I was watching a playthrough on Youtube, and there is a one-minute cutscene that plays between running from the giant worm and walking in the city, which is a brief introduction to the world/setting, and then the main character walking toward the city gates. So it seems like a pretty jarring transition, demo or otherwise.
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I played through the first story dungeon, picking up at the half-way point from where I ended in the demo. I have the same issue in this game as in Persona games: I know these dungeons are meant to be tackled over the course of multiple in-game days, but my goblin brain won’t allow me to do that cause I feel like I’ll be missing out on other stuff if I take extra days.
I ran out of mana, so ended up running back through the beginning part of the dungeon a couple times killing low-level foxes with the action combat as a mage in order to get my mana back. I know this is degenerate behavior, but I can’t stop.
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This is my struggle too. I tried to take on the side quest dungeon before the necromancer dungeon despite all of the in-game warnings not to do that and the boss kicked my teeth in. So I humbled myself and just took the exp and ran, losing a day. Now in the necromancer dungeon I’m all out of SP and considering also not clearing this one in a single attempt rather than trying to brute force it.
Is this what group therapy feels like? I’m Stormotron and I’m a degenerate goblin.
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Yeah it’s taken me two days for the first dungeon, something that’s kind of eating me is that I feel like the social stats don’t level very fast for there being more of them.
It gets a little better. I’m at the beginning of the next section of the story and the social stats are now improving by four instead of two.
I do like the pseudo action overworld combat when the enemy is beneath going into a full turn based battle. It’s nice when there’s a room full of baddies and you only end up having to go turn based with a select few. Gives it a quality over quantity feel.
I think it and the skateboarding could be a little beefier but I’m grateful they exist at all. I’m sure my memory of the Jak2 hoverboard is rose tinted but that remains the floaty bouncy standard. The sword is neat but I don’t see myself getting distracted trying to pull off sick stunts. With it being a big ol’ 80 something hour long game that’s probably for the best.
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I’m thru the first dungeon as well. Lots to love! I like the combat, and the class system (although I wish knight didn’t feel simultaneously mandatory and horrible to have). The first boss had real difficulty that made me restart a few times, nice! And I actually played a sidequest dungeon.
Also I quite like the story thus far, feels FF6 esque.
That said, I think the persona elements still are kind of short sighted for a game like this, maybe I will eat crow on this but are we really getting only one cool RPG town for the whole game? Why am I leveling my jobs and then also having to do social links for them? Was any of it necessary to do the stuff that’s fun in this? I don’t really care about missing the dating sim part, but at least the dating sim part had like, purposeful progress. Maybe the side stories will be cool, I got the merchant social link and it seems to be trying to do something.
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Liking this game a lot so far. It’s letting me off the rails pretty fast, which is nice. You can cruise around at night immediately also. As others have said, a way quicker onboarding than P4/P5.
Super happy about the lack of fusing demons/personas. I like doing it sometimes, but honestly a game like this already has a lot to juggle. All that demon fusing is perfect for SMT, but when I’m on a time limit and I need to tune bae, I don’t want to be fusing demons.
So far, I give it a yes out of ten.
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What’s the verdict on one-day dungeons? As others have said above, the goblin brain is strong. I’m at maybe the midway point and very low on mana.
I’m trying to convince myself to relax and take a couple days to clear it. Help me fantazio therapy group.
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It ended up taking me 2 days for the first story dungeon and there was no way I could have squeaked by in 1. I even had to do some of the mage sp farming on my 2nd day before the boss.
Still in the prologue. I’m pretty sure More is a reference to Sir Thomas More and the book is the fantasy analogue of his Utopia, that is, a perfect world.
Immediately after I named my character “Gareth” (after the knight of King Arthur’s), I realized I should have done something like Simile or Metonym. Dang it.
@matt I can’t offer counseling on how to not do a dungeon in one day, because I did that whenever possible in Persona 5. The main thing, which helps me a lot on other games where what is presented encourages chugging (like Final Fantasy VII Rebirth), is to ask, “Am I going to have fun chugging this in one go?” and, mid-chug, “Is it better to just take a break for (a) a day or (b) until I’m higher level and have done some other things?” Sometimes asking the question curtails the “gotta do this” mindset, where I see playing optimally as the only choice and don’t even question plowing ahead. These days, unless I genuinely enjoy that extra challenge, I would rather play felicitously (almost wrote “funnily”).
A side note: I’m also treating myself on other aspects of optimizing. I caught myself looking up how the initial choice of skill affects the skill points. Then I put that away. I don’t want this to be a game where I’m looking up optimal choices on the first playthrough. (I managed not to do this for Persona 5 and had a great time.) I still think looking up information when I’m stuck is fine, but looking it up to aid in-game decisions mainly rewards an anxiety of playing right. I’m not actually having more fun doing that.
I picked Luck to start with.
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The Thomas More thing is so on-the-nose that I actually kind of like it.
I was definitely going to pass on this game until I realized there was a demo. I always feel so disconcerted spending $95 (CAD) on a game that I spend the first few hours super critical, concerned that if I’ve wasted my money. It’s smart that with such a long game they give a real generous demo to suck you in. I haven’t bought it yet but I’m pretty engrossed so I’ll likely purchase it once I finish the demo.
I really like Gallica’s voice actor. I could’ve sworn it was Laura Bailey just from the fact that she was a real staple of these kind of games for a while, but I guess not. Either way, she’s great, and I like the voice of the protagonist too. His character gives off the feeling of being timid and somewhat wide-eyed but at the same time not afraid or naive. Even those he doesn’t talk much, and usually has pretty short lines, I feel like his character’s being expressed well.
Honestly, I was so done with the high-school setting and Persona style after 5, which I only played about ~15 hours of. It felt like the characters would spend so much time circling around in conversations about “Isn’t this crazy? I can’t believe this is happening…” and then rehashing the same points over and over. It’s nice to have a game with that style of gameplay and character/art design but in a world where Magic Is Real and the characters can just take things as they come. The writing still has its fair share of over-explaining, but it’s nowhere near as egregious. I usually don’t go for this kind of fantasy world, but the aesthetic design is so good that I can’t help but enjoy it. I particularly love the look of the initial city.
I’m still early enough that the game hasn’t really opened up, but I’m having a great time so far. I still can’t believe that they went with such a wild title.
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I’m 12 hours deep and getting more and more into it. I’m surprised at how much more smooth and sensible the narrative is compared to your average Persona, given how much more absurd it is on the surface level – Persona has those modern trappings, but the narrative thrust is usually really soupy (this is clearly most akin to P5, where “yeah, we can kind of enter psyches and fix people for reasons” is so thin and unsupported) while this one manages to have crabwalking blimps with legs and an election decided by a dead king’s disembodied head floating in the sky, but I’m buying it and I’m following it, even without overmuch exposition.
Playing it here a few weeks away from the most absurd US election in history, it seems very aware that absurdism and hyper-fantasy suits a post-satire world if you’re even circling any sort of social commentary. And it helps you get away with a few thematic hammers to the face, like the overt More’s Utopia stuff and the sort of college-sophomore-at-the-bar-reading-Nietzsche vibe of calling the monsters “humans.” They get away with it, and thus far, they’re getting away with a Japanese fantasy video game story dealing with racism (that’s four red flags) with a fair amount of elegance. It’s an earnest game – it’s just excited to pack in too much graphic design and Gregorian techno-chants and Hieronymus Bosch without making a mess of it. As broad as it is, it’s also kind of so focused on its own handful of interests (medievalism, the interplay of democracy/fascism/systemic inequality and the fantasy genre) that it holds it together. It ain’t Disco Elysium or 1000XRESIST, but I’ll tell you I was pretty shocked to see an early boss character in an anime-assed JRPG essentially play out as a young man radicalized by fascism in a way that seems acutely aware of the lonely man to internet neo-nazi cultist pipeline.
Having just got to where the party is travelling around on their airship equivalent, I’m also getting hit by Super Famicom Final Fantasy vibes pretty hard. The magical technology, the party banter (super likable and well acted – at least in English – cast, Hulkenberg is a video game character name in the pantheon of Mr. Drippy or Travis Touchdown), the way the story has you funneling across the land in pursuit of a villain, making up your plan as you go and chilling around campfires and dinner tables in new places. If you showed me this and Final Fantasy XVI in 1994, I’d guess this one was the new Final Fantasy in a heartbeat.
On the dungeons in a day talk, I’m very happy to crooz along in easy mode here. Similar to Shin Megami Tensei V, I find that this game’s easy setting still requires you to engage with its systems (party members have died, MP items are precious, I’m buying intel, I’m constantly changing up my archetypes) without punching you in the mouth. Storyteller difficulty is the one that’s going to give you no pushback whatsoever, and unlike storyteller, easy lets you switch back among difficulty settings freely. So far, I’ve been able to do what I want to do in the dungeons (i.e. fill in as much of the map as the game currently allows me to) in one allotted day. It’s also comfy for me because I know this game is going to be 80 god dang hours, so let’s just keep it moving.
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Oh, nice, I didn’t expect a thread here.
Already posted on the main game thread, but I’m at the 20 hour mark (with the demo) and the game for me is quite enjoyable.
By the way, Merchant fucking rules. This and Fighter have been my favorite archetypes to play.
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I love a vocalist in an RPG battle theme.
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Yeah, them’s the words I need. I won’t have fun, it will hurt me. I played P3/P4/P5 like this and it made it an anxious experience.
Monty (my protag name) is gonna go to bed, then maybe he’ll listen to a story from that box head guy and work a shift at the inn before he returns to the dungeon.
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I like it, but I feel the theme is kind of overrated imo. I prefer the instrumental battle themes.
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So, I played several hours. Nor I’ll give more detailed impressions and advices for those who want to:
Summary
For those who want to try the game and take some juice, there are different things to do. So:
First of all, unlock Merchant as soon as you can. Merchant has a passive ability that helps you get extra money. With this and the Mage passive ability, you get some extra money and MP by knocking down or killing minor enemies, which doesn’t seem much but it gives you an extra oomph.
Secondly, invest in your stats and links. The most complex ones are those which imply your characters. You have to do the main quests as soon as you can and then try to improve your links with characters like Strohl or Hulkenberg, which will give you stronger subarchetypes.
Third, when you can, get Maria to a level four link. This can make you cook without spending time, which is a boon. I got there because I wanted a Healer subclass and it’s a 10/10 experience.
Also, two extra things: you can try to steal and restart the game to get what you want, and try to get Wisdom at the beginning as quickly as you can, since it enables you to Purifying weapons. I got one from the dragon fight at the beginning and it was easy to get through the cathedral.
Now I don’t remember more, but these are the ones that feel useful at the early game.
I pumped the air, when I figured out the solution to this battle (around ch. 2ish).
Felt like a very cool throwback to a similar fight in SMT Nocturne:
While the game isn’t a MegaTen game, is sure feels like a celebration of Atlus’ back catalogue. The similarities with Persona are obvious, but there’s a lot of small details that feels like nods towards their other games as well.
Like, the archetypes gets compared with personas (and for good reasons. They’re arguably more similar to the original concept than the ones in P5). But I think their design definitely share some lineage with the demon forms from Digital Devil Saga.
Also, the visual of a God-like figure that takes the shape of a giant face in the sky to judge the succession of the next sovereign, is very reminiscent of the plot in SMT Nocturne.
There’s probably a lot more obvious ones. Maybe I’ll try to gather a list or something later. I like that they aren’t more on-the-nose. They just feel like small nods.
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I did it folks. I managed to stop myself from beating helpless dogs to death for hours. I left the dungeon and spent some time listening to a box head man and badly cooking a meal. Didn’t even reload for my bad meal. Then I went back in and smashed the boss.
Let us spread the word, less anxiety and more relaxing with your fantasy buds.
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