many figures and beings from the world’s mythologies, theologies, and folklores. I started the game using Orpheus and completed it with a team that had amongst others Thor, Chi You, and Satan on it! These later personas are obtained through a process called “fusion” that combines two or more lower level personas together. High powered demons remain unusable though unless you are a high enough level to summon them and they’ve been unlocked through the other major part of the game called “social links.” You’ll want more powerful ones as the Persona you use not only determines your characters stats but also your weaknesses, strengths, and spell selection. Creating new demons with new powers and no weaknesses is a neat concept and I enjoyed fusing demons together throughout the entire 65 hours I played but at times the process seems really random. I’m told this can be remedied by sinking more time into the game. The problem though is that you need to sink A LOT of time in order to see the best and most powerful demons. A LOT. Hundreds of hours even. That seems excessive in this day and age.
Social Linking is the other major component of the game and helps drive the narrative forward. As such it’s also where the high school simulation part comes in. To advance your social links you’ll be having conversations with other people in the game, mostly classmates and fellow students. This aspect of the game is similar in ways to old style adventure gaming where you’re presented with a puzzle and must find the single correct solution in order to advance the social link. Each time you advance the link you’ll have access to more powerful personas and each persona within that link will be at a higher power when you fuse it! Completing a link will give you access to the most powerful personas in the game (I think.) High school in Japan seems really different than it is here in the states. It’s mostly clubs and studying as opposed to crippling social anxiety and avoiding bullies. Or was that just MY high school experience? The setting is foreign but think like an awkward teenager and treat the conversations as puzzles and I was fine. If you really hate this aspect you can cheat through it using a FAQ. It was well worth it for the more fun and enjoyable parts of the game. There is a dating game aspect to the social links and this made me a little uncomfortable. You play as a high school kid in the game but going through the process of trying to pick up on high school kids made me feel a little weird. Thankfully, the game doesn’t devolve into pandering to fetishists!
I’m glad I stuck it out with P3P. I didn’t understand how the game was structured and was initially turned off by the setting but the game doesn’t force you into that aspect of them game. The game is beatable without doing any of the links it’ll just take you longer and might be more difficult. But, I suggest you do a few of the social links if just to get stronger personas sooner. Just use GameFAQs to negotiate the social links. I wouldn’t pick up any of the earlier Persona games or even the ones on the Playstation 2 unless you have time to sit in front of your TV and game these days. There is now though a version of Persona 4 on the Vita. It might be as streamlined as the PSP version.
P3P scratched an itch for meaty, long JRPGs that I thought I’d lost in 2001! Maybe, I can get around to completing Final Fantasy XII now?
I’ve been playing EO3 off and on now for the better part of a year (Editor: now two years…) and I’m only at the 10th floor of what I believe are twenty five floors in the game. This might convey in some small way just what type of game EO3 is. Atlus games don’t get a lot of press here in the states (or they didn’t before this summer and Nintendo’s big push of Shin Megami Tensei IV on the 3DS), it seems they rely on the internet and their fans to spread the word about their games. That’s how I heard about the EO franchise, and EO3, which at the time was considered the best. I believe EO4 on the 3DS is now has the title of best game in the franchise, a rare feat as most games this far along begin to degrade in quality
The people at Talking Time are huge fans of the series and have been talking about the games since the first one came out in 2007 (Editor: has it been that long?! I’m getting old). I picked up the first one spent maybe an hour or two with the game before I set it down. It sat in its case for half a year and then I sold it. I believe the difficulty curve of the game and the potential for making poor choices at the beginning of the game that would virtually lock you out of completing it many hours later was what originally turned me off. But, it’s been six years. I avoided the second game completely, despite all the encouragement from critics and friends. My complaints with the original stood and nothing I saw or read dissuaded me.
Then EO3 came out. Again, the critics praised the game and all of my friends were busy guiding teams of adventurers through dungeons. I asked if the game’s difficulty curve was fixed. Did it now resemble something more like a hill and less like a sheer cliff face? I asked if they’d balanced out the adventurers, the enemies, the bosses, and the skill trees to insure that early game mistakes wouldn’t bar players from end-game content. ‘Yes’ and ‘yes’ I was told this game is perfect! I believed them, and I bought it. And, at first things were okay. No, things were good! I made a party of adventurers and then I delved into the dungeons. The game was challenging but also fair. When I died it felt like I was still learning, that difficulty curve seemed to be more the curve I was looking for! Everything was going great!
Then I got to the 10th level, or in the game’s lingo tenth floor basement in the third stratum, there is a boss battle on this floor. I’ve reached the boss now innumerable times., I’ve tried dozens of different strategies from intricate and complicated to sheer brute force. Nothing I have tried has worked. I’ve asked friends for help, I’ve read game guides. Nothing I see seems to apply to me. The advice I’m most often given? “Make a new team with different skills!” BUT WAIT! This was the problem I had with earlier versions of this game! This was the issue I was told had been dealt with!
I guess it hasn’t. It’s a shame too because up until the 10th level I was having a lot of fun, the game’s art and music is charming and the world I’m exploring is unique. I want to spend more time here. But, I don’t want it to feel like I’m smashing my head against a wall.
Occasionally, I put the EO3 cartridge in my DS and I play through level 10, like I always do. I get to the boss and I die. I reload my game, I grind a little, and try again. I die. I turn my DS off and I go watch some TV. And that kind of says it all, doesn’t it?
I’m trying to recall how I heard about Gunpoint. It wasn’t on any websites that cover video games. I know I never saw an advertisement for the game, or a preview/review. It might have been on twitter or a forum. It reminded me of the recommendations I’d get from classmates and friends on the playground, “Hey! have you heard of Gunpoint? It’s this really cool game that just came out! No! You won’t find it in GamePro! You really need to get it!” It felt like I was discovering something no one else knew about.
And that’s ridiculous, because today someone you know, probably someones, knows something about everything. So, while I was “discovering” Gunpoint so where thousands of other people at the same time. I’m okay with that. Walled gardens never sat well with me. my enjoyment of entertainment isn’t diminished by the number of people enjoying it. That feeling though of finding something out of the way, something a little secret, it probably colors my view of the game. You’ve been warned.
Gunpoint is a puzzle game; you play the role of a freelance spy breaking into corporate offices and stealing/destroying data. Your success depends on your ability to rewire the electronics in each building to work for you and against the people it is supposed to protect. Need to open a door? Rewire it to open when you turn a light switch. Need to eliminate a guard? Rewire the outlet next to him to overcharge and electrocute him whenever someone calls the elevator. No switches by you and you still need to open a door? Is there a camera? Then rewire the camera to open the door instead of triggering an alarm. It’s an interesting and clever concept but it can be a little difficult to explain the video below should help.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9d5ht7mQUU]I’m not done with Gunpoint yet, I’m taking my time through each of the missions. I like to sit outside of a building and analyze every facet of the job from the layout of the rooms to the movement of the guards, from the electrical wiring to the placement of windows and elevators. I’m always shocked when I complete a mission and the game tells me how quick the record for completing a mission is. Some people take mere seconds for a job that I’ve spent six or seven minutes solving. I suspect that these are smash and grab jobs where I’m meticulously rewiring buildings to ensure that I get in and out without ever being seen. The strength of Gunpoint is that both approaches, and all the variations between, are valid. The engine and design are robust enough to allow for varied styles of game play as well as allowing for more complicated, robust, Rube Goldberg-esque solutions involving multiple rewirings, broken windows, and the tragic deaths of unwary guards.
The game may be had for a mere $10. It comes highly recommended.
PS – Finished the game yesterday morning. If you’re curious to see how the story played out for me, click here.