Like most of early SMT, Persona 1 is cool. It's trying a lot of bold, interesting stuff, and its aesthetic alone is enough to earn some positive attention. It's just too bad that the execution on all of those ideas always feels so clumsy.
For the record, I'm not talking about the appallingly localized PS1 version. I just tend to log everything under its original release so that when I sort things by release date my results come back the way I want them to and things don't get lost amid 30 versions of the same game.
Even on the PSP, Persona 1 is a slog, though that didn't really start killing me until about halfway through. For a good while, I was having a much better time than I expected. Partially that's because story developments are pretty frontloaded even on the SEBEC route, but really it's because I hadn't yet realized the gameplay's problems, nor the fact that they weren't going to go away.
Persona 1 has a million numbers for you to look at, and leverages them for a battle system that's so much shallower than it looks. There is a tactical grid in battles for the placement of area attacks and the determination of reach, but in practice the player almost never interacts with that grid in any interesting way. You set up your party's positioning near the start of the game and never change it. Resources are abundant and managing them is scarcely a concern. Persona fusion is crippled by the sky-high level requirements on recruiting most foes, and higher level personas eat so much SP and their stats are so often irrelevant in the face of other factors that players are likely to use the same personas across their party for giant stretches of time, and that so often reduces the system to something that's just kind of... there. Before long players are likely to be playing out every battle on auto (and PPSSPP's fast-forward) and seeing little to no punishment for it. The encounter rate is high, and many enemies are annoying, but the average encounter sparks no joy, and that's what one spends about 75% of Persona 1 doing.
I'll admit, I had heard some terrible things about Persona 1 and I had trepidations about playing it. I'm glad that I gave it an honest chance, because before the honeymoon was over I had a pretty good time.
Then the novelty wore off, and I was left with a bunch of unengaging, time-wasting encounters in mean-ass SMT dungeons keeping me from a story that is pretty neat for its time, but not enough to sustain the experience.
Update: I actually bailed before I noticed that you can skip the battle animations on PSP, which is enough to shoot it up a couple points all on its own. In addition to that, like, damn the Snow Queen route is so cool, and I really don't think I was giving it enough credit.
For the record, I'm not talking about the appallingly localized PS1 version. I just tend to log everything under its original release so that when I sort things by release date my results come back the way I want them to and things don't get lost amid 30 versions of the same game.
Even on the PSP, Persona 1 is a slog, though that didn't really start killing me until about halfway through. For a good while, I was having a much better time than I expected. Partially that's because story developments are pretty frontloaded even on the SEBEC route, but really it's because I hadn't yet realized the gameplay's problems, nor the fact that they weren't going to go away.
Persona 1 has a million numbers for you to look at, and leverages them for a battle system that's so much shallower than it looks. There is a tactical grid in battles for the placement of area attacks and the determination of reach, but in practice the player almost never interacts with that grid in any interesting way. You set up your party's positioning near the start of the game and never change it. Resources are abundant and managing them is scarcely a concern. Persona fusion is crippled by the sky-high level requirements on recruiting most foes, and higher level personas eat so much SP and their stats are so often irrelevant in the face of other factors that players are likely to use the same personas across their party for giant stretches of time, and that so often reduces the system to something that's just kind of... there. Before long players are likely to be playing out every battle on auto (and PPSSPP's fast-forward) and seeing little to no punishment for it. The encounter rate is high, and many enemies are annoying, but the average encounter sparks no joy, and that's what one spends about 75% of Persona 1 doing.
I'll admit, I had heard some terrible things about Persona 1 and I had trepidations about playing it. I'm glad that I gave it an honest chance, because before the honeymoon was over I had a pretty good time.
Then the novelty wore off, and I was left with a bunch of unengaging, time-wasting encounters in mean-ass SMT dungeons keeping me from a story that is pretty neat for its time, but not enough to sustain the experience.
Update: I actually bailed before I noticed that you can skip the battle animations on PSP, which is enough to shoot it up a couple points all on its own. In addition to that, like, damn the Snow Queen route is so cool, and I really don't think I was giving it enough credit.