What Did We Play Yesterday?

During the day segments, you can spend time with your friends to build up your social links or you can do stat-raising activities. Then... it's dungeon time! And unfortunately, the dungeons are boring as shit. They're procedurally generated levels with apparently no visual variety, the loot is crappy, and the whole setup appears to be a mechanism for grinding to get stats high enough to fight bosses.

I started out exploring the whole dungeon, but soon realized there was no point, and it was better to search for staircases and ascend as quickly as possible. The boss of this dungeon had a cool design, but getting there was tedious even on easy mode, so I can only imagine how grindy it would have felt on normal difficulty.

I also found persona acquisition a bit underwhelming. In the SMT game I played, you had to haggle with demons to get them to join, but in Persona 4 you can pick up persona cards during what's called Shuffle Time, which is a randomly-triggered post game bonus where you can acquire cards that include abilities, personas, healing, and chances to get bonus cards. I like Shuffle Time, but I wish there were other ways to recruit personas.

I'm a little on the fence at this stage, but now I know the dungeon crawling isn't rewarding so I'll focus on the social links and see how it goes.

I've recruited a third (the situation with Shadow Chie really escalated) and enjoyed my first dungeon. Now the game opens up, and you have to decide how to plan your days. If you don't rescue the latest victim in time, it's game over. I have no idea what to do so I'm just gonna wing it.

The main character figures out he can travel into televisions, and he can take his classmates with him. Doing so sends them to a strange world with a weird bear (not pictured) where dopplegangers called Shadows roam. In this game, characters fight with the aid of Personas, which are personality constructs that function similarly to the demons in the SMT games. The main character's first persona Izanagi manifests here, as does Yosuke's.

So far, I've only had a couple of battles. A big aspect of battle is exploiting an enemy's weakness to gain an extra turn. The game has mostly been story and rolling through the day calendar. The dialogue is a bit long-winded and sometimes odd, but I'm rolling with it.

After poking at a few of the SMT games and reading about how they're designed and QOL issues, I decided to try the more recent games and work my way backwards, if so inclined. I'm starting with Persona 4: Golden, which centers around a small town murder mystery.

This game has 5 difficulty levels and I chose the easiest one on the assumption this game has a lot of turn-based battles and I'd rather breeze through those. So far, the gameplay has been more like a visual novel. The protagonist (who has no default name) is switching to a school in a small town to live with his uncle, who is a detective. Right now, I'm slowly meeting the students and getting the town's vibe. The game has a day structure like a VN.

Decided to poke at some of the other SMT games, including the first game on PSX. No hand-holding here. They drop you into a new world and expect you to figure it out. The room-to-room navigation can be a little disorienting, but the overall weirdness appeals.

A guy you meet at the beginning of the game, Hijiri, helps you get through the Amala Network by opening doors, but you have to reach "good connection" points to do that.

Sometimes when you try to negotiate with a demon and there is more than one of the same kind, the other demon will butt in and cut you off. I haven't been able to recruit any demons lately (I tried multiple times with the mop-looking guys but I always manage to answer their questions incorrectly and piss them off).

This dungeon area is kinda boring so I buzzed through it pretty fast. Even the souls don't have much to say. The general weirdness of the game and the atmosphere have kept me engaged, but the encounter rate (which many players complain about) and the boring dungeon aesthetics are definitely a weak point.

Encountered a shop with magatama, and got in on that action. Now I've got fire and support. Also encountered the Amala Network. Immediately got Lost Woods vibes as a wrong-turn sends you back to the beginning of the area. One guide describes this dungeon as tedious, so I took the liberty of sketching out a map for next time.

Figured out the map situation, and I've continued onward, meeting the Lady of the Fount (who is hot) and getting an explanation of the Kagutsuchi. I'm grateful that I have emulator save states because save points have been few and far between, and I might bail otherwise. Also, linking the hotkeys because I keep forgetting them.

A busy day left me with low bandwidth, so I piddled around on my farm. Since I was playing later at night, I got a few visitors, including a lovely visitor who left a very nice guestbook message but decided to replant some of my fields with the wrong crops. I have a carefully terraced grape area and alas, they did not plant grapes there. They also messed with my tomato color coded rows.

Witness the horrors (chickpeas in my tomato beds).

Now I know how this makes me feel: itchy. Lol. You can buy crop instruction signs that only allow a certain crop to be planted in an area, so if it keeps happening I can either do that or change my farm permissions, but I'm gonna TRY to be a little more flexible here. It's probably good for me.

I finally unlocked the first type of water lantern, so I began refining my hatchery and you know, I REALLY don't like those seasonal tree rows I planted, but I think I might like them better after I fully pave and decorate the area. IDK. Most of my crop unlocks are to the grindy phase (level 50 cosmic carrots, level 80 peanuts) but what really needs work is my orchard.