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Customer Reviews: Average Rating:  Rating :  - I would have rated it much lower but...
I want to start by saying that I'm a huge fan of the Persona series. I logged over a hundred hours of playtime on the original Persona 3 and loved every minute of it, so when I heard this "expansion" was coming out I was, to coin the term, geeked. I picked it up at launch and have been playing The Answer for about a week now, but if I had to sum it up in one word I would say that there isn't a word for how gut-wrenchingly tedious it is.
I'm not even going to bother reviewing The Journey since it's just the previous game with bonus content and minor switch ups in dialog. There is a new social link and you can upload a previous save from the old game to carry over your academics, charm, courage, and compendium, but I really didn't want to sit through 90+ hours of what I had already seen just to catch the 25% of that which was now changed from way f***ing different to just ever so slightly. If you want to know what the new content will be like read an old review for P3, forget a quarter of it and then act surprised when you play this. Now, back to The Answer.
I've come to the conclusion that Atlus really doesn't want you to know how this game "actually" ends. If they did they would have kept enough story around to bait me through this nightmare like they did previously. Yet instead of adding to the good points of the original they did away with them all together in order to make more room for what everyone b***ed about before; hours and hours of grinding in a bad level design.
Although you are indeed rewarded for your efforts with a brief sixty second cut scene each time you finish a particular dungeon, I found it rather insulting since I had just waded through hordes of enemies across the exact same dungeon layout and past at least three bosses all the while carrying my team of allies who act as though they had all been tied down and beaten with a baseball bat of frozen stupid for a good hour or so, only to receive little more than a cryptic message none of my team understood and I didn't give a flying s*** about.
When your intelligence isn't being pissed on by the cut scenes you spend your time wandering around, or preparing to wander around, the exact same dungeon literally hundreds of times. The fact that they are all randomly generated makes up for this a bit but since they all look like the same anyway you're guaranteed to have seen everything by the end of the second level. It makes me wonder why I couldn't simply remain stationary while beating off wave after wave of enemies, at least then combat might have proved challenging.
The combat itself is the absolute worst of this train wreck, which is a bit sad seeing as how that's essentially all it is. It revolves solely around finding an enemies weakness and exploiting it, but that doesn't mean it isn't "challenging". What makes it "challenging" is the fact that the game hates you. It's programed to mercilessly kill you at all costs and is not above using your own team to accomplish this task. While you may be level 65 and can go toe-to-toe with any monster up to the boss fight, simply laughing off their attacks the whole time, my advice is to just run straight to the damn thing at the beginning of each stage as you will never be more prepared for it than you are at that moment. It already knows and is poised to exploit your teams specific weaknesses so it makes choosing your party rather un-strategic as all you're really doing is varing the degrees of frustration slightly since as soon as you reach said boss anyone you do choose is just as useless as anyone else, and will spend the entire battle inadvertently healing the boss, healing each other, wasting their turns in various ways, or accidentally helping you.
Since you on the other hand have the option of switching your skills via the unique ability to cycle through over a hundred useless personas, it's up to you to support, lead, and essentially BE the team, with the rest of your mates acting as nothing more than a distraction at best to momentarily redirect the seething hate the game feels toward you to them. In the last game this ability was actually useful but now it's rather unnecessary. I found myself able to progress to the last part of the game using only TWO personas before finally having to switch to something without weaknesses.
Now I could go on about all the glaring flaws here; so I will. The story and any semblance of it was one of the first things Atlus destroyed in order to make room for all the monsters that are really just different color variations of each other. The plot that survived the remodel is rather simple, being that march 31st continues to repeat itself and it's up to you to figure out why. I've heard people liken it to the movie Groundhog Day with all I can say being that yes, it's exactly like watching f***ing Groundhog Day. If you can't see anything wrong with that statement I want you to push a pencil slowly through your hand. Even the ending and all the simple minded melodramatic chatter up to it are predictable as hell. Leaving me wondering just why I sat through it all in the first place, without an aforementioned reward of cake of something other than pure curiosity driving me. Again, while the previous title suffered some of these flaws it still made up for it by-well now I can't even remember what drove me to complete that either. Perhaps it was because at the time it was a fresh and pleasant deviation from the corporate formula which has so obviously infested and corrupted what otherwise had all the potential to be a wonderful game.
The only reason I'm giving it such a high grade is because it still contains an only mildly tainted form of the original at a bare bones price. Other than that it's pure fan service and deserves to be treated as such. + See Full Customer Review |  |
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