I just desperately want to go back to the grimdark Momento Mori theme of P3 as opposed to the bright and optimistic Scooby Doo vibe of P4.
I loved both games almost equally, but 3 just had so much more...scale to it.
I also actually really liked the idea of one super long dungeon that you keep fighting your way deeper into. It really, really clicked with the "spend your time as you see fit" thing Persona has going for it, but it needs to be broken up with other, maybe optional dungeons. Just slapping on some new wallpaper every 20 floors or something didn't do enough.
I want a more fleshed out city to explore. P3/P4's city felt small with only a few places to really go. Dungeons need to be less bland. Every dungeon was just running from floor to floor in the same looking environment over and over; got really tedious. Also, no more high school setting. It would be cool to have a character, male or female, similar to the age of Vincent from Catherine as the MC. Integrating work life, socializing after work, love interest, going to the bar, etc. would be neat for social links.
Another thing that hit me while replaying P4 was how secluded and sterile the social links with party members were. No matter the social link levels at which you were with your friends, it would have zero bearing or influence on story cutscenes. I found this disappointing. If bits of dialogue changed depending on your social link levels, or even whom you are dating, it would greatly help in making the entire story feel more alive and responding to player input. As is, sometimes it is even off-putting, such as seeing Dojima scold and yell at the player in a story cutscene which happened to play right after having a moment with him in his last social link level. It takes the player (at least, me) out of the experience and reminds him that "oh right, I'm playing a video game. sigh". The same can be said of the dialogue options offered to the player regularly. Not only do they have zero bearing on the rest of the cutscene, but some of them don't even offer one extra or different bit of dialogue ! There are moments where the player has to choose between two or three different answers, and all three of them lead to the exact same response from the other party. Disappointing. This could be taken to the next level. I'm not asking for the entire story to change, but maybe if, after picking one answer or the other, the rest of the cutscene played differently, or had its atmosphere tampered with. Maybe if you insult someone, his social link goes down by one level and the player has to gain it back by going through a different social link cutscene that acknowledged the founding incident. I think it would be neat and more immersive.
Good write up for the OP. I agree with some of your points there, namely the change of the cast age, though I wouldn't mind if they still use highschool setting. But here I left one paragraph that I would like to specifically address.
It is not like I disagree with this. I too feel this sometime when playing Persona 4 that much more open to S.Link approach as opposed to Persona 3 that some S.Link tied to the plot. I maxed Yosuke's link really early, and seeing him wooing woman is really strange and immersion breaking for me since his S.Link supposed to be his resolve. Altering dialogue wouldn't be too hard, and would be a great addition for replayability but those would make the development cost skyrocketed if all main storyline cutscene have voiced dialogue. You just couldn't edit the the line, you need to redo for each line variation. I mean, just don't expected it too much. Persona is still a niche game in the west, and it would hurt itself if it have too many dialogues to voiced. It should have 1 cutscene lines variation at most for each character if we want them to keep full voiced.
Also your point about dating is damned, just damned good. I don't like how we allowed to make our own personal harem in Persona 4. It is really silly and kinda breaking it for me. Don't make the dating element become too prevalent, but at least make it only 1 love interest only.
I want a more fleshed out city to explore. P3/P4's city felt small with only a few places to really go. Dungeons need to be less bland. Every dungeon was just running from floor to floor in the same looking environment over and over; got really tedious. Also, no more high school setting. It would be cool to have a character, male or female, similar to the age of Vincent from Catherine as the MC. Integrating work life, socializing after work, love interest, going to the bar, etc. would be neat for social links.
Theres just so many clubs in high school that someone who has work would not be able to do though. Also exams and school holidays whats going to happen to them, trips, theres just too much to miss.
I agree with slightly older cast, Catherine style visuals and more elaborate dungeons.
But I just want the damn game already, I'm tired of speculating about it.
There are a lot of dopey suggestions every time this comes up. "Let's have a cast of adult characters!" The franchise is premised on the idea of supernatural adventure with high school students. (Even P2:EP, the game people like to cite as a counterpoint here, is simply the companion piece to P2:IS, another game about high school students.)
The franchise is what it is. It's likely to see some notable changes compared to the previous entries, and probably some brand-new mechanical twists; some elements might change (male-only MC, playing as a cipher rather than a named character, etc.) but ultimately the underlying concept is going to remain the same.
There are a lot of dopey suggestions every time this comes up. "Let's have a cast of adult characters!" The franchise is premised on the idea of supernatural adventure with high school students.
Japanese folks don't hold that same nostalgia for college that they do for high school. For a lot of people here, college is just a thing you go to for huge lectures. From what I gather from co-workers and friends etc, the best time of their young life was back during HS. Most folks don't live in dorms, they either commute from home or live in an apartment somewhere in the city, so you don't have those dorm antics either.
Having gone to college here for a year, I can attest to the fact that it's all pretty "meh." You make friends in clubs (if you're in any), but making friends in class is a rare sort of thing, and you have to be one hell of a go-getter in order to do it. With the majority of courses being huge lectures, there's never much time to talk to your peers unless you make the time.
High school settings are easy, and they appeal to a wide audience. College? Not so much, as odd as that may seem.
I agree that college would be a silly choice because of the games japanese roots but an adult game would be fantastic and would work well. Take the interactions and themes of Catherine as your social links and dump it in with a Detective as the MC and other officers, detectives, and some type of wild card character (high school student, criminal, something off-kilter) as the party memebers. Its so simple and would work perfectly.
I think it would be presuming too much in saying that a university setting would lower sales in Japan. If it did though, it would show how superficial japanese gamers' priorities are. Not buying a great game because it features young adults in university instead of a bunch of kids in high school, as we've gotten for the past four games ? Christ.
I think it would be presuming too much in saying that a university setting would lower sales in Japan. If it did though, it would show how superficial japanese gamers' priorities are. Not buying a great game because it features young adults in university instead of a bunch of kids in high school, as we've gotten for the past four games ? Christ.
How is that any different from sales anywhere? Quite a few people here would refuse to play a game taking place in a high school no matter how great it is. You generally have to cater to a culture for it to do well in a certain place. Not every subject can have worldwide appeal, and that's not something Persona would be going for in the first place, at least not now.
Entirely new cast of characters. I'm getting a little scared due to the immense popularity and milking of P4 recently. P4 is one of my favourite games, and I love the characters, but enough is enough. Now with the new version, Arena, an anime, a film of the anime, I feel like they may be compelled to bring the characters back. I just want something like P3 to P4: entirely new setting, characters and story. Make references to the previous games, sure, but I don't want any of the characters popping up in anything more than the P3 cameo's in P4 when they visited the school. Apart from that, just give the game a challenging and fair difficulty, better designed dungeons, Catherine grade graphics, a great story and just general new features and improvements to the whole timetable system, bring back the weather system but maybe implement it with something similar, lots of extra things to do. Make the game more in the style and tone of Persona 3, make it pretty dark at times, but with the fun and humour for some of the social events. I don't want it to go the way of most modern anime now and go full on cutesy and shit. We don't need another hot bath scene or another beach scene (which seems to be pretty much obligatory in every anime now). Selectable MC would be cool, and I want some dynamic dialogue between the cast depending on who you're friends with, who you're dating and so on (it's weird to go out with another playable character, but then have the whole group never really acknowledge it). Would also like a Vita release, but PS3 is fine.
P3P without the randomly generated dungeons. Just that.
And it's not sales what stops Persona from getting out of high-school, it's the fact that Persona means high-school; it's kind of like how SMT means Tokyo. Atlus is pretty serious about that stuff.
P3P without the randomly generated dungeons. Just that.
And it's not sales what stops Persona from getting out of high-school, it's the fact that Persona means high-school; it's kind of like how SMT means Tokyo. Atlus is pretty serious about that stuff.
I just want to be able to control my entire party in P5. None of this AI party members. I hate RPG's with AI partymates. P4G is so much better for this reason alone.
Eh, isn't Catherine one of Atlus' best selling titles despite being a new IP and featuring an older cast of characters? I'm sure that a well-written cast of young adults could be just as appealing to the Japanese, and there are few better occasions than a generational shift to bring significant change to a series' traditions.
I just want to be able to control my entire party in P5. None of this AI party members. I hate RPG's with AI partymates. P4G is so much better for this reason alone.
Eh, isn't Catherine one of Atlus' best selling titles despite being a new IP and featuring an older cast of characters? I'm sure that a well-written cast of young adults could be just as appealing to the Japanese, and there are few better occasions than a generational shift to bring significant change to a series' traditions.
I didn't mean exactly in that sense, but there was no exploration in Persona 3 or Persona 4; the overworld is small, empty and the locations aren't very varied in design. Exploration requires discovery, the only discovery in the modern Persona games is made when you figure out new demon combinations.
Eh, isn't Catherine one of Atlus' best selling titles despite being a new IP and featuring an older cast of characters? I'm sure that a well-written cast of young adults could be just as appealing to the Japanese, and there are few better occasions than a generational shift to bring significant change to a series' traditions.
Man, as long as it comes for PS3 or xBox 360 I'm fine.
I believe in the developers in all other aspects. They already released 2 of my top 10 games of all time. all they need is to do is to expand on the improvements they did each iteration and I'll enjoy it.
You play some grandpa who gets the powers for some reason. Like he had the chance when he was younger, missed it and regretted it ever since. And now he's going for the one last adventure because he has nothing left since his wife died and needs to feel like his life had some importance to it.
Then you just recruit old friends or your grandkids or something.
That way all the activities that take a day would be realistic. And he would really need the power of persona in order to get anything done.
There are a lot of dopey suggestions every time this comes up. "Let's have a cast of adult characters!" The franchise is premised on the idea of supernatural adventure with high school students. (Even P2:EP, the game people like to cite as a counterpoint here, is simply the companion piece to P2:IS, another game about high school students.)
The franchise is what it is. It's likely to see some notable changes compared to the previous entries, and probably some brand-new mechanical twists; some elements might change (male-only MC, playing as a cipher rather than a named character, etc.) but ultimately the underlying concept is going to remain the same.
i don't think there's any reason you couldn't write a story with young adults and high school students together. i don't think it would've been that much of a narrative stretch to have made Dojima a party member in the story of P4. maybe that kind of interaction just doesn't happen in Japan though.
some ideas:
-allow the player to organize the order in which spells are listed in the skill window, or at the very least group them (offensive SP, offensive HP, status, healing); this is nitpicky but it bothers me immensely
-automatically select the most pertinent item when going to the Item Screen (ex: if a party member is silenced, cursor should already be at Mouthwash)
-maintain the added control over Fusions in P4G
-unique spell combos that rely on Social Link standings
-make Enemy and Player Advantages much harder to pull off, rely more on party/Persona stats or specific Items to determine first blood; added benefit of removing the need to wait for an enemy to FINALLY turn around so you can backstab it
-move to a "currency" based time management system. activities/jobs have hours assigned to them, and you can mix and match your activities as you like. time of day still matters (i.e. - you can't hang out for 2 hours after school and then go to basketball practice). moving locations across town consumes time.
Dating does have bearing on gameplay in ONE fight, and one fight only.
Fighting against Namatame's boss, when all 3 members get mind controlled, whoever you're dating will flat out refuse to attack you.
The game could easily have more things like that and it wouldn't be a bad thing.
I want a revamp of the social link system itself.
- Impossible for a "Max link" run.
- Characters in links start off aloof and are hard to find, the more you hang with them, the more open they are to hang out.
- "Hanging out" can be as simple as just having a phone conversation.
- Characters can follow the "path" of tarot, leveling into different tarots completely.
- total revamp of the "time" management system.
Most of these boil down to how I want the system changed. In Persona 3, they made a big deal about how someone moves towards enlightenment, and how it's basically a path from one tarot to the next, starting at Fool and getting to World. I want a similar system in 5. Tie up a character's skills to that character themselves so you can keep the same "idea" of party member and Fools(if they must), but have their "growth" as people represented by the arcana. Take Junpei for example. He's someone that has the most "growth" out of any party member across either game, but stays as a Magician. Heck, 3 did this a lot, with all of their "resolutions" really cementing them crossing that last barrier and obtaining peace with themselves.
So here's how it can all work. You still have "ranks", but each tarot has a different number of them. No "life-shattering" realization needs to be made to progress a rank, simply spending time will suffice, and those moments could be saved as we cross from one tarot to the next. Maybe you can save this type of system for just party members, and you can have non-party members stick with the old system? At any rate, make it totally impossible to "max" everyone, but have that be something able to be accomplished with a "new game +".
And for the love of god, no more social linking existing in a damn vacuum. If you're dating someone, it should be put out there. Golden did an ok job with this with a few scenes where the characters obviously knew what was going on, indicating they told each other behind the scenes(Yukiko supporting Chie during the Valentine's event for example), but more of this could be good. There's realistically no way that you SHOULD be able to date both Chie and Yukiko without the other knowing, and if they find out, you could have scenes playing up their shadow confrontations and that they're not quite over that whole thing yet. (Persona 4 spoilers)
The months of November and December are still the most damning ones for me in terms of immersion. Major bad crap happens in the MC's life in those months, and he's stuck in a house all alone. As far as we know, none of the party members or social links ever visit him to keep him company? Really? This was another thing Golden fixed a little bit with the January month, but if they were more dedicated they probably could have Teddie move in in November.
Tying into this system I'd like to see a revamp of the "time management" the game has. The old way is effective, but simple. But if I'm hanging out in Junes with Yosuke, why does it take up the same amount of time hopping into the TV does? Make it more realistic by having an hourly setting now. While you're awake, a day progresses normally. If you don't specifically do something, time can progress in a chunk fashion, otherwise by hour. You want to talk with a party member, but it's more of a hang out thing, so that can take like an hour on the phone. Practice can take a few hours after school. Dungeon crawling takes as long as it does when you're inside, with some stipulations. If you're only in for, say, 3 hours, then when you leave(since it's still "before" the old Evening block, you can still do something later). If you're in for 9 hours, when you leave it's Evening block time, but you're too exhausted to do anything for the rest of the day.
Well, in the same sense that there's "nothing stopping" Activision from making the next CoD a dating sim. In reality, changing the fundamental identity of a popular series isn't something that happens, and "modern supernatural adventure RPG with high school students" is the core of the Persona series.
Why would they try to pass off a full new entry with an old cast? Main entries are going to sell well no matter what. Look at how Disgaea does it: create new casts in the core games, then revisit the ones that are particularly popular. It makes much more sense to create a brand-new cast for P5, while continuing to release spinoffs that exploit the P4 cast.
That's definitely true. Maya worked great in P2:IS. As long as the MC and some of his friends are high schoolers I do think there could be a lot of variation in the rest of the cast.
Edit: There's no point in arguing for/against HS as a setting. It's going to be set in high school. Expecting anything else is setting yourself up for disappoint.
High School is fine. No need to change that. It would be cool if we have party members that are adults though. These guys can be the non-high school characters.
I do love the Persona series, and 4 is definitely the absolute highlight for me. It's better than 3 in pretty much every way. Better combat system, better characters, better plot, it doesn't have
a completely awful and game ruining
ending, better soundtrack....I could go on, but that's not what this thread is about.
For Persona 5, well a few thoughts from me,
I can't say I agree with putting the characters into college if they're going to keep the setting in Japan, which is an almost certainty given the life simulation aspects of the game. As has been said, college in Japan is a vastly different experience to the US or UK where it's something of a party time. There's less 'fun' and more serious study going on.
If the game is going to be set in Japan (99% certain) then High School is probably where it needs to stay.
If however the game were set maybe somewhere else like the US, then sure go for a college setting.
Homosexual relationships. It's time the Persona series got dragged into the modern age with this as a serious option rather than simply being something to make into a punchline as was done with Kanji in P4. It would give a lot more scope to some of the characters and increase replayability.
Have the status of your relationship with various characters, particularly your party members, have an influence on the actual plot. So things like a different level of relationship/social link will cause changes in dialogue. If your character is in a romantic relationship with one of the party, make that clear during plot segments too with different dialogue or actions.
Dungeon variety. Whilst P4 did do quite a lot in this regard, the dungeons were still stuck in the old staple of the SMT series, long corridors with occasional branches here and there. The dungeons need to be fleshed out a little more, made into a bit of a more interesting environment rather than just seemingly endless corridors with some different textures applied. I know that these kind of dungeons are the SMT series 'thing', but it's just not really something that works anymore when you look at the dungeons in games like the Zelda series.
Well, in the same sense that there's "nothing stopping" Activision from making the next CoD a dating sim. In reality, changing the fundamental identity of a popular series isn't something that happens, and "modern supernatural adventure RPG with high school students" is the core of the Persona series.
Casting older characters is not the same as changing the genre so I don't really get your argument. Besides COD went from WW2 to modern, now it has a dog. It's still a FPS despite the changes. It's not like anyone here is trying to make Persona into something else like a fighting game.... bad example there.
Seriously how does turning high school kids into more mature college kids really ruin the core of the experience?
Edit: There's no point in arguing for/against HS as a setting. It's going to be set in high school. Expecting anything else is setting yourself up for disappoint.
Edit: There's no point in arguing for/against HS as a setting. It's going to be set in high school. Expecting anything else is setting yourself up for disappoint.
I'm down with any theme or setting as long as the cast is all-new. I trust these guys enough to make something interesting. That said, I do want more effort going into the dungeons as well. Days where I had to go in dungeons were basically days where I wasn't going to have a lot of fun with the game. I also noticed the Vita version of P4Golden upped the fanservice and I'd appreciate if they dialled that way back.
Eh, isn't Catherine one of Atlus' best selling titles despite being a new IP and featuring an older cast of characters? I'm sure that a well-written cast of young adults could be just as appealing to the Japanese, and there are few better occasions than a generational shift to bring significant change to a series' traditions.
Besides, people are automatically assuming that older cast equals college but it doesn't have to be like that. I know this isn't going to happen but they could be people with jobs that have something in common like working at the same company or hanging out at night like in Catherine.
I'm down with any theme or setting as long as the cast is all-new. I trust these guys enough to make something interesting. That said, I do want more effort going into the dungeons as well. Days where I had to go in dungeons were basically days where I wasn't going to have a lot of fun with the game. I also noticed the Vita version of P4Golden upped the fanservice and I'd appreciate if they dialled that way back.
