What Are You Playing: 9 Years since the Last Dragon Age

[Zevox]

I've also been playing Persona 3 Reload - in fact, I've got the next week off work specifically to play it. Happens when you remake one of my favorite games of all time.

So far, it's very much in the "very faithful remake" category - almost too much so to an extent. I'm slightly disappointed by Tartatrus appearing to still be the same fully procedurally-generated dungeon it was, since that was one of the biggest things they improved about the series in P5, giving the Palaces unique dungeon designs instead of leaning on that. But hey, the game was already great despite that, and there's been a number of other modernizations that are good:

- The visuals, obviously. The game just looks great now, no question about it.
- Fully selectable inherited Persona skills, which I don't believe even P3P had implemented.
- The "Baton Pass" system from Persona 5, now just called "Shift," allowing you to pass a character's bonus turn to another party member.
- The Kouha (and presumably Eiha, though I haven't seen that one yet) skills from P5 have been brought in, so Light/Dark are no longer just restricted to Hama/Mudo instant kill spells.
- In a change relative to P3P that I appreciate, the three different physical damage types are back! Although for some reason the MC is locked to one-handed swords now, so he'll have to rely on party members or personas for bashing and piercing damage.
- In a first for the series, when registering Personas and selecting "register all," Elizabeth offers to just register Personas that are higher-level than your already-registered versions. No more needing to register everything individually to avoid overwriting a Persona you picked up a base version of from Shuffle Time!
- Rather than choosing between three sports clubs that all lead to the same social links, you now just join the track team to get the Chariot and Strength links going. I'm presuming the same will hold true for the culture clubs and Temperance.

One that I'm hoping is in but can't confirm yet is platonic social link routes for all of the potential romances. Seems like it should be a given, since they started doing that in P4 and had it for the female protagonist route in P3P, but still, I'm too early in the game, don't know yet.

Music is mostly remixes of the old it seems, but they're mostly as good as the originals or better. Though sadly one exception is Mass Destruction, the main fight theme, which I think got worse - and was already probably my least favorite Persona fight theme, so, yeah. On the upside there's also a new fight theme, It's Going Down Now, which is better, so it's nice when I get that instead. Not sure what triggers that or if it's just random. Also pre-ordering got me a download option to use P4G music instead, which I'm resisting because I want to stick to actual P3 music, but boy I can't say it isn't tempting to turn on Reach Out to the Truth.

One odd thing is that social links seem to be referred to themselves by their last names now? It's weird seeing Kenji referred to as "Tomochika" or Kaz calling himself "Miyamoto." Not sure why they did that. Are Yukari and Fuuka going to be calling themselves "Takeba" and "Yamagishi" in texts to you despite being close friends once you get those links going? That'd be extra weird. (I could see Mitsuru calling herself "Kiriijo," to be fair.) Still, it is a minor thing.

All in all, unless they screw something up later on, this game pretty much seems like it obsoletes FES*. I just hope they're smart enough to add the female protagonist route as DLC down the line so it can truly be a definitive version of the game at long last.

*Unless you really like The Answer, I guess. Personally I'd just recommend watching the cutscenes from that on Youtube rather playing through it though, it's way too grindy and tedious. Even as much as I love Persona, I have never been able to finish The Answer.