Episode 35: Persona 4 Golden—You are Yu!

Episode 35: Persona 4 Golden—You are Yu!

Platform: PS Vita

Release Date:  JP: June 14, 2012, NA: November 20, 2012, AU: February 21, 2013, EU: February 22, 2013

Difficulty: Medium

Pricing: $19.99

Podcast: Download, iTunes, PodOmatic

[He was so sad, he couldn't make a bear pun.]

The Good

• Teenaged characters that feel like real teenagers instead of adults in high school.
• Randomly generated dungeons that aren’t a cakewalk, but also don’t drag on forever.
• A good balance between the dungeons and the social aspects of the game. Need a break from dungeons? Do some socializing. Sick of Yosuke and Teddie’s perverted antics? Run some dungeons. Without them in the party.
• You have to do some planning when it comes to deciding how to spend your time. There are a lot of options—social links, making lunches, studying, working part-times jobs, and oh, yeah, rescuing people from the dungeons before the fog comes. There won’t be the opportunity to do absolutely everything.

The Bad

• Nothing, this game is perfect.
• Or almost perfect. Teddie could have been less annoying and less obsessed with finding out what a hot stud is.
• Getting the good ending involves a lot of places where it’s easy to misstep and make the wrong choice.

The Ugly

• The quality of education these kids are getting. There’s the teacher who uses sock puppets, the one who thinks she’s an ancient Egyptian, the one who’s more concerned with how sexy she is…And the exams that test you on things that are random trivia, like Napoleon inventing glass jars, or things you would hope a high schooler already knows, like what an atlas is.

• This thing:

[Not even the most disturbing Persona you'll get.]

The Lowdown: This is easily one of the best RPGS I’ve played. I love the characters (expect for Teddie and the murderer), I love the storyline, I love knocking the enemies out with an elemental weakness and the skull of dust that appears as the party members pile on to kick ass.

  

Music Credits

RPG Roundup Theme Song: “Video Game Theme,” J. Arthur Keenes Band. Creative Commons Attribution License.

Persona 4 Golden OST

Episode 32: Conception 2: Children of the Seven Stars—The One With The Boobs

Episode 32:  Conception 2: Children of the Seven Stars—The One With The Boobs

Platform: PS Vita, 3DS

Release Date:  Japan: August 22, 2013. North America: April 15, 2014. EU: May, 14, 2014

Difficulty: Easy

Pricing: $34.99 (Vita), 19.59 (3DS, on sale). Don’t pay $34.99 for this game.

Podcast: Download, iTunes, PodOmatic

[Triche know what his priories are.]

The Good

• Granted, I had very low expectations, but Conception 2 wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. 
• The main storyline did actually keep my attention and I wanted to keep going with it to find out what happened next. The individual storylines for the heroines were more hit or miss, with some of them being well done, like Fuuko and Serina’s, and others, like Feene and Torri’s, seeing like there was very little thought put into their plots. Ellie’s storyline, about hunting down Heretics, could easily be the base for a pretty interesting game premise.
• Although the Heroines fit pretty easily into set archetypes—Fuuko is The Girl Next Door, Narika is The Shy One, Ellie is The Little Sister, Chloe is The Big Sister, etc—I did like all of them and enjoyed the character scenes with them. I also appreciated that the Heroines were all friends with each other instead of the game being one big jealous catfight over the main character.

The Bad

• If the Hero dies, it’s game over, which is the most annoying game mechanic every invented.
• The dungeons were So. Boring. They were far too long with far too many monsters. It was a mind numbing grind, running through identical corridors and square rooms to fight palette swapped monsters. I took forever to finish this game because the dungeons kept making me want to doze off. The actual battle system isn’t all that interesting either, even with your parties of various Star Children.
• The game introduces potentially interesting systems, but doesn’t follow through with them. For example, near the beginning of the game, you’re warned to talk to the NPC characters to open up options. This matters once, with getting Fuuko into the Aquatics Club, and it never happens again. Conception also could have done more with the touch event system it advertised but rarely used. 
• This is a weird criticism, but I actually wish the game has been more perverted? Despite the premise, the game was kind of tame. You’re calling yourself Conception, you’re rated Mature, and the battle system revolves around pseudo-teen pregnancy. You may as well go all out at that point instead of limiting yourself to glowy naked bodies during classmating sessions and touch events that don’t go beyond holding hands. 

The Ugly

[Chlotz REALLY likes going to bathrooms with other guys]

The Lowdown: If you have insomnia, this game is a great sleep aid. The storyline sections were interesting enough, but the dungeons were incredibly dull. And there’s a lot more dungeon crawling than there is storyline. If you really want to play this game, buy it used and try to break up your times in the dungeons with time doing character storylines. I tended to burn through all the character storyline sections—because I actually enjoyed those—and then I would go on to the storyline dungeon. I think the game would have been more enjoyable if I had used the character storylines to break up the tedium of the dungeons. Especially since there’s no consequences for leaving and re-entering the dungeons or progressing to the next day in game.

  

Music Credits

1. RPG Roundup Theme Song: "Video Game Theme," J. Arthur Keenes Band. Creative Commons Attribution License.
2. Conception OST