15 hours into Persona 5 Royal – Really feeling my age (spoilers)

15 hours of gameplay should be enough for an initial post. Though it’s more like 5 hours of the dungeon and 10 hours of visual novel hijinks, but the dungeon was really boring so I’m cool not having too much of it. I’ve finished the first, overly-long Kamoshida arc, now I’m into the second, also sure to be over-long Madarame saga.

Along the way I’ve had to remind myself over and over again that the protagonists are just kids. They’re just kids. They’re just kids. If I don’t keep repeating that to myself, it will be just too frustrating because there’s a lot of things I just wouldn’t do if I were in their position – at my age right now. As a dumb 17 year-old, yeah, it sounds about right, but as a [ahem! ahem!] year-old, I’m more into “keeping my head down and getting on with my life” no matter where I go.

1) I wouldn’t get involved with any of this Kamoshida business to begin with. I already got into trouble once for meddling. I’d just serve my time quietly for a year and skedaddle. Especially the moment I was told the Principal, teachers and parents were all aware and kept their mouths shut for the sake of results, that would have been my cue to butt out and stay out. Those days of joining an organization and immediately trying to reform their culture are well over [ahem ahem!] years behind me.

2) I definitely wouldn’t hang out with that Ryuji kid. He’s an idiot. Always running about, mouthing off with to the wrong people, taking decisions for me, making uncontrolled outbursts left and right with all the discretion and common sense of a monkey at the zoo… I think he was supposed to be the “lovable idiot” type but they forgot the “lovable” part. In fact, as a general principle it’s best to avoid the kind of loser who latches on to newbies in organizations and is full of complaints about this and that. Eventually you’ll find out why they are shunned by their peers, hopefully before you burn too many bridges.

3) Once the whole Kamoshida saga was over, that would have been the end of my adventures as a “Phantom Thief.” If Mishima wants to create his little website, that’s his problem. If Ryuji wants people to know we’re real (why???), that’s his problem as well. I’ll deny everything to the end. I mean for story reasons we have to keep doing this whole thief and Palace thing, so I’m just talking in hypotheticals here. This whole thing is just too shady, better to read some books, watch some DVDs, and chill in the coffee shop until the school year ends than risk my life and reputation for stuff that doesn’t concern me.

4) No way in hell am I going to out of my way to save a creep that tried to blackmail a girl into posing nude for him. Being an abused orphan does not give you the right to become a lech. That’s criminal. Any sympathy I had for him went out of the window like whooosh. In fact, I wouldn’t talk to a stalker like that to begin with, or go to his art exhibition, or go to his house… And since I’m looking for dirt on Madarame, I would certainly have an audio recording going so I could capture both his confession of Madarame’s plagiarism and his threats. These Phantom Thieves are just too naive. They’re just kids… they’re just kids…

Actually the far more bizarre detail is how no one has realized over all these years that Madarame’s works are all drawn by different people. An artist can’t get that famous without his works being studied over and over again by art experts, who would spot the differences in style from all kinds of things like the depth of the brush strokes and what have you (I’m not an art critic but it sounds plausible, right?). He miiight have gotten away with it for one apprentice with a very similar style, but dozens of apprentices over the years? How stupid is the art world in this game anyway?

Honestly it’s only a matter of time before Madarame comes crashing down in a blaze of common sense, so I would just give Nakanohara the reporter’s number and stay well out of it.

But no, Persona 5 Royal doesn’t work by common sense, so I’ve been tossed into the second Palace in this game to take down Madarame because otherwise Ann will have to pose nude? Except she really won’t because she really never has to talk to that guy again? His threat to call the police is an empty one when it’s your word against his, and seriously, you can just talk to the shady counselor at school to get things sorted out. Shujin Academy is in a bad place right now and the last thing they need is more publicity. They’ll definitely help us make this thing go away… and there I go thinking like a rational adult again.

Okay, back to the game. The stealth mechanic isn’t as annoying as I’d thought it would be, and I’m happy to finally get to collect Personas again. Time to steal some treasure!

What I’m playing lately (March 2024)

I’m pretty busy, but if I can squeeze some gacha games into the day, then I can squeeze proper games in as well. Here’s a few things I’ve been trying lately.

Epic Seven & Love Nikki: Go without saying, but I just put them up here to proclaim my continued love. Love Nikki is the same as usual, though I’m happy with more frequent housing pavilions. Epic Seven is going great too. I was able to finish the Hell difficulty in the last Advent event, even though I could barely finish the first stage the last time it ran.

Now if only I had the charms to level up gear. I have some promising-looking gear, and plenty of Wyvern and Banshee materials to craft with, plenty of cores and those blue conversion gear boxes. But the charms and powder… where are the charms and powder to level the gear up?! Moreover, I keep getting very good characters: in March alone I’ve pulled Navy Captain Landy, Beehoo, Death Dealer Ray, Urban Shadow Choux, and just now, Solitaria of the Snow, but the gear… Just Epic Seven doing Epic Seven things.

Ring Fit Adventure: “Middle-age spread” is real, let’s just leave it at that.😅 I mentioned in this year’s resolutions that I wanted to work on my health this year, and I recently started Ring Fit Adventure to help shore up my flagging stamina (and flabby… everywhere else). It’s only been two weeks, so there hasn’t been much change, but I do feel like the exercises are slowly getting easier. The ring con works really well, and the mini-games are fun. It’s a game I intend to stick with for the long term, so I’ll write a proper review one of these days.

Atelier Lulua: Mentioned that I accidentally started this recently. I haven’t played any more beyond the initial session, and I think I’ll bench it for a bit in favor of the game below:

Persona 5 Royal: Two hours and twenty minutes in, and I’m somewhat enjoying it, somewhat frustrated. I named my main character “Useless Showoff,” which says a lot about my very early feelings, but I’m really looking forward to getting more personae, and doing social links/confidant thingies. I wish they had lead off with a different story instead of Kamoshida though. He’s so gross and it’s taking so long -___-. Another game I plan to stick with, so I’ll write more later.

Unicorn Overlord demo: I heard it was like “real-time Fire Emblem” and also reminiscent of FFXIII Revenant Wings, which I dutifully played but didn’t really like. I don’t play many SRPGs lately, but the screenshots and descriptions piqued my interest and I tried a little. More than anything else, the fact that there’s a “Story” mode with very easy battles is super appealing to me. Everything else, I’m on the fence about. The text is really small and there’s just so much of it. I couldn’t follow all the instructions and battle mechanics without squinting, and eventually I just gave up.

Also… Prince Alain and his troops are kind of dumb. There’s like four of them against an enemy that controls the whole continent, but they just waltz into town without a care or a disguise. It’s going to be one of “those” games again, isn’t it? You know, where the heroes keep doing stupid things but it works out because they’re the good guys (*ahem* Xenoblade Chronicles 2 *ahem* any Tales game *ahem*)? Anyway, I liked the little I played of the demo, but the eye strain was too much, so I’ll have to continue it later when I’m better rested and also have the leisure to play on the TV. More complete comments when I’m done trying the full demo. Not any time soon, though, ‘cos P5R comes first.

Voxelgram: Just about 5 puzzles left to finish this game. I wish they would release a DLC or something. After that comes Murder by Numbers when I need a puzzle game. It’s about time Picross S10 came out already.

What else am I playing… can’t remember anything else for now. Anyway, I’m pretty busy these days but I’m working on some stuff here and there, so I have more to write in the near future. See you then!

Finished Shin Megami Tensei V after 72 hours. It was kind of fun, actually

shin megami tensei v nahobino in battle

Fun, but not memorable. I would have passed it by without a final word if I hadn’t heard recently that Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance was coming out. I thought it would be a spin-off like SMTIV: Apocalypse, but no, they just added more content and re-released it. Which is like RRGGGH, I just bought this thing and now there’s a better one out already, grr. This usually doesn’t happen to me, because my laziness and large backlog means I take ages to buy a game in the first place, but publishers are re-releasting and remaking anything and everything these days, so it was inevitable that something like this would occur.

That said, it’s just a minor annoyance but hardly the end of the world. Of course I’d want to get the best bang for my buck when I buy a game, but once I play something, that’s the definitive version of the game as far as I’m concerned. For example, I hear there’s Persona 3 Reloaded coming out soon, but in my opinion, there were no other Persona 3s after Persona 3 FES. FF7 Remake part 2 came out, but I have FF7 at home in my Playstation X, so we’re cool.

Back to the topic of Shin Megami Tensei V. I think I explained my thoughts about it quite thoroughly in earlier posts, so today I will just do a quick summary of the pros and cons, say something about the story and the ending I got and call it a day.

PROS

Collecting and fusing demons, like I said already. You won’t find me playing a lot of (or, indeed, any) Pokémon on this blog because I have Pokémon at home in the form of the Shin Megami Tensei and Persona series. That’s not to say I dislike Pokémon, but after playing one or two of them, I’ve had enough. And I honestly feel like I’ve had enough of SMT as well after this mediocre offering, but we’ll see how I feel if/when SMT VI comes out.

Demon menu SMT V

I dared to risk a screenshot

Not having any party members. Technically the demons you summon are your party members, but you know what I mean. So many JRPGs with whiny party members with long tedious backstories and trauma to overcome, so you have to sit through a lot of talking and arguments etc etc blah blah, I’m getting too old for that stuff. When it works, it works great. When it doesn’t work, I want to rip my hair out.

You can simply choose the route you want to be on. No need to play three times for separate routes, though you will be penalized if your past behavior doesn’t align with your final route. That’s pretty handy.

Decent number of sidequests. I like sidequests, especially when they’re not too tedious. I could have used another 100 of, especially of the “kill this monster” type, but I was satisfied with what I got.

CONS

Horrible map so I kept getting lost. Again I complained about this already so I won’t start.

Soundtrack was crap. I had a lot of work recently, so I was listening to game soundtracks to pass the time, and I couldn’t make it through more than a few tracks of SMT V‘s. It was just noise.

Slow start with wasted hours in the beginning. I started a New Game+ out of inertia but was so annoyed by the memory that I quit.

The other characters were either annoying or hardly present. You barely know them anyway, so you don’t feel anything about all the pathos they’re going through. Like whatever, can you send me to a new area so I can catch new demons now? Dishonorable mention goes to the whole school arc which was just an excuse to kill some girl whose name I’ve forgotten. What was the point of that arc anyway? In the end everybody died. If they had asked me nicely, I would have offed them all in five minutes so we could get back to the real action.

Story and Neutral ending

Um, I already forgot most of it. Something about the “God” of the Bible actually usurped a world throne somewhere and declared himself God? Where did the throne even come from… anyway, Satan wasn’t really bad but they were all demons or whatever and “God” kicked them all out or whatever. But later Lucifer killed him??? But didn’t take over the throne himself??? So it’s open to whoever, and at some point Tokyo was destroyed by demons and replaced by God… I AM SO LOST.

IIRC the Law route has the angels pretending Lucifer didn’t kill God and… umm, IDK. I didn’t do that route. The Chaos route was all about saving Tokyo. IIRC one of my classmates and the president of Japan want to take over the world’s throne so they can restore Japan. In fact, not even Japan, but Tokyo. That one flew clear over my head because it was so “Tokyo, Tokyo, Tokyo,” like “Screw anyone who’s not from Tokyo,” right? It would be too reasonable if they wanted to save the whole world while they were at it, so Atlus made sure to exclude 99.9% of the world from their grand plan.

So, the Neutral route… and the Neutral ending I got… Nope, barely remember a thing either. IIRC I had to fight both the Law and Chaos representatives, who had turned into demons because why not. Then instead of assuming the throne and shaping the world, I chose to destroy it. Which, apparently, changed very little. Demons still kept attacking Tokyo, and angels and demons kept fighting for lack of anything better to do, and I’m just up in some ethereal plane watching them. Yeah, aight, whatevs.

Presumably, the true ending to everything will be revealed by beating the True Neutral route on New Game Plus (or your first playthrough if you can be bothered to grind to level 94 and beat the secret boss). I don’t even care enough to YouTube it.

TL;DR

I wish I had written this a little earlier when Shin Megami Tensei V was still fresh in my mind. SMT V isn’t particularly memorable, and I kind of want my money back but I’m glad I played it. Despite the lukewarm comments above, I did enjoy roaming around doing my own thing for the most part. If I weren’t so lazy, I would look into more Last Ranker-style games where you don’t have to deal with party members at all, not even demons or created ones.

Currently playing: Epic Seven and Love Nikki, my surviving gacha games. On the Switch I’m playing a puzzle game called Voxelgram. I’m almost done with all the puzzles, then I’ll either play Oninaki or start Persona 5 Royal. On the PC I accidentally re-started Atelier Lulua the other day. No time for any console games this week though, too much work to do. Long live gacha games!

Done with Romancing Saga Re;Universe for now

Just completed a 130-day login streak, where I got down and dirty with Romancing Saga Re;Universe and explored all its nooks and crannies, doing all the story chapters and events that later went away in the 3.0 overhaul, doing plenty of Spiral Corridor (180) and Remembrance Battles as well as catching up to the latest story.

My initial thoughts about Romancing Saga Re;Universe are captured in this post I wrote years ago, trying to talk myself out of playing it. It worked for a while, but eventually the other stingy gacha games wore me down and I fled for comfort to the arms of RSRU. It’s not as ridiculously generous all the time once you run out of welcoming bonuses and the like, but it is still far better than most other games I’ve played, both in terms of gem income and in terms of regular giveaways. There’s always something being given away for free, sometimes useless stamina but often gems, tickets, characters, even excellent SSS weapons. For the freebies alone, I’d rate this game 1000/10.

The reason I dropped it is because of the gameplay loop. Or lack thereof. You get the latest characters, grind them up, use them for some content, newer and better characters come out, newer and harder content comes out, repeat the process endlessly. It’s fun to get shiny new characters, and the high gem income in the game makes it possible for even F2P players to get the majority of powerful characters. Equipment is not gated by gacha or even by hard content, so you can get the best weapons, armors, accessories etc. without breaking a sweat.

It’s just… it gets tiring after a while. Get characters, use characters, get more, use more. And the constant powercreep gets me down. The Orlette I pulled when I first returned was recently powercrept by an even better Orlette, same for the Esper Girl I got, and I know it will happen to all my other characters sooner or later. So on one hand I like getting new characters with flashy and powerful new moves, but on the other hand there’s a very “Why do I even bother” feel about the whole affair.

In a very recent update (February 2024), Romancing Saga Re;Universe finally did the sensible thing and gave us offline farming, a.k.a. “Memory Rematch.” The game records the skills you use in a match and the time it took to clear it, then reruns it for up to 24 hours in the background. No more leaving your phone on charge overnight or getting a second phone just to grind stats forever. It was a much-needed and very welcome addition to the game, but ironically it also made it much easier for me to drop the game.

The first reason is that RSRU became a pure idle game where you just log in once or twice a day, check your stat growths, queue up more matches and dip. That isn’t my idea of a “game,” or at least not one I want to stick with for any length of time. It’s very easy to forget to even load the game once a day, and I haven’t missed it since I uninstalled it yesterday.

The second, bigger reason is that it will make it very easy for me to jump back into the game whenever I’m ready to. I was reluctant to drop it at first because I was thinking of all the hours I would have spend grinding up the latest styles when I returned, but this Memory Rematch system takes all the pain out of it. I even saved enough gems for a pity so I can get whoever the latest and hottest style is if/when I jump back into the game.

When will that be? Honestly, not any time soon. It really isn’t much of a “game,” much as I enjoy the bright, happy colours, the killer soundtracks and the bountiful freebies. However, thanks to it my interest in the SaGa games has been revived, so I’m going to work on those for a while, especially Romancing Saga 2 and 3, Scarlet Grace and SaGa Frontier 1 since I already have those. If I miss Romancing Saga Re;Universe after I’m done with all that, then maybe I’ll dive back in again. Until then, it’s goodbye to this game.

Tried and dropped Atelier Resleriana – Too sluggish and too stingy

I haven’t played any Atelier games in a while (last proper game was Firis in 2020 IIRC), but I still have a lot of love for the series. A lot of good memories, lots of fun times spent crafting and adventuring, good times. The more recent entries have just left me cold because the focus has been less on that crafting and adventuring and more on character interactions (that never go anywhere in the long run) and “cute girls doing cute stuff” which hasn’t been interesting to me in a loooong time.

But still, Atelier is Atelier, so when I heard a new gacha was coming out, it was like “hey, free Atelier game!” What’s not to like, right? The answer is “plenty.”

The game ran poorly on my phone

The game felt like it had been dipped in coal tar, with everything moving slowly and looooong loading times to do and open every single thing. Every time I want to open a quest, every time I want to switch to a character, every time I want to do anything in this game whether it’s crafting or fighting or just opening the store, it takes forever and a day. Even the skip option doesn’t help because there are still unnecessary scenes to watch before and after. The poor user experience is honestly the biggest reason why I dropped Atelier Resleriana. I may have sat through worse in the Playstation era, but it’s the 2020s now and I’m not doing this to myself any more.

I lowered the graphical settings to see if that would help, but instead I got an ugly game that still ran terribly. It’s possible that the game runs better on Steam (apparently emulators don’t work) but nothing else about it made me want to try a different platform.

The gameplay wasn’t what I had hoped for

When I play an Atelier game specifically, versus your run-of-the-mill JRPG, I want to craft stuff first of all, and I want to forage and go adventuring while I’m at it. For all its many, many flaws, Atelier Online: Alchemist of Bressisle at least let us run around maps and gather all kinds of stuff to make many new things with. Atelier Resleriana takes more of an Atelier Sophie approach to things, with a very small number of largely useless recipes which must be unlocked by jumping through increasingly annoying hoops. Foraging is also no fun, firstly because of the aforementioned sluggish pace of movement and secondly because of the long drawn out fights you have to go through every time you enter a new area.

That brings me to the combat. Which I actually liked, to be honest. I liked the system where you have to juggle the types of attack you use and pick the best time to use items to avoid giving the enemies too many advantages. What I didn’t like was how tanky even the most basic mob was due to the “break” system. I don’t like games with break mechanics, it’s almost always a way to draw out fights by giving enemies extra HP without explicitly calling it extra HP. And, again because of the slowness of the game itself, every turn and every attack felt like wading through mud, so it quickly became a chore I wished I could avoid. Still the Burst system is something I’d like to see done better in a more interesting game, with more skills and options than just spamming S2 and sometimes S1.

I had bad gacha luck

Self explanatory. Part of why I play gacha games is for the dopamine hit of pulling rare characters and other nice things. I pull crap, I don’t get my hit, I don’t want to keep playing. Actually I didn’t do too badly because I had Rorona for attacking and Escha for breaking and they made a good team, but it wasn’t fun seeing people boasting about their super-meta Ryza, Marie, Sophie etc., etc. and knowing it could have been so much better. “That’s a you problem,” you say. Yup, it’s a me problem, and that’s why me quit the game.

The gem income was poor

I hate stingy games. It doesn’t cost you anything to give players a few more rewards, Koei-Tecmo. Especially in a game that just launched and isn’t that great. Giving 50 gems here and 50 gems there when a 10-pull costs 3000 gems, do you think you are Genshin Impact or something? You want me to scrimp and save and get those 3,000 gems and pull crap, and then feel good somehow? Heck no. I’m a little spoiled by Epic Seven and Romancing Saga Re;Universe (developed by the same Akatsuki Games) where you can easily get enough currency to pity several characters a year. Since I know it can be done better, saving drips and drabs for months to get pity at 45,000 gems in Atelier Resleriana sounds like torture. Nope, not doing that to myself either.

The first event was boring and the rewards were pitiful

The game’s first event was a “Score Battle” thing where you have to fight the same boss in stronger iterations and try to deal lots of damage against it. First off, that’s boring and pointless. Like, seriously, what for? Who plays an Atelier game for this? In any case the event was only around for a week and by the time I thought my party was strong enough to fight the stronger levels, it had already ended. The rewards looked like this:

Just increasingly expensive character EXP items and tiny amounts of money. That’s it. No weapon, no event character, no Memoria, no strengthening or synthesis material, nothing interesting to make it worth slogging through pointless battle after pointless battle. The first event of a game is where the developer is supposed to hook players with fun gameplay, an interesting event story and lots of rewards, but this had none of that. It could have been added to the permanent quests and nothing would be missed. I despaired of the future of the game and made up my mind to quit at that point.

The story wasn’t bad, but not enough to stick around for

Cute girls being cute just isn’t my thing any more (was it ever? not sure) so I confess I fast-forwarded everything after the first few scenes, so I have a vague idea of what happened, but not why it matters or why I should care. I figure it’s the writers’ job to make me care, not mine to force myself to care about someone’s alchemy journey. What’s so great about being an alchemist when you can barely make anything you want? Too boring.

Last I saw, some mysterious organization was attacking Valeria and she and her friends barely escaped. You just know that mysterious organization will be after them for 200 chapters before eventually being replaced by even badder guys, and very likely it will turn out the bad guys weren’t so bad and they’ll become available to pull in the gacha etc etc, blah blah. And that’s not even mentioning the roadblocks where they stop you from progressing the story until you clear X dungeon (very boring) or X score battle or whatever. Just let me play and get my ass kicked, then no one will have to order me to go do other content to get stronger.

TL;DR: I’m still open to trying new gacha games, but I’ve got the attention span of a hamster these days, so anything new needs to look good, play smoothly and give me lots of rewards to hold my attention. Atelier Resleriana is not horrible, but it’s not great either, and as a supposedly mainline Atelier game, it is disappointing and completely unsatisfying. I still have at least five “real” Atelier games left to play, so I think I’ll spend my time and energy on those instead.