played snow queen on psx. god i love this game, sure it's janky as hell but it's got something special. idk if it's the weird ass atmospheric ost or the frankly amazing graphics and design, but i'm completely sold.

revelations: persona is just so likeable. the sebec translation, while obviously cringeworthy nowadays considering how hard it wanted to be some working designs type localization, doesn't really ruin the game for me. what is a dealbreaker tho is the lack of the snow queen quest, which is an alternate storyline present in the game which for some reason has been left out. it is still in the game disc tho: you can re enable it with some cheatcodes, but none of the dialogue is translated. but trust me when i say there's some cool shit here they removed from the psp version. i love for example that the sqq final boss just screams the spells they're casting. like "MAHAZANDAIN!!! DIARAMA!!! MAHAJIODAIN!!!". it's so cool lol, while in the psp version it's just a boring ass grin.

if you want to play the original game, as the designers intended, i recommend playing the PS1 version with a walkthrough. yes, it's slow, yes the psp remaster has more animation, and yes, it does have some really weird design choices/mistakes corrected in the psp version. but still, the soundtrack is probably my favourite from megaten, and playing this on a PS1 is just magical man. it's no secret that i've had some sort of weird fascination with old, janky, and overly ambitious video games, which is why i'm so drawn to games like koudelka, phantasy star 2, megami tensei 2., or pretty much all from software games prior to demon's souls, but this game man. it's so different than all other rpgs of the era i've played, specially in the artistic design department. also the music is amazing, sometimes it sounds like something out of a modern indie game or something. in a way, revelations: persona is the anti rpg, it does absolutely everything to be annoying (slow ass battles, janky localization, maze-like dungeons, etc) but somehow it manages to charming and emotional, in a way which few games have made me feel. somehow, a lot of it's design is incredibly forward-looking, which is amazing coming from a game dev who was previously making the wizardry-like snes smt games.

in conclusion, i gotta say this game is among my favourites. it just hits something within me, idk what is it, but it completely fullfills my thirst for weird PS1 games. if you can play this on a real psx with a crt, definetly go for it, but don't expect a persona game, it's just not. it's not even like persona 2 or soul hackers, in a way it's a lot more old school, but in others it's a lot more modern.

i can't really say if you'll like this honestly, i think it's more approachable if you grew up with a PS1 or a W98 pc and played games of that era. all the hate for this game kinda reminds me of when i showed a friend from school, who said he loved re4, old resident evil 1 on my psx. he thought it looked horrible, he felt it was clunky, hated the tank controls, and said the music and dialogue were so muffled they were incomprehensible (keep in mind this was in the early ps3 era), and honestly i do understand him. but at the same time, all this jank just resonates with me in a way i can't explain. i'll leave it at that i guess.

Edit (1/23/2022): I've played more (up to halfway through of the third area, give or take) and while I had more fun than my review originally indicated, I still stand by a lot of my points. I'm writing this about a month after I shelved the game, and I don't remember much of the music in the game except for the second area (which was a banger, to be fair). What I've played of the story was still very piss poor, to the point I hated advancing in the game because that also meant advancing the plot. Apparently you can now turn down the brightness in the game, a feature I apparently never got because every time I checked if I got the 1.2 update it wasn't there.

I can at least say I like the gameplay after spending more time with it. Beating the first major boss allows you to warp to each save point, which is massively helpful (and should have been given to you right from the start, imo). Battle system can be said to be one of Atlus's best, and exploring each of the areas is rewarding, as the Koroks (I can't remember what they're called, but everything in this game is forgettable) of this game give some pretty substantial rewards. Upgrading the Nahobino and your party of demons is fun, too.

It's just such a shame that none of it feels worth it when all you get are just one skippable cutscene after the next.


Original review:
TL;DR: A lot could be improved if there were checkpoints so you don't lose all your progress from a random "difficulty spike" in an otherwise easy game. These are also my first impressions after playing for ~4-5 hours, so I wouldn't consider them a review by any sense of the word.

First impressions: this was an impulse purchase, but it's one I'm finding myself regretting.

I really, really wanted to like this game and keep coming back to it, but I just get the desire to play something else every time I pick it up. This game gets boring in every aspect after about an hour, visually, musically, and in its gameplay.

I thought this game was pretty fun starting out, but after playing on hard for a little while I eventually found out this game is very easy 95% of the time and feigns its difficulty by sending you to your last save when you die, with save points being rather sparse. This is lame, and it also sucks, since it just makes playing the game become a chore when you die to a sudden "difficulty spike" (for lack of a better term - these were the occasional mob fights where they suddenly attacked my Nahobino all at once and also one boss on the verge of defeat). The battle system is like a slightly better version of Octopath Traveler's, so you can see again why I'd say it gets boring so quickly.

The music isn't very good at all, which was unexpected from Atlus. The main battle theme sounds interesting at first, but once you start hearing it more and more the novelty wears off. The song that plays as you explore Da'at (at least the desert portion, if there are other areas at all) does a good job sounding bleak and empty - until again, the novelty wears off and it becomes grating. The scenery of (if there are any other areas) the first area is just generic post apocalyptic desert and not really anything I haven't seen before. Not only that, but the bloom is turned to all the way up to 11 so not only is the world hard to look at aesthetically, but also literally and I found myself having headaches when playing this game (there's also no way to turn down the brightness at all, ffs). This game also runs like ass on the Switch, and low FPS doesn't help when the brightness was already agonizing enough.

The only thing I can really praise Atlus for here are the character designs, but even that's hard when most of the demon designs were lifted from previous MegaTen games, which normally isn't a problem but it just makes things feel worse here. Speaking of characters, there are none! Although I did start off meeting the main cast, they were all extremely one dimensional and not the least bit entertaining. If characters are good enough, they can carry an otherwise boring game, but by the time I gave up on this I only encountered one of the main characters a second time, whose personality trait is that he's actually an undercover government agent. Wow!

You could easily describe this game as one word: "generic", but even then, if making progress was less of a chore, I could get past a lot of the flaws here. But these are just my first impressions. Maybe I'll come back to this game, but man, it's just not my thing, apparently.

I played about 17 hours, some ways into the second area. I'm disappointed, but I'm not that surprised. I've played enough of these games to know there's a wide gulf between Katsura Hashino's work and everything else. So I wasn't expecting Nocturne, despite how much this game wants to evoke Nocturne.

Much of my time with the game feels like playing a pretty terrible collectathon. A lot of time spent Naruto-running past every demon (because there's hardly been a point in fighting anything unless you're going to recruit it) to find your way to trinkets and quest objectives marked on the map. There's also a weird amount of verticality for a game where the platforming doesn't exactly feel like Mario.

You have not so much an open world here as you do a linear series of very large rooms connected by narrow tunnels. Those rooms are mostly indistinguishable. It's all the same blown-out ruins of Tokyo with the same cars littering the ground everywhere. I hoped the second area would be distinct from the first, which I tired of after a few hours and which lasted ten hours. But the second area looked more or less the same, and now I've been there for several hours and I want to stop.

Since enemies can be avoided, there's little danger outside of occasional forced encounters. These fights can be fine and at least feel tense sometimes, but they go on a bit long and there's not that much depth to fights once you're in them. The depth comes more from creating your team outside of battle. But this game really limits your options there by, for reasons I cannot fathom, making you wait to unlock half your skill slots until later in the game. There's also a fair number of demons with unique skills that make them better than other demons of a comparable level, even early on. I like the idea, but I end up not wanting to use most of the old demons much of the time due to their lack of unique skills.

Anyway, I only felt engaged when I was team-building or in a big fight, and I don't know if it's worth trudging through the rest of the game for that. The exploration, as it were, is very boring and comprises a lot of the content here.

ORIGINAL REVIEW
The game arrived prior to the release date.
The game was great up until the last 5 hours where it became kusoge
midturne 2.0

UPDATED REVIEW
The game isn't bad. It has probably my favourite OST in all of Megaten, the gameplay is solid, but the story is what really bothered me in my first playthrough. Now that I know how bad it is, a second playthrough was a lot more enjoyable since I wasn't expecting much. I had fun and it was somewhat addicting.