Persona Q

I just wrapped up my first playthrough of the Persona/Etrian Odyssey hybrid game, Persona Q: Shadows of the Labyrinth. I liked it, overall, though it became more and more of a chore to play the farther I got.

It's obvious right from the get go, considering the nature of the game, that none of the characters involved would remember anything. That's ultimately what happens. But the journey is the point, not the destination, right? Well, the journey could have been better.

It's not that I didn't like playing the game. The battle system is well designed, and I love the Persona switching mechanic for the whole team. It's just so easily broken. Fairly early on, I figured out that nearly all the enemies in the game have a Light or Dark weakness. Since every Light/Dark spell in the Persona series are instakills, this meant I could take the multihit Hama/Mudo skills and wipe out almost any random battle. I mean not every enemy had a light or dark weakness, but enough of them did that, unlike in an Etrian Odyssey game, for example, random battles did not scare me after the first few floors of the game. That's a problem! Sure, you don't have to play the game this way, and for a while I tried going without, but I'm sure doing it that way would add another 40 hours of battling onto an already 50+ hour game (I finished the game in 60 hours). No thanks.

The bosses were fun, though, I have to say. The second boss, especially, was fun to figure out, and was hilarious, to boot (not something I thought I'd ever say about a Persona or Etrian Odyssey boss). I don't know if it was completely intended to be funny, but I read it that way and think it works.

Then there's the Persona fanservice. Some of it I like - seeing all these characters again is great, since I love them all (besides Ken - fuck you, Ken). Seeing them interact with the cast of both P3 and P4 is interesting, because prior to this, you get weirdo Persona Arena which is years later. The less said about the plot in that game, the better, quite frankly, interesting though it was.

But some of the fanservice is gross. There's WAY more innuendo from Teddie this time, which I found amusing at first, but as the game went on it was like "gee, dude, calm down, none of these girls are going to bone you." Quite frankly, it amazed me that he didn't get beat up by Mitsuru or Yukari every time he opened his mouth near the end of the game. It sucks, because I really like Teddie, actually. Maybe if I play through as the Persona 4 team, he gets some more non pervy lines?

I did choose the Persona 3 team, and actually went through the entire game with a P3 only team - P3MC, Akihiko, Junpei, Yukari, and Aigis. We've gotten so much more Persona 4 content (which I love, to be clear!) that I wanted to spend more time with these characters, since other than weirdo Persona Arena, Persona 3 is all you get (yes, a few P3 characters are in Arena, but what they're up to is so off the wall and weird that I don't count it). It was nice to hang out with these guys again. Their voices did grate a bit in the last two labyrinths, though - my fiancee would roll her eyes and groan every time Junpei would say "Oh no! We've got an FOE breathing down our asses!" which was pretty much every five steps in those last two dungeons. And Akihiko - whenever I see a treasure box, I want to open it, which is what I've done every time we reach one. Why do you insist on asking me what I want to do with it every time? At least when Aigis points one out, she jokes about destroying it, which is at least amusing.

But yes, sadly, the game just does go on a bit long. The final labyrinth is ten floors high, with the first seven floors being little bit sized ones, but those last couple of floors in the last labyrinth are awful. Moving platforms, pistons that rise and fall between floors, goddamn Death chasing you around, annoying random battle enemies who have instakill and ailment spells (and are resistant to them, too, most of the time!), these stupid spider FOEs that you have to puzzle way around, and what is quite frankly the most elaborate two floor puzzle I have ever encountered in any dungeon crawler make for quite a rough few hours of exploring. I don't experience this in Etrian Odyssey - at least, most of the time - and it was pretty painful here. My favorite dungeons in these styles of games are just labyrinths that you wander around, mapping out, looking for treasure, maybe with the occasional damage tile, pitfall, or conveyor belt. Not the intricate puzzle monstrosities in Persona Q.

The third dungeon is the best example of this. For half the dungeon, there aren't even that many random battles - you're just trying to figure out how to proceed most of the time. The atmosphere of the dungeon is great - it's very creepy. The whole dungeon reminded me of Corpse Party, actually. But because getting through it is so complicated, the third dungeon is where I was when I put the game down for two months. This is the first time I've played a Persona game that I didn't devour as quickly as I possibly could. The dungeon isn't badly designed or anything, and I'm sure someone out there would love it, but it just isn't for me. I'd rather spend more time leveling my characters up and mastering battles, which this game didn't do as well as, say, Etrian Odyssey III, for example. The aforementioned toothless random battles combined with super complex dungeons just didn't scratch the itch I thought it was going to when I bought the game.

If this post seems very down on the game, I'm sorry. I did largely enjoy playing it! The things I didn't like about it just stand out so much more for me than the things I did. The music was fantastic, as always for the Persona series, throughout the game. The Velvet Room has some cool stuff in it, now, such as Extracting Skill Cards from Personae, allowing you to teach your main Personae new moves. You can choose which moves your new Persona gets when you fuse, but they've definitely limited which moves the result can learn. This is probably for the best, I suppose, since in Persona 4 Golden or SMTIV, you could create ridiculous demons that absorbed every element, healed both HP and SP when battle was over, and had a Megidolaon or Pierce or whatever to boot. Still, I had fun fusing demons, as always.

Overall, I don't know when I'll go back to Persona Q. Probably eventually, as I wouldn't mind seeing how the Persona 4 side of the story plays out (though it won't be TOO different from the P3 side, just certain scenes, especially in the first labyrinth before you meet the other team, will have different characters in them). Also, hearing the Persona 3 main character actually speak is going to be weird. It was weird hearing P4MC talk in Persona 4 Arena, and it's still kind of weird here.

Anyway, you could do worse for a shoehorned fanservicey game, but you certainly could do better, too. I'm ready for Persona 5, and I think I'd rather replay P3P or P4G before going back to PQ, sadly. Also, it is an absolute shame that they included Theodore from P3P, but not the female P3 main character. Dammit Atlus!