Holy Fuck MCM Expo was a lot of fun!
Bought soooooo much stuff it was hard to get it all home!
But most importantly, I got about an hour's worth of hands on with Persona Q! Dont worry there are no story spoilers here.
This game is pretty fucking fun! The gameplay is standard Etrian Odyssey style, choose all of your attacks first, hit go and watch the turn play out. I found that turn order is fairly hard to work out, it probably goes on whoever has the highest agility stat and works down from there, enemies included. Unfortunately, this means that the 'one more' system doesnt apply here, but if you manage to hit an enemy's weakness and knock them down, then their turn is wasted picking themselves back up, so weaknesses still have an important role to play.
Also, when you knock an enemy down, you get a 'boost', and when that character's boost meter is full, that is when you are able to perform a follow-up attack. All out attacks are still in the game and work as normal, knock down every enemy then charge.
Also, while your character is in 'boost' all of your skills cost 0SP, so go nuts!
Now onto Personas, every character, except your MC of choice, has their persona from the original game and they level up as normal and gain skills and boost stats just as you would expect. But, uniquely, you can assign everyone, even the support character, a sub-persona. This allows the characters to have a much wider range of skills available to them. You want to be able to use Agi skills with Chie? Go for it! Akihiko being able to use Bufu? Sure, why not! This is especially useful since Personas now only have 6 skill slots as opposed to the usual 8.
Character interactions in Q seem pretty heavy, as I was wandering the labyrinth, there were multiple occasions of dialogue being shown, even at non-critical areas. I ran into a dead end and got a mini-scene between some of the characters. Oh, and for those wondering, you dont have to have the characters in your active party to be able to see these scenes. There is plenty of stuff to see and chances are, you'll probably not see it all unless you are a completionist by the looks of it.
One of the most fun parts of EO games for me is, strangely, the map drawing. And this is here in Q and as elaborate as ever, and the maps here are HUGE! I spent 30 minutes in one level after taking over someone else's game, who had already filled in a lot of the map, and I barely added anything to it! These levels are going to take a while to fully map out if you want to explore everywhere. Oh, and for those of you who couldn't care less about it, there is a feature that fills everything in automatically as you go if you dont want to bother with it.
Now onto the characters! I managed to get hands on with both sides so I was lucky there. The character interaction is really good here! The characters are a lot closer to their original P3/P4 versions of themselves, as opposed to the caricatures that some of them became in Arena/Ultimax. The dialogue between them all is great, although I wouldnt have expected anything less from the localisation crew. The only downside I had was that it was VERY NOISY, so I was unable to hear the voices clearly, although I did note that not all of the dialogue lines are voiced. A lot of them simply have a reactionary sound followed by text (a la Danganronpa).
One of the things I've seen a few people mention is about how the game looks. Let me tell you this game looks AMAZING, the visuals are gorgeous, whether or not you like the chibi character designs is your personal opinion, but I think they look great. The trailers really dont do the game justice, this game is not supposed to be viewed via youtube going full screen on a monitor, it's supposed to be viewed on a 3ds, and boy does it look good on a 3ds. The colours are vibrant, the animations are smooth, the 3d effect isnt too distracting, overall, it is a great looking game.
Well, thats all I can think of saying for now. If anyone has any questions, then ask away and I'll try my best to answer.
