Niahak's Place

Playing through Persona 3 gradually for nearly a month straight has really taken away my will to play; I’m considering just giving up on the main story and going on ahead to The Answer.

Perhaps as a reaction to Persona 3, in which the main dungeon is the endless-seeming tower of Tartarus, I started playing through Final Fantasy Legend, whose story centers around The Demon Tower.

The best feature of Final Fantasy Legend is the fact that it is mysterious – much like Drakkhen, I find myself coming back to it time and again if only in the hope I will find something new again this time around. FFL rarely disappoints. There are four “cardinal” worlds:

• The starting world, which is standard fantasy fare: three kings seek to unify the world.
• The ocean world, with pirates, wizards, and the dragon Seiryu’s undersea palace;
• The sky world, in which Byakko’s glider-planes seek domination over an ongoing rebellion;
• The post-apocalyptic world, in which the fiery phoenix Suzaku destroys all who stray from the few protected dwellings.

Of these four, the last has the most compelling plot, in which your party aids a small group in raiding an abandoned nuclear power plant to obtain the technology to neutralize Suzaku.

And yet, though these worlds have in themselves good sub-stories, still more miniature worlds hide in the Tower for the most adventurous to find.

Star Ocean didn’t last very long.  I’m again a bit sad – it’s a good enough game, but I couldn’t stick with it.  Part of the problem is that I just can’t play the game “normally” anymore.  The game is practically built to be broken via the item creation system, and it’s quite feasible to get some of the best equipment in the game before you’re even halfway in.

This is often a problem for me.  Some games are so geared towards being exploited (or at least played optimally) that playing it any other way is impossible once you know how to do it.  This makes the games feel more mechanical and less fun than the first time around.

Because I run into this problem, most of my favorite games are nearly impossible to break.  Lunar 2 is going to be pretty rough no matter how you try and play it – only some aspects are partially breakable (the Crest system) and that only gives you some smallish advantages.  Suikoden 2 is possible to optimize which makes the end of the game easier – but I’ve never had an easy time of taking down Luca Blight.  Wild Arms requires a lot of strategy, even fairly at the end.

Here’s the thing: I like breaking games, but I don’t like playing games again once I have broken them.  Final Fantasy Tactics is the only game that survives game-breaking easily, and that’s because there are so many ways to do it.

I suppose Star Ocean is the only game I can think of at the moment that’s really bad about this.  Some games (pretty much any Final Fantasy, for example) get pretty bad this way near the end.

The game I picked up after Star Ocean is pretty tough to break.  Persona 3 is my favorite RPG on the PS2, and the semi-expansion FES came out a week or so ago.  So far I’m about 1/3 of the way through the “regular” P3 story (The Journey) and the improvements are fairly minor, but it is better than the first time around.

One main complaint about the game (aside from Tartarus being “dungeon-crawly”), as so eloquently put by Junpei:

Part of the reason I like Persona 3 so much is that it’s practically a good book in addition to being a good game.  When you’re tired of messing around in Tartarus, you can always wander around and talk to people, and vice-versa.  Even minor characters in P3 are more three-dimensional than many RPG characters – some more so than characters from several novels I’ve read.  To be fair, I tend to favor moderately cheesy fantasy.  I think Persona 3 is pretty much the best game of this past generation, and I hope more games learn from its example.  Its biggest flaw is that it drags on a bit, but it still managed to get me to start a second play-through within half a year of the first.