Sklorenz said:
I'll be picking this up soon... I never played through P3 on hard mode, so I probably want to try this one on hard.
I did not have too many problems with P3 or Nocturne on normal, but I just don't want this game's hard mode to be much more difficult than Nocturne's normal mode. Nocturne's normal was just hard enough, and I'm sure hard mode on that game would have been a turn off for me. Too much grinding can ruin a game for me. So, where does the difficulty/grindy-ness sit in comparison for the persona hard modes? I just don't wanna get 15 hours in and start over because I'm not enjoying it
Hard mode feels harder than Nocturne's normal mode, at least so far, and definitely more grindy.
1) Enemies are easy to avoid, so there's nothing keeping you from just sneaking your way to a boss or mid boss without fighting enemies, necessitating that you take a timeout to go back down and grind.
2) Both of the midbosses so far have felt like level checks, where even with a bunch of Kaja and Kunda spells the bosses were so far above my level that I did too little damage while they were one-shotting my members.
However, the crawling aspects are much, much better designed than anything in P3. I remember playing The Answer and thinking "Hmm... I'd really like to see a straight dungeon crawler like this." Fights are more varied, enemies have a more interesting selections of abilities and weaknesses, and your friends will jump in to save you from single target killing hits (sorry, won't work against Mazio)
Level gain definitely appears to be a lot slower, since there are no wand cards to speed the process up.
You should also be cautious that dungeon exploration prevents you from doing bath daytime and nighttime S. Links, and that restoring HP/MP in the dungeon is expensive as fuck. So, while P3's Hard mode only made the dungeon aspect a little bit harder, here it will almost definitely require you to adjust how you go through the social aspects; how long you put it off, how many trips you take, whether or not you choose to waste a day to restore your health or burn through your life savings for a heal. Very interesting stuff so far.
I also hear that Normal is too easy after the first boss, so selecting Hard might prevent some imminent boredom.
(At second Major boss, died eight times so far. Once each against each midboss/boss (those first two don't count), and then in three random encounters where I just absolutely got waylaid by high level hitall stuff)
