Corpse Run 767: Wouldn’t want to do the right thing too fast
Up until recently, I’ve never taken a shot at a Persona game before. Both my college roommates, Chris and Paul, were big fans of the series and both of them had played Persona 3 and 4 during school, and I remember seeing snippets here and there.
I also recall calling Paul a whimp every time he skipped Shuffle Time due to fear of losing the fight exp with penalty cards.
Sooooooooo I loaded up Persona 4 this week and…
…omg wat.
It takes two hours to get to anything that even resembles a video game. This is not a joke. You basically press X to advance text for two hours before any gameplay happens. That’s absolutely insane.
The major issue for me however, is that the gameplay subverts the narrative. According to the folks on Twitch chat, the idea is to go into the dungeons, get X amount of the way through it, and then leave and come back the next day, so on and so forth.
Which is all well and good, but… people are dying. The player is told that every time you go on a rescue mission, you have until a foggy day before the person dies.
In my personal (sane) opinion, any time not spent in the direct act of rescuing that person is wasted time. Sure, you have a couple of days… but what if you wait until the last day and you’re not strong enough? Making matters worse is that the characters are trying to live their regular lives while all this nonsense is going on.
YOUR FRIENDS LIVES ARE IN THE BALANCE AND YOU’RE FAFFING ABOUT.
Wat. All my wat.
While I like all of the modern Persona games, 4 is easily my least favorite. The cast and murder mystery theme is great, but it suffers pacing and gameplay issues which are difficult to ignore. I had to struggle to get through it, which was not the case when I played 3 or 5.
To be fair, in Persona 4, the situation is usually more your party wanting to go save whoever and YOU faffing about.
Yeah, Persona games take a long time before letting you actually play the game (Persona 5 is nasty in this regard). I personally enjoyed it since I was into the whole high school setting, but I get that it’s not for everyone. Also, spending time developing the social links is extremely important, so don’t disregard them completely in favor of the dungeons; that being said, the boss of the first dungeon is extremely difficult so expect to die a lot even if you are a decent level, especially since I assume you’re playing the PS2 original (the remake on PS Vita has much more reasonable difficulty and numerous gameplay refinements). If you’re really worried about not beating the boss in time, always have a backup save a couple days before the deadline, I did this constantly during my playthrough.
As someone living in a big city I loved that rural town feeling that the game gave off
Technically speaking, I don’t think anyone is stopping you from doing the dungeon in one night and then faffing about town in the time after that before the next kidnapping
I could be wrong though, clearing it before the deadline might just fast forward you to the next one, but given that time management is an important part of the game, making you give up days you could have spent working on stats or social links because you beat a boss earlier than you had to would be pretty crummy
You sure you weren’t playing a visual novel?