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Persona Community Thread: The Butterfly Effect
- Thread starter Dantis
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SatelliteOfLove
Member
Same. It's right up my alley, but here I sit playing La Mulana, but replaying DDS for IV and the poketalk got me doing all the post-game I missed in B2. I got sloppy with my backlog once it got small. :/
IHaveCandy
Banned
Spoilers for Persona 3 and 4 below, if its necessary to state in this thread.
The characters from Persona 3 and 4 really do fit under the same archetype. It becomes kinda noticable how much so if you lay it out. For the most part, I like Persona 3's over 4's
Annoying goofball who is kind of jealous of the MC and has affection towards a dead NPC and kind of bored with his life as it is.
Junpei > Yosuke
The formal richer girl that is chained to a set business path thanks to family business she was born into and will inherit
Mitsuru > Yukiko
Misunderstood thug who is actually extremely noble
Shinjiro > Kanji (this one was close)
Girl that has a tomboish hobby that gives her a gender identity crisis
Naoto > Fuuka
Meeeee fighter that takes challenges seriously and must always see them through
Chei > Aikahiko
Non-human creation that struggles to understand their purpose since they do not have the same origin as the others around them.
Aigis > Teddy
Child that is quite mature for their age and had a mother that was manslaughtered.
Nanako > Ken
Animal that manages to communicate and aid the investigation team.
Koromaru > Kitsune
Persona user that wishes for the world to end because it is worthless as it is and feels this way due to transgressions done to him, and also uses a pistol.
Takaya >
Persona 3 wins 6 to 3.
The characters from Persona 3 and 4 really do fit under the same archetype. It becomes kinda noticable how much so if you lay it out. For the most part, I like Persona 3's over 4's
Annoying goofball who is kind of jealous of the MC and has affection towards a dead NPC and kind of bored with his life as it is.
Junpei > Yosuke
The formal richer girl that is chained to a set business path thanks to family business she was born into and will inherit
Mitsuru > Yukiko
Misunderstood thug who is actually extremely noble
Shinjiro > Kanji (this one was close)
Girl that has a tomboish hobby that gives her a gender identity crisis
Naoto > Fuuka
Meeeee fighter that takes challenges seriously and must always see them through
Chei > Aikahiko
Non-human creation that struggles to understand their purpose since they do not have the same origin as the others around them.
Aigis > Teddy
Child that is quite mature for their age and had a mother that was manslaughtered.
Nanako > Ken
Animal that manages to communicate and aid the investigation team.
Koromaru > Kitsune
Persona user that wishes for the world to end because it is worthless as it is and feels this way due to transgressions done to him, and also uses a pistol.
Takaya >
Adachi
Persona 3 wins 6 to 3.
What?
A few of those are a stretch (Naoto / Fuuka's class especially). Mitsuru has none of the issues Yukiko has regarding her path... or at least not in the same way, I don't recall much of her s.link. The closest parallel is definitely Yosuke/Junpei, although Junpei's character development is linked heavily with Chihiro where Yosuke's is with the MC and the gang as a whole.
IHaveCandy
Banned
Both Mitsuru and Yukiko are born into a family business and were raised to inherit the business from birth. Both have problems accepting that. Mitsuru realizes how much it bothers her when she realizes how little experience she has outside of her family's coddling umbrella.
ScraftyDevil
Banned
Shinjiro over Kanji? Get out of here. Shinji's cool and all but you don't get to know him at all
Kanji by comparison is much more friendly and likeable, and his arc ends on a much better note.
I'd also argue that Chie > Akihiko, since the latter gets very little development and characterisation over the course of the game whereas the former's is very apparent and significant.
Add those to the previous comments about Mitsuru vs. Yukari and Fuuka vs. Naoto, and I'd say P4 just squeaks by.
P4 has better villains as well, so it gets points for that.
before he up and kicks the bucket.
I'd also argue that Chie > Akihiko, since the latter gets very little development and characterisation over the course of the game whereas the former's is very apparent and significant.
Add those to the previous comments about Mitsuru vs. Yukari and Fuuka vs. Naoto, and I'd say P4 just squeaks by.
P4 has better villains as well, so it gets points for that.
It... it does?
IHaveCandy
Banned
I decided to go with Shinjiro since Kanji wussed out and let me get Naoto while his eyes were all over her.
If you are keeping score with me, I put Chei ahead of Akihiko. And I assume you meant Yukiko instead of Yukari.
buddha0991
Member
Yes, I agree it does son.
cj_iwakura
Member
Takaya was a great character, but a poor villain, if that makes sense.
Fuuka doesn't have a gender identity crisis. She's quite fine with being a girl.
Interesting. Guess I haven't heard people say that they preferred P4's antagonists to P3's before. To me, P3's bad guys felt like much more of a threat to the protagonists than anyone in P4, even the big bad. The tension was palpable in the final weeks before facing
Nyx
Adachi
ScraftyDevil
Banned
It's late. I can't read or type.
Anyway, the only P3 charcters whom I feel are objectively superior to their P4 counterparts are Junpei, Nanako and Koromaru. Just about everyone else could be argued either way; it just comes down to a matter of persona(l) preference.
buddha0991
Member
I thought the common villain rating was P2 > P1 > P4 > P3?
IHaveCandy
Banned
For her, I believe she had a problem with her hobbies. She was worried that people wouldn't find them acceptable since she wasn't make. So she tries to take up cooking instead since it is more feminine. She realizes she should simply just to what she wants. She kinda takes the opposite path as Naoto. Naoto at first tries to continue her masculine hobbies, but also make her appearance masculine. Fuuka at first tries to keep her feminine appearance and try to force herself to take part in feminine hobbies she doesn't like.
Right, but she also largely doesn't feel like she's pressured into it in the same way Yukiko does. Yukiko blah blah blah bird cage etc. Mitsuru is completely a-ok with being the head of the Kirijo group and kind of doesn't notice how much it constrains her until MC comes along. It's a different character arc.
IHaveCandy
Banned
Well they are all personal preference....and Nanako was in 4.
Well, that's definitely wrong because P1 wouldn't even be there. But, to me, I guess I'd go with P2 > P3 > P4 > P1. The villain barely had a presence in P1.
cj_iwakura
Member
In retrospect, I'd put P1's above the other three, especially since
he comes back in P2. Nyarlathotep is a divine force of nature. Kandori is just an evil bastard.
He's also much cooler in P2.
buddha0991
Member
What do you mean son.
Guido/Kandori was a cool villain. They even resurrected him in 2
IHaveCandy
Banned
I think she didnt like the arranged marriage from the start, but just put up with it. Besides, I wasn't trying to say their archetypes were identical, just similar.
ScraftyDevil
Banned
Strega isn't a legitimate threat because the writers cop out and pull the same cheap trick twice in order to artificially raise the stakes. I mean, come on. It's writing 101.
Nyx
Adachi
You know it's really annoying when you do this. Throw out everything about a character, make blanket statements and expect it to go well.
There are parallels between the character, but the ones you've listed and described (Naoto and Fuuka,
Takaya and Adachi
EDIT:
Adachi was a great villain,
(the reason why I joined the police force was because I could own a gun)
He's awesome in P2, but essentially a non-presence in P1, or at least I didn't care about him. The only reason him and Nyarlathotep are great is P2, which is because of their existence in P1.
The only real issue I have with the comparison is that I feel like the severity of the girl's problems are pretty darn different. lol, it'd almost be better if the category was just "girl with blue hair".
IHaveCandy
Banned
You know it's just a fun little post. It's nothing I expect to be taken that seriously. I'm not trying to create a comparative thesis or anything.
ScraftyDevil
Banned
Tired. No coffee. Can't type.
I agree with this; to an extent. While there are very clear parallels between P3 and 4'a characters, it's unfair to the extremely skilled writing teams to reduce many of them to blanket archtypes for the sake of comparison.
I'm not sure what trick you're referring to, but at least they manage to
murder one of SEES
Shadow Teddie
Adachi's
CrazyTank940
Member
I'll agree to this. Same with Jin. I like both of them as characters, but as villains it feels like a little bit of wasted potential. I wish they were used more than for just "oh hai we don't want you to destroy Tartarus". That and they really didn't do much with
Takaya and Jin's cult thing. Sure they mentioned it a few times, but it felt more like a "Hey remember there's a cult" thing rather than a legitimate presence.
IHaveCandy
Banned
Full disclosure. Somebody intentionally spoiled
for me. Kinda loses a lot of it's impact for me. That might be why I went with Takaya.
Adachi
Indeed, they didn't do much with the cult aspect of it. Felt more like a thematic throwback to Eternal Punishment's JOKER than anything else, really.
I absolutely love the concept of a rival Persona user team.
cj_iwakura
Member
Funny that P2's Tatsuya Sudou alone was more threatening than all of Strega combined. Imagine if P2 made you fight all of the Masquerade at once.
(As much as I like the Atlus USA translation, I do not like them changing that to Masked Circle. Masquerade is iconic.)
ScraftyDevil
Banned
That's exactly what I'm talking about. They shoot someone important to a main character not once, but twice just so that some kind of forced hatred of them can be quelled in the player. Maybe it's just because I'm a critic by nature and over-analyze everything, but it seemed like a massive cop-out to me that was inserted in place of them doing any legitimately sinister action.
Adachi, on the other hand, shows he means business before his true identity is even revealed by murdering two defenseless victims (one a highschool girl) in cold blood, and then orchestrating several other attempted murders from the shadows. These, coupled with his total personality shift post-reveal, give him a well-deserved air of menace that persists even after he's defeated. Golden also bolstered this by adding his two S. Link-specific scenes (the Confrontation and Accomplice endings), both of which add to his credibility as a rather brilliant manipulator and villain.
Adachi, on the other hand, shows he means business before his true identity is even revealed by murdering two defenseless victims (one a highschool girl) in cold blood, and then orchestrating several other attempted murders from the shadows. These, coupled with his total personality shift post-reveal, give him a well-deserved air of menace that persists even after he's defeated. Golden also bolstered this by adding his two S. Link-specific scenes (the Confrontation and Accomplice endings), both of which add to his credibility as a rather brilliant manipulator and villain.
Just my two cents.
That's why I like him, but the fact is that he represents absolutely no danger to the main characters themselves. It's not a bad thing that the danger he represents concerns innocent victims and not the protagonists, but I enjoy antagonists who represent an active and real threat to the main party and
Adachi
Like cj_iwakura mentioned, the Masked Circle was genuinely threatening without
resorting to killing party members like P3 did, but I also think that how P3 handled it was an effective way of showing that they're not screwing around
On a telephone pole of course.
ScraftyDevil
Banned
I still don't think it makes Takaya threatening, personally. Gunning two unsuspecting people down in the street is pragmatic, but loses some impact because you don't truly care for either of them. I've heard rumours that Shinji being a party member for a month was a last-minute desicion made by the dev team in order to make the player feel more upset over his death, and I'm honestly not surprised. Had Shinji not been a member of the party for that single month, then Takaya would be viewed as no more threatening than Adachi.
Plus the rest if Strega is about as threatening as an unplugged toaster, so Takaya loses villain points for associating with them. I kinda wish they'd just cut the other two and made him the main villain; he would've benefitted from the extra development and loss of association with a couple of comic-booky schmucks.
IHaveCandy
Banned
Strega isn't menacing because their boss fights are pathetically easy. You all knew when you fight them at the end that it wasn't going to be a problem at all. They had their chance to show you what they were made of and blew it, twice.
And we do have people going through the games for the first time pop in here pretty often.
Yup. The amount of spoilers in one post (before it was edited) was staggering.
When in doubt, put it under spoiler tags. If there's something that has completely become an untwist (such as Naoto's gender) we'll let you know.
afreaknamedpete
Member
Strega was such a missed opportunity. You never fight them as a full team, and wouldn't it have been cool if they fought kind of like how you fight? I'm not just talking about exploiting, but using buffs, healing spells, maybe some kind of unison spell or something. Maybe make it so the goal was to KO Takaya and so long as he was alive he could recarm the other members, kind of like how you have to protect the MC but can revive the rest. Could've made for a much more exciting fight than what we ended up getting.
Yeah, but it's not really very interesting information. Like I said the only ones I think that parallel effectively are Youske and Junpei, and then primarily because one is 'redeemed' through love and the other is redeemed much more gradually through having a friend group.
I think P4 is far, far more effective at creating a group of characters who legit seem like legitimate friends. SEES is much more like a bunch of co-workers until sometime around November/December.
Strega was wasted opportunity as far as I was concerned.
Of course, that was done intentionally. Perhaps Persona 5's group will also have a different group dynamic than the previous games. We don't need another "best friends forever" angle, at least not initially.
That was actually the intention. Hashino (from the P3 design works art book) compared the SEES members to drinking buddies. You'd see them and have a great time, but then everyone would leave and go their separate ways. That could explain why Makoto Yuki can't build social links with half of the SEEs members.
Though I 100% agree with you. The group dynamic in P4 is really, really, really awesome. In fact, they're my favorite group... ever.
See. I actually liked this quite a bit. Each character had their own lives and responsibilities and everyone comes together for pretty much only one cause. I wouldn't expect people like Junpei and Akihiko for example to hang out with each other on a regular basis during the start of the story and it makes the development between each main character by the end of the game that much more meaningful to me.
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