The game's not all happiness and joy, unfortunately. There's a couple of things which rise to the level of spiking-the-controller frustration...
The first is the death system. As in most party-type RPGs, when one of your party members goes down, you can use an item (or presumably a spell, though I haven't seen one) to get them back on their feet. Not so with your main character. If he goes down, it's game over, immediately.

This wouldn't be so bad if it was punishment for not paying attention to your life bar, but you get into "unavoidable death" situations. One boss uses a special attack that attempts to give your whole party a "fear" condition; this gives you about a 50-50 shot of not being able to act on your next action. On his next action, he uses a special attack against anyone still under the "fear" condition, hitting them for their whole life bar or so of damage. So if your main character gets affected by the fear, and doesn't get his next action, then you're almost certainly screwed; your fellow party-members don't put "get rid of fear" as a high priority, so it's "game over". Beating this boss essentially came down to "try it until you got a run where this did not happen".

Of course, there's also bosses with instant-kill attacks (or worse, trash with instant-kill attacks), where you resist it or die; if one of these hits your main character, reload time. There's at least some defense against that (the instant-death stuff is all light or dark elemental, and you can equip personas strong against the one or the other... but then you can't use your other personas, which really limits your attack options and is a pain in the butt to boot!)

You're not in control of the other party members, and usually that's not a big deal - they'll act appropriately, go for enemy weaknesses, heal people in danger, and overall it doesn't detract much. However, some of your fellow-combatants have fairly limited attack options, and if they're up against a boss that's resistant to those attacks, they'll sit around and do nothing for the whole fight. That turns new boss encounters into purely exploratory "which person should I have in my party to take this guy on?" experiments. Aigis is especially vulnerable to this - if something's resistant to piercing damage, she won't do anything for round after round after round, even though she's got a couple of special attacks that do strike damage. (This is doubly bad because Aigis is, otherwise, a tremendous bruiser who goes through enemies like chocolates.)

Additionally, I'm going to complain a bit about the game's structure of summer break. Right as you're getting into the swing of things, your social stats are topping off, and you're busily trying to juggle two girls, the French kid in the home ec club, sports team, photography club, student council, the old couple at the bookstore, the Gourmet King at the mall, and half of your merry band of misfits who've just discovered that you're now cool enough, brave enough, or smart enough to talk to... school ends for two months and you're essentially locked into stasis with most of them until September. Summer has a couple of good events (vacation, summer festival) and a bunch of stupid stuff (athletic club practice, "special summer classes", and a film festival that goes on for two weeks) that takes up all the time you could be doing something game-productive.

I realize that the conceit of "this is a school year" requires a summer break, sure. But the events seem to underline that the game knows that it's wasting your time here, and the stat bonuses are just overflow if you've been diligent in the first semester. (Or maybe it's just the game telling you "spend less time studying and less money on karaoke early on, we'll catch you up over the break!") It just felt like a long season of blah to me; I was as bored with it as Junpei was.

Finally, voice acting. This is a PS2 game, so no Japanese and English voices; dub only. The aforementioned Junpei is a bright spot - Vic nails the role. Most of the other characters are at least passable (Aigis sounds quite robotic, but that isn't really a complaint with her). There are a few which are just grimace-inducing, though; Fuuka's VA is obviously working outside her range, for example. All of the male roles besides Junpei are somewhat generic "I smoulder with adolescent rage" types, though that's not so much the VAs as it is the script. I guess I'm saying that it's not that great overall, but not bad enough to make me want to quit playing.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 05:49 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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