Midboss

Personathon, part 1

Back in August, I mentioned the idea of doing a Personathon - playing every Persona game back-to-back. Seeing the evolution of the series would be interesting, and, well, like I needed an excuse to play one of my favorite series from end-to-end.

I’ll admit I thought about putting it off until next year, when the PS Vita and Persona 4: The Golden would be available, but realistically, while we know a release window for the Vita, we don’t have one for P4TG, so I could be waiting a good long while.

Plus, uh, I’ve never actually completed Persona 1, or the Persona 2s.

Just for bonus fun, this allows me to see the whole story end-to-end - and yes, the storylines all share a universe, at least nominally. I’ll try and screenshot the points of P3 where P1 & 2 are referenced, but it requires me to look at the TV every day, and sometimes I’m bound to forget.

So the plan is this:

1. Persona 1, specifically the PSP port of it. Yes, I still have the original on disc, but seriously, the translation is awful. If I can finish the main story in a reasonable amount of time, I’ll go for the Snow Queen Quest, too, but considering it’s a completely optional non-canonical storyline… maybe after everything else.


2. Persona 2: Innocent Sin, newly released for the PSP.


3. Persona 2: Eternal Punishment, which I’ve converted from disc to a PSP game and confirmed runs, even on the PSP Go, with custom firmware.


4. Persona 3 Portable. Just to mix things up, I will likely play this on the hardest difficulty - P3P, for all the good things it did, kind of gutted the difficulty of the game on normal. Not to mention that a New Game Plus, which I would be sorely tempted to do in order to keep my number of hours running, would include my Super Pixie, which I will take a screenshot of sometime. I will probably not do a female protagonist run except, like the Snow Queen Quest, as a bonus chapter at the end - for basically the same reasons.


5. Persona 3 FES’s epilogue chapter, “The Answer.” For this I’ll have to switch back to the PS2 - “The Answer” was never included in P3P, but it is canon, as it’s referenced (obliquely) in Persona 4 a few times.


6. Persona 4, still on the PS2, unless this takes me so long that P4TG is out in America by then. ;)

Part 1: Persona 1 (Here There Be Spoilers)

Persona 1 has a few interesting things to it that make it slightly more challenging.

• The difficulty level is very low until the first time you infiltrate the SEBEC building, then it suddenly shoots through the roof. As do the enemy levels - if I’ve got any hope of getting any spell cards here, I need to actually level grind. The problem is that the enemies on the lower floors don’t give much XP, and the enemies on the other floor - well, I need to cleverly hit their weaknesses without, say, reflecting statuses all over myself, or they’ll massacre Maki (low HP) and Kei (weak to physical attacks). — Of course, part of this is probably because I decided to get Reiji Kido as my final party member; he’s tricky to recruit, but he’s also the best option besides Elly or Brown, even if he doesn’t get along with almost any Personae at first.


• Speaking of brown: kudos to Atlus for giving a nod to their awful, awful earlier US translation by making many of the party members’ nicknames be their name from the US translation. Hense Masao “Mark” Inaba, who is once again not a stereotypical black kid, and Hidehiko “Brown” Uesugi.


• The storyline is really almost absent in terms of grip until later in the game. It’s just kind of “bwuh, city’s full of demons now, I bet this is Kandori’s fault” - okay, there’s more to it than that, but it’s just kind of funny how little substance there is right now.


• HOW IS NO ONE SUSPICIOUS OF MAKI. NO ONE. AT ALL. Sure, I’ll give you “shows up with no memory,” that’s a typical video game trope. She shows up with no idea what a police station is. She also insists she hasn’t been in the hospital at all. No one finds that the least bit suspicious? I don’t even know that it means and I’m suspicious.