Persona 5 (PS4): Stolen My Heart, {Because of course it did}.

Ok, I can't even pretend to have some kinda cutesy anecdote about this one. At this point in the life of this blog it's pretty well documented how much I've fallen in love with this franchise. I talked about it non-stop until I played Undertale. Now I expect it to swing back that direction because a new one has finally been released, so the question really is going to be how does it hold up to it's lineage. Let's get to it. 

PERSONA 5 (PS4)

There is a bit of introduction so I'll try to cliffnote it here. The game starts off with you taking control of a masked thief being referred to as Joker. He's a got a briefcase and is being pursued as he being looks to make an escape. He is in radio contact with what appears to be a whole team. He dispatches a series of shadows (giving us a brief combat and stealth tutorial) and makes what seems like a daring escape through a decorative window, only to be ambushed by a large scale police force and apprehended.

After getting beaten down by the police and drugged up, he is forced to sign a confession of guilt. The prosecutor of his case arrives to interrogate him, inquiring how one could "steal someone's heart" but she wants a truthful story out of Joker. Despite her disbelief of the whole situation you are told to start from the beginning.

Joker is actually a high schooler called Akira Kurusu (Manga), who is moving to Tokyo after being expelled from his original school. He was removed from school due to a criminal probation, as he was sued by a man who was sexually harassing a woman on the street, and Joker physically put a stop to it. The case didn't go his way, he was taken out of school, and sent by his parents to live in Tokyo for his probation staying with a somewhat cold and distant cafe owner named Sojiro Sakura.

After making his day one introductions, digging his roots to his new room, and finding a mysterious app on his phone Joker runs into local delinquent Ryuji Sakamoto on his way to the first day of class. However, the pair never make it to school as they find a medieval castle in its place run by what seems to be an oversexed and overblown version of the schools PE teacher, King Kamoshida. They are attacked and accosted by the King and his Shadows which causes Akira to awaken to his persona and fight back.

During their escape, Ryuji sees many of his fellow students being tortured and caged. They are able to make their escape by releasing a talking cat monster called Morgana who seems to have an understanding of this world, which turns out to be a manifestation of the teacher's twisted desires. The boys make a deal with Morgana to come back and help them as "Phantom Thieves", and in return it will allow them to change Kamoshida's heart to confess to the possible abuses he has done back in the real world.

I am probably glossing over a lot there but as we all know by now the Persona is a very narrative driven game, so admittedly they reason they start you off In Medias Res is to let you get a feel for the action early because once that is done you are in for a bit of storytelling. I will say that it feels like this one gets Star Ocean 2 levels of long before it really lets you off the chain to explore the world more. Which is fine, I don't mind a little exposition for a longer narrative, but you really gotta get the hooks in early for some people.

The Persona franchise is a split between a dungeon crawling JRPG and day-to-day Japanese Life simulation. That really is the best way to explain the two major aspects of this game. One of the key aspects of the Persona franchise for those who don't know is the contemporary setting forcing a balance of daily normal life on top of the fantastical dungeon crawling. You aren't legendary heroes on a quest, you are high school kids trying to go to class and save the world on the side. So why does the game force you simulate normal life? Because it affects your ability to fight.

While dungeon crawling the game has a very standard JRPG system about it: wander the map, find treasures, fight monsters, get to the boss. As you fight various shadows, you have the opportunity to collect them as personas to make them fight for you. You might think this apes the Pokemon system but the major difference here is that your persona's abilities also directly effect you. If your persona is weak to ice, then that means you are too so you have to be careful about what you are using to what you are fighting. On top of collecting them, you can fuse them together to make new ones with the abilities of both.

So what does this have to do with your daily life? Personas are tied to various tarot arcana, and they can be strengthened by increasing you bonds of the said arcana.  This is done by bonding with the various people you meet in your daily life. Some are teammates, some are classmates, some are strangers, but as you continue to deepen your bonds with them, it increases the strength of your fusions for massive experience boosts. So while you might love a Persona you've been using for hours, eventually the game will out pace you and they won't be relevant anymore.

So typically, when you have the freedom, your day will start with you going to school and getting a bit of news about whats happening, you might have to answer a question in class so pay attention (seriously). After class you can go out and work a job, hang with your friends, study or do other various activities to boost your stats. As you improve your relationships, the corresponding arcana also increases, and when you fuse a new persona of that type, they will grow much stronger. Both of them play a factor into each other, so you will want to make time to do a little of everything.

The goofy dubs they do spoofing on American movies are fucking hilarious.

If you chose instead to dungeon crawl, then your objective should be to clear dungeons in as few attempts as you can possibly muster. If you can go from start to finish in a single day that is ideal because then it maxes out your time to socialize with other people. There is a degree of pressure to this because Persona is a game that's defined by its deadlines. When you are given a mission you are then restricted to a few weeks time to complete the dungeon as well as fit in all the socializing you need to do prior to deadline, so as said above it's in your best interest to try to complete the dungeon in as few attempts as possible.

I've touched on the combat a little bit, but for a more full explanation it runs the typically turn based JRPG standard this series has always had. In battle you have the option to fight, guard, use your persona, run and etc. All the enemies in the game have varied strengths and weaknesses, and if you manage to hit a weakness it knocks them down for you to do a follow up attack. If you are able to knock down all the of the enemies you get the chance to smash them for a big all out attack.

But that has changed a little bit this time around. Since you are thieves instead of just rushing for an all out attack, you instead can hold up the monster. In doing this you can then negotiate with them to give you an item or drop more cash at the cost of less experience, or you can persuade them to join you as a persona (Which hearkens back to the old Persona and Shin Megami Tensei games). These can be tricky since you need to look at their personality type, and respond to their questions appropriately. Since getting many of them will allow you to increase your strength, you will want to try to catch as many as you can.

There are handful of little tricks you can learn along the way too. Persona 5 brings back the "shoot" damage affinity since everyone has a gun they can use in battle. You can't often restore ammo and sometimes it's not as strong, but it can be used to hit a weakness. If monsters have varied weaknesses, you can use the "baton pass" ability to give your bonus turn to another character to keep the chain going. This is incredibly handy since your Skill Points used to cast personas are limited, and by being able to trade to other teammates, it will keep you from wasting all your hero's SP. 

The game has a minor stealth mechanic to dungeon crawling. If monsters see you it raises an alert percentage and makes the enemies more aggressive. If that number reaches 100% getting caught again will bounce you right out of the dungeon, forcing you to waste a day of time. Thankfully, the game is pretty forgiving. You have lots of little ledges and corners to hide behind, and as long as you are hidden behind them the enemies can't see you even if they are standing in front of you. Pretty much gives you a free pace to ambush them and bring down your alert percentage.

If you are on a wall, it doesn't where the baddie is. They can't see you.
The stealth in this game is very generous.

Those are really the big functional differences to the overall combat system. If you have a played a Persona game prior to this one then all in all it's going to feel pretty natural to you. The one thing they changed that felt odd was instead of using the D-pad to pick your battle options, your main abilities are tied to different buttons: Fight is X, Guard is O, Persona is Triangle and so forth. It's a subtle change that took some getting used to but after a while you won't even notice it. 

That isn't the only shortcut they added either. Usually when you fight things or if you captured said persona you can tap the L1 button to see its list of health, strengths, weaknesses, and immunities. But now they've added a handy shortcut button (R1) that will jump you to a knockdown option. It may not give you the best possible option (such as a stronger version of a Fire attack, or one that attacks everyone) but it will give you one that can knock them down, if you can't it will show you who can pass the baton to to keep the chain going. It was a nifty little feature I appreciated.

Persona has always been fetishistic a bit, so this didn't bother me.
This is not the worst thing in this game.

You are going to spend a pretty significant amount of time in some menus too, primarily in the Velvet room. It returns again as your hub to fuse personas, and they thankfully put in all the little updates to in previous iterations of the game so now you can sort out by results, manually choose which abilities to bring over, and get a clearer better overall viewing of what it is your are doing. They also added some means of turning old personas into items or nuking them for a free XP boost as well, in addition to adding kind of solitary chamber to increase their resistances. But I'll be honest with you I found myself not needing to use these very  much, only when I was trying to make something specific.

Ultimately, those are the major mechanics to this game. A lot of little changes built onto the solid core it has already established. If you have played a previous Persona game or are even loosely familiar with JRPGs then this one is not going to throw you any curveballs you aren't expecting, at least from a gameplay standpoint.

It's actually pretty ironic that the Velvet Room is a prison this time around,
because you are going to be locked in these menus for a while.

Graphically the visual styling has changed, sharpened, and matured. When I first started playing the game I couldn't rattle out of my head that it just felt like Catherine the RPG, but in retrospect that's not a really fair analogy. While it has kind of gone away from the more anime looking styles off Persona 4, the design definitely falls more in with the original design aesthetics of the Shin Megami Tensei series Persona initially spun off from.

Because of this, everything looks more mature. When I say that I mean when playing the older ones the character models looked very video gamey for lack of a better term, where in this one they are fully fleshed out and appropriately sized. Characters are taller and more human looking. More importantly, I feel it really allows to show reactions better. For example, the moments where a character makes a contract with their persona, or show actual terror the way the eyes dilate in that very Shigenori Soejima manner you've come to know.

From what I understand, this is a pretty faithful recreation of current day Tokyo, which is pretty impressive. It also explains why in the very beginning of the game when I was trying to get to the right character to actually progress with the start of the game It took me forever to get to. Persona 5 has done a pretty painstaking job of showing where everything is on your map with a minor exception of the way point maker. That would have been helpful navigating around the first few areas of the game.

Thankfully as you play through the game and visit more areas, you can eventually just menu jump from place to place without having to walk the entirety of the map. So you can go around and do your shopping and visit places and talk to people before you "spend your afternoon". It makes the whole time mechanic a little goofy since you can travel around town for hours and not pass time, but one trip to the batting cages wastes the whole day. You basically get the choice to do something during the day and something at night, unless you went to a dungeon. So you really need to use your time wisely.

Speaking of which, Social links feel way more important in this one. You could always use them to boost the experience your persona's got, but now on top of allowing your teammates personas you improve, the strangers that you befriend also have a significant effect on you. Through improving the many social links you meet along the way, you learn multitudes of new abilities both in battle and out. One lets you extort people for more money, One lets you learn how to switch your teammates in battle on the fly, one gives you more time to do additional daily activities, and so forth. It really forced me to take an interest in completing all of them because they all bring something valuable to your team.

She better have good ethics about games in her journalism. Yeah, that still pisses me off.

Let's talk Shoji Meguro. I've previously mentioned that this man is in my god tier of video game composers and he once again knocked it out of the fucking park this time. Now when I first started it didn't immediately grab me, and I'm not sure why. Meguro is known for using various styles of music throughout his works. Persona 3 had a more hip hop vibe, Persona 4 was more punk and rock influenced, Persona Q blended the previous two games styles with a Ska vibe and somehow made it work {which is a true testament to his ability because Ska is awful}.

To be a bit more descriptive, if I had to summarize what style of music this game had I would say it shifts itself somewhere between I what feels like a blending of Acid Jazz for the downplayed moments, and Disco for the more upbeat moments, with an occasional rock song spliced in here and there. For lack of a better way to describe it I would say it it's very "groovy". Watching the intro movie to the game left me feeling lukewarm at best... to start.

That being said, this soundtrack was a slow burn for me. As I was playing through the opening segments and going into new areas, the music just wasn't hitting me. But as I played along, I would catch myself kinda moving to the music as I played. I would catch myself humming some of the songs, so they were definitely notable. Then I hit the main boss music and I got this shit eating grin on my face because it was scored perfectly with this great guitar riff, it raised the tension of the fight and just made the whole thing feel bad ass.

Then the music started introduce the vocals of Lyn Inaizumi, which she sung completely in English, so then songs became songs I could sing along with which make them stick in you head more. Then I started to notice how some of the songs remixed to be softer when it rained in game. Noticed homages to other video games with the chiptunes they used, the callback to Persona 4 in the crane game, the type of song used for each dungeon. Everything about it felt.... Perfect. Not much longer after that I approached the final acts of the game and got to some later boss fights. Those fights had a song I loved so much... Well.. Look...

And that is why I hide in the corner at parties. Look at this mess.

That image isn't staged. For the final few fights of the game, I enjoyed the music so much that I actually made me get up out of my chair and dance while I played. I am not making this up. I genuinely enjoyed the music of the game that much. It took me forever to find a copy of the 3 disc soundtrack (only to have it domestically released right after) and it's currently bumped Undertale's Determination soundtrack off my listening for now. It's a fantastic OST and has forced me to come to terms with the fact that I might like disco. Shoji Meguro is a god.

One other minor note on the sound? I would like to thank Atlus and Persona team for adding in an animal mascot character and NOT give them a voice that made me want to dig the business end of a screwdriver into my ear. I usually develop a numbness to some of them over time but they are usually insufferable (Tales of Berseria is a big offender here). While Persona has done this before Teddie and a lesser extent Koromaru, it was nice to have a cat person not be so sickeningly over the top.

Aside from a few meows in his words, Morgana is actually pretty normal.

As I've always said, there is no perfect game but my complaints in this one are minor as always. First and most annoyingly it's kept the very very stupid "Hero can't die" rule that the other games had. So regardless if you have the items, spells, or party members to save you, if the hero drops to zero it's an instant game over. So if you say accidentally use your own weakness in the late stages of the final boss and it gets reflected into you, get sent up fucked river for it. I don't know why they keep this. Morgana can literally save me on the next turn, why do I need to reload the fight?

Speaking of that fucking cat, Morgana? To steal a joke from Kotaku: I'm a big boy. I can go to bed when I want to. I don't need you holding my hand constantly telling me to go to bed. In Persona 3 being in Tartarus directly affected your health and you needed the rest to be in peak form. Persona 4 they outright said the TV world can be physically draining. They have said nothing of the like in Persona 5, so if I want to study or make coffee after doing some dungeon crawling, god damn it let me!

Didn't take the meme folk long to go to down on this one.
Atlus even made a shirt about it.

In addition to that, there really are long stretches of the game where you are subjected to a lot of story. Like, a lot of it. I said before it's a very narrative driven game, but some of the deadlines wouldn't feel like they are pressuring me so much if I was allowed to do more during the deader story moments. Functionally, only when you have the actual deadline counter on the screen, that's when you have the freedom to actually do things.

There is some great story moments in this game, but there are some pretty large segments that just feel like fluff to fill time. I don't know why but I don't feel as emotionally pulled into this one like I was with Persona 4. But that is more because of the theme of that one resonated with me more on a personal level. The pace of the story is pretty slow I will admit, and it takes a few dungeons before the main narrative really sort of unveils itself and drive me. Until it does, it has a very doofy "Aww man, adults are the worst and were the best because were teens" theme to it. Which is silly since they are year or 2 out of being done with high school.

There are two big story issues that I have that I'll keep somewhat spoiler free. First, they tease something right into the opening cutscene and build throughout the course of the game, and they do a pretty good job of throwing things around to make it confusing, getting me to 2nd guess my choices. But it's resolved by being what was probably the most obvious solution, which actually kind of stunned me that they went that way with it. It felt too obvious and thought my ideas would have been way better.

The other is the resolution of that situation where they have to explain how they got out of the other aforementioned one. It's such a long and contrived explanation that they basically leave it for you to find in a single missable conversation, where it tells you straight off "this can be long and boring, you sure you want to know?" and then will ask if you want to quit mid explanation. Well no, I already plowed through 10 other text boxes, you might as well keep going so I can understand what the fuck happened. I wonder if this is a matter of localization, but I'm not really sure.

And this is kind of a weird thing to note, but apparently in Japan older working women are super down with the idea of banging a 16 or 17 year old kid, because you certain have options to romance in your social links. Don't get me wrong, they all have amazingly useful effects and were my favorite social links to do, but it does give an air of creepiness about them.

The older social links are not exactly shy about what they want to do with

Joker if you choose to purse one of them romantically.

The game has an online mechanic for the "Thieves guild" which is cool. It shows you what people did on what days and what percentage of them did. But it also shows you what people picked on non-test school answers. Guess what, everyone is using a guide. It makes class easy mode because the right answer is usually ahead by an 85% margin. It sort of breaks the purpose of it but I'm not complaining. I was a bad student anyways.

My biggest complaint isn't really about the game, but with Atlus' draconian stances on streaming and sharing. They, like the Tales of series, locked off all native streaming abilities, and threatened copyrights and channel take downs if you played online. This pissed a lot of people off and there was a massive backlash. I was personally upset because I took 9 days off to play it and fully intended to stream. Now the backlash was really bad and just recently they lighted up the restrictions. You still can't do it natively on the console, but they are now at least cool with you streaming up to the last major act. It's still stupid, and makes getting screenshots a chore, but at least it's a minor concession.

This is Mara. It's a giant tentacle dick on a chariot. THIS is probably the worst thing in the game,
It also should be made the new Atlus mascot over Jack Frost because of their streaming policies.

But honestly, a lot of the things that can be seen as complaints are things that some people like about JRPGs. And you look at the things I was able to complain about in this you can see that they are minor complaints at best. The fact is I was able to plant my ass in a chair for 9 days and binge on 122 hours and then have to force myself to stop from continuing a new game plus because I have such a huge pile of games to get to.

The team at Atlus realized something that a lot of other games realized lately and have benefited from. Is that when you, from a story or gameplay aspect, make your game about doing heists? It instantly becomes more fun. Sure it takes some effort to slog through the dungeons but when you actually make the final push to finish and the song gets upbeat and you dash into the boss encounter? It's just impossible to not enjoy yourself.

Persona 5 is great. I knew it was going to be great, reviewers knew it was going to be great, YOU knew it was going to be great. I don't know why I needed to bother with 3500+ words to jack this game off. If you like enjoy anime based JRPGs or day to day life simulators with a sprinkle of Pokemon collectiblity, Persona 5 is going to scratch all those itches. It's not a game for those who are looking for a quick weekend play or games with a lot of reading.

But for everyone else, get it. It's incredible. This is going to be a very difficult year for people to decide on what the game of the year will be because there is so many amazing games that have come out this year already with more on the way, but you bet you ass Persona 5 is going to be that discussion. Five star A+ high recommendation. I love you Persona.

I'm sorry Punk Rock Doc, I know you are hot
but when I met "Becky" I knew I couldn't love you anymore.
I hope we can still be friends.

Ragey's 2016: The Rage Quitter Year End Wrap Up.

This years Ragey's will be a tad more bared boned this year because with the X+Y thing I didn't get as many written as I would have liked to. Still though, this year had its series of ups and downs and while all of the games I've played might not have gotten site reviews, I still played an awful lot of games. Hopefully I'll have a slew of games to review in January and those that don't I'll make a new omniderp video to cover, but until then please enjoy.....

The 2016 Ragey's
Seriously, Who does a nobody have to blow to get a sponsorship for their blog???

10: The "Empty Best Friends Photo Frame" award for "Game I wish I got to play" goes to....

Attack On Titan (PS4)

Originally, this was Persona 5 because it keeps getting delayed. But it's coming soon so I just need to hang on. Instead, I found myself rather infatuated with the Attack on Titan game that came out earlier this year. I enjoy the show so all I really wanted to see out of this game was flying around in the 3d gear and killing big naked titans. And I'll be damned if that's not exactly what this looked like. It looked like it really maintained a lot of the fun swinging around in the old Spiderman 2 on PS2 had, so I look forward to actually sitting down with this one.

9: The "Jesus Christ, People actually voted for Trump" garbage award for "Biggest Disappointment" goes to.....

Nights of Azure

I'm a huge fan of Gust games, and the trailer made this seem so damn cool with fast moving action and combos. It was Gusts first attempt at a more action based game so I was willing to be kind with it, but I have to call a spade a spade here. At best, this game was decidedly average. The music is good and the action is ok, but the combat all feels very mashy and loose. There's no real weight, the side quests seem trite, it doesn't have a lot of clear direction in what it wants to do, the story tries to be tragic and heartwarming but it never seems to do a good enough job explaining the stakes, and if I'm being honest it was incredibly easy. 

I beat the game expecting there to be more to it but apparently I had little struggle with any boss in the game. It wasn't a terrible game, it was just incredibly underwhelming. That said, If they revisit this and change some things, it has potential to actually be something I think.

8. The "Holy Shit, Cleveland Actually Won a Championship" award for "Biggest Surprise" goes to.....

Doom 2016

Sometimes, people just get it right. And that is exactly what happened here. As guy who is lukewarm to shooters I came into this wanting just to shoot iconic baddies with iconic weapons on mars while moving really fast. Not only did Doom deliver on all of those fronts, but it also handed me one of the most bad ass soundtracks I've heard in a game in a long time. Honestly it might been the best soundtrack this year (but only because another item on this list came out at the end of last year.) I enjoyed my time with Doom so much that I considered it a must own. I haven't even bothered with the multiplayer and I still want to go back and play it.


7. The "Esports Tourney Grand Finals Match" award for "Most Hyped game" this year goes to.....

 Overwatch

I don't like putting this one here because I consider "overhyped" be a negative connotation, and despite what I thought, Overwatch is really a great game. But if there is any game that had a hype train building around it, it definitely was Overwatch. So this year, I'm removing the "over" in this years award. A lot of people were very excited for this game, and when they started putting out all the nifty trailers to promote the game, it even got me to take notice of it.

Blizzard didn't reinvent the wheel here, nor did they make something truly original I feel. But I would be an idiot to deny what a cultural force Overwatch has become. Comics, cosplays, fan dominated alternate character story lines, hilarious misrepresentations, I Hanjo, and even an dedicated pornography fanbase and bdsm community (this actually isn't surprising, but the fact that major sources highlighted it is). Overwatch was an exceptional game and earned the hype it generated. Credit where its due on this one, Overwatch generated a hype machine and deserves all of it. It got a guy who doesn't like shooters to play it all the time.



6. The "Another Marvel Movie" award for "Flash in the Pan" game of the year.

Uncharted 4: A Thief's end

Uncharted is a very good series of games. But when you start rehashing the same game over and over, all you can really change are the maps and story. I don't feel Uncharted was wearing out its welcome but it was getting to the point where they weren't exciting me anymore and when you do the over the top blow up action movie as your base model, that's a problem. Uncharted 4 was not a perfect game because a lot of the things that annoyed me in the other games still hold true here.

But what this game does very very right? Is that it closes the book on the Nathan Drake story, and does it satisfyingly so. When this game ended and I did the epilogue sequence, I was left feeling very happy with how things shook out. I was able to put this series to bed and be happy to do so. I hope naughty dog sticks it too. Uncharted 4 doesn't break the mold but it does what it does, and does it well. Just another solid entry in the action adventure genre. 

5. The "2016 Cleveland Browns Season Ticket Package" award for "Worst Value" goes to....

Street Fighter V/Guilty Gear Revelator

Street Fighter V and Revelator get to share the worst value award because despite being technically sound fighting games that are very good, they both went the bullshit cash grab route. SF started off promising by telling people that anything was in the game you could unlock by playing it. I was happy to hear that. I was immediately unhappy by learning that the ways to do this were so arduous and time consuming that I lost interest in the game before I actually unlocked a character. This is Capcom though, so this is to be expected.

Guilty Gear however should know better. It was almost 10 years before we finally got a new iteration of the game and I was pretty stoked about it, even with the 2 extra paid DLC characters. But what seemed like not even a year later, they put out a new full priced version of the game with a few more characters, but no English dialog even though the last one had it. Sorry, the stuff that got put in could have just been a DLC update. That's a cash grab. Bad year for fighting games.



4. The "15 Dollar asking price for this game" award for "Best Value" goes to....

Stardew Valley (pc)

The Internet actually went insane when this game came out in February. People who pirated the game loved it so much they went back and paid for it honestly. People who loved the game actually paid for copies of it for pirates to have when they couldn't afford it. I never got to play Harvest Moon growing up but always wanted to. Then I saw Kotaku posting about this game very frequently so I decided to check it out.

And what followed was close to 200 incredibly chill hours taking care of my hilariously immature named farms, fighting monsters down in the mine, courting the many singles of Pelican Town, marrying the lovely Abigail (the of course fictional perfect woman for me who doesn't fucking exist.), and harvesting dem blueberries. I still sink hours a day playing Stardew Valley and am ready to buy it again when the multiplayer mode gets released so I can infect my sisters with it too.

3. The "Because I don't hate myself enough" Honorable mention goes to....

Darkest Dungeon (PC)

Similarly, another steam game that ate and is still eating a significant chunk of my life goes to this mother fucker. A game that quickly teaches you that progress is not linear, and that everything you knew about RPG grinding is wrong. The game is relentless, merciless, and in a lot of ways fucking hopeless. This game deals a lot with the occult, which is fitting because it has no soul. And by the end of it neither will you.

I struggled so much to progress. Caught in chains of trying to keep dead weight characters alive because I didn't want to start over, Trying to hang on for one more room to finish a dungeon instead of getting out when I should have and losing 2 or 3 people. Preparing teams for near hours for a high level dungeon only to get completely fucked inside the first fight. Or most recently, having the perfect set of circumstances break your way in a dungeon before an approaching boss fight only to have mean nothing and STILL get your shit ruined at the end.

Darkest Dungeon changes a lot of the rules on how RPGs are played, and not everyone is going to get through this game. The only reason I still play it, is I've hit an ironclad state of "Fuck you game, you will not best me."....... But I've been wrong before.

2. The "Pretty Much ALL Of 2016" award for "Worst Game of the Year" goes to.....

Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness (PS4)

Ugh, Someone at Tri-ace really dropped the ball on this one. I don't think I've ever played a Star Ocean where I was so underwhelmed and bored at the onset that it killed any desire I had to play it. Shakey camera, poor acting, awkward controls, unlikable characters, droning unskippable cutscenes, and this is the flipping opening of the game! How did it all get messed up so badly? Why does square insist on trying to reinvent something that worked and worked well. Even Star Ocean: The Last Hope for all its hokey acting and flaws still was fun to play all the way to the finish. I couldn't even get this one started.

I might go back to it to see if it gets better later, but literally any other game I had available to play took precedent over this. If you want to play a Star Ocean, play literally any of the other ones. I'm pissed I paid 60 bucks for this.

1. The "Game that surprisingly isn't Dark Souls 3" Award for "Best game of the year" goes to...

Undertale (PC)

Of course its Undertale.

I was a little late to the party with Undertale. Something I wholeheartedly regret. If I had played it around when I actually bought it, it had an honest shot of being my game of the year last year. It's time to make up for that. Undertale as it stands alone is a JRPG/Bullet Hell hybrid with some very quirky characters and exceptional music. But that's not what makes it great. The game pitches itself as the game where nobody has to die.

And that, my friends, was the whole fucking point. The game's creator, Toby Fox, took great care in crafting the opening tutorial area of the game. It's entire point was to put you in the mindset that sympathetically designed monsters are just making the best with what they have and may attack you, but don't really want to fight. Adhering to this lesson treated you to one of the most emotionally satisfying games I've ever played in my life. To the point where I actually shed tears at its true ending (and still do every time I see it). If you ignored Toriel's advice and resorted to violence, you are treated to an unfulfilling neutral ending. If you took the effort to do a genocide run, You were treated as you should have been: the only real monster in the game. It was fucking brilliant.

So many people I tried to get to play this game, and almost all of them killed monsters and ignored the story and never saw what I did. Missed out on so many of the emotional punches. And its a damn shame (although some did eventually see the light, so credit to those few.). That's really my only complaint about the game: All the bullshit reasons people tell me why they won't. "I don't like the graphics", "It's too quirky", "I don't use steam", "It sounds stupid", "I don't like the fandom". Conglaturation, you missed out on something truly special for very stupid reasons.

THIS game could have won most overhyped, but I feel it deserves every single bit of hype it gets and then some. Almost everything about this game is perfect: The music, the story, the characters, the play time, the fan created AU's, the merch. I love Undertale. It might be one of my favorites of all time. Easily, EASILY my game of the year. Fuck, I'd give it game of the year for the next 10 years. It's that good. If you want any more proof, its the game that got me to stop talking about Persona 4. A copy of it was given to the Pope for fucks sake.

Can't believe I'm still writing on this thing considering how little traction it gets. Here's to the next year of it. Thanks for reading.  -- CannonMan ┌∩┐(◣_◢)┌∩┐

Stardew Valley (PC): Harvesting the Moon and then some.

When I was a wee CannonMan waaaaay back when the Super Nintendo has just about lived through its console cycle, I had read in my Nintendo Power magazine about a new game called Harvest Moon. Being a budding young JRPG fan at this age something about its design appealed to me. I knew it was game about farming but that was pretty much it. On more than one occasion I would beg my parents to take me to Toys R' Us to see if I could get a copy.

It was never in stock. I never ended up getting a copy either because by the time that system started to fade and this playstation thing was boasting a small game called Final Fantasy 7 that kinda drew my attention. I always sought it out on emulators but never really sat down with it. Never really motivated to play the later iterations either.

But as I learned with Undertale, the Steam community (how many things am I going to plug here?) tends to be on the pulse of whats hot in gaming right now. I kept seeing articles, reactions, and stories about this game, and in short learned it was a spiritual successor to the game I missed out on so long ago. Well, as I also learned with Undertale if the Steam starts raving about something, its definitely worth a look. So this time, I jumped right into the fire to see what it was all about....

STARDEW VALLEY:(PC)

Stardew Valley starts off simple enough. You are immediately taken to a character generator where you can chose your gender, hairstyle, clothing, accessories, and race with a surprisingly amount of options and detail for a pixel game (yes it has those horrible pixel graphics again, indie games man...). And when I say options I mean if you want to give you character neon pink hair and blue skin you are completely welcome to do so. For the record because I am super mature, my character was Bone Orson and his favorite thing is butts (a decision I came to regret later). 

Once your character is done you are treated to scene of an elderly looking man lying on his bed. From what he's saying, it sounds like he doesn't have a whole lot of time left. He entrusts to you an envelope and says to open it only when things seem to be their most hopeless and you feel life needs to change.

It cuts to a scene of you working in a cubical at Jo-Ja Mart. It is clearly not a fun work environment and your character is clearly unhappy. They open the envelope to find its a letter from Grandfather, saying that if you are reading this its time for a change, and enclosed is the deed to a Farm in the countryside city of Pelican Town. Armed with a new home, you escape your job and travel to start your new life in the country side.

When you get to your farm, you clearly have some work to do.

Simple enough plot, pretty much just a frame to get you going. Once you get to town you are shown to your farm and see that work needs to be done in a bad way. After meeting the mayor and having him explain that if you place things in a crate by your house he will take them to sell, you at this point are pretty much free to do whatever you want. But the game gives you some simple tips to get you going. You start with some tools that you can use to start clearing away your farm land so you have room to start planting your crops. 

The game functions with a pretty simple hud for the most part. You have a calendar in the top right showing what day, date, and time it is, how far into the day/night cycle you are, and what the weather is {just in case being outside wasn't clear enough}. On the lower right you have an energy bar to show you how much work you can do, and on the bottom you have an item HUD that you might see in an MMO rpg really. Scroll wheel moves your items easily, right click uses you tools, left click uses your food and items and it uses the standard WASD controls (although there is controller support which I actually found more complicated).

So you start your first day hacking away at the tall grass, cutting wood debris, and smashing rocks until you have a nice little set of soil to plant your first seeds in. You get a few parsnip seeds to start, but at the behest of the Mayor he invites you to explore the town. So with not much else to do you will set to explore. As you walk you will learn that there is simple forage of wild fruits and veggies on the ground that you can pick up to eat or sell.

It'll take time for your farm to develop. Plant in 3x3 squares or lines of 5.

By following the most easily viewed roads you will be taken to the small village of Pelican City. It's a simple location and you will quickly see that people are bustling about in real time. You will peruse around and find shops to buy more seeds, a pub where you can get food and drink for energy, a bait shop for fishing supplies, and a number of various homes of its many citizens. Most of which are very friendly as they go about their day, so feel free to chat and meet people.

But as you do this, you will note in your menu that there is a tab for social interaction showing how well you have befriended people in town. And what you will immediately notice is that some of them also specify whether or note they are bachelors or bachelorette's. For those of you who have played the original Harvest Moon you have probably started to note a number of similarities from that game to this one already.

Now honestly, I can probably try to continue on trying to explain everything but that would be a difficult exercise since there really is no order to do things and how you unlock them. But what I can tell you for certain is that this game is surprisingly deep, and there is a lot to do and discover in this game. I have been playing it fairly often and have logged well over 65 hours of play into the game already, and I haven't even completed my first run on HotMilk Farm (again, super mature). Since there is so much to do this review is going to be kind of a smattering of experiences rather than my normal structured review.

Getting a horse is a huge kick to movement. Wish I hadn't waited so long.

A big point of contention in the game's community is the fishing minigame. Some people love it, some people hate it and think its too difficult. Since we live in a society that gave life to Neir's dumbfuck shitty impossible fucking fishing minigame that literally halts your progress, I was not intimidated by what Stardew Valley could throw at me.

Basically you have a small power gauge to cast your line, then once you get a bite you have a little bar that moves up and down if you hold or click the mouse button and keep it over a fish icon. Sometimes it can be squirrely, but I didn't consider it difficult and once you upgrade your rod and tackle it gets even easier. I end up doing a lot of fishing in this game, it surprisingly cathartic. This will be one of your primary means of money making during the winter months.

There are hotspots and some fish only appear during certain seasons, times of day,
or locations so you will be bouncing around often to try to fill your quests.

You will also learn that your tools at the onset of the game are kinda shit, but a trip to the blacksmith will tell you can upgrade them if you refine ore into ingots to make stronger gear that affects a bigger area. You could always buy the ore, but more than likely you will find yourself heading to the mine which also happens to be located by the adventurers guild, When you step foot into the mine a grizzled veteran guildsman will offer you your first weapon and send you off in the mine.

Now suddenly, the game turns into a hybrid of the original Legend of Zelda and Terraria/Minecraft. The dungeon appears fairly rogue-like as only key floors seem to be the same every time you come in them. You enter small to fairly large rooms filled with rocks, chests, and crates and you are free to smash and mine for valuable ores, gems, and artifacts for as long as your strength can let you. But its not totally safe down there as monsters are crawling about as well. While there is no real XP system that I can really tell, you can build your adventuring level a bit and unlock new accessories to equip to help you in battle as you balance clearing out the enemies and mining for supplies.

In addition to the things you can do on your own there is a town bulletin board where people will make requests, they aren't mandatory to do but they do make you try new things and helps your relationships, but you usually only have 2 days to complete them. Sometimes they will mail you requests and those appear to have indefinite time tables to do. You will quickly learn which of these you will want to do. Don't sweat ones that look difficult, there is no penalty for not doing it.

The game will also get weird on you, its not really spoilery I guess but I don't want to give it all away. You will start to get some requests from an eccentric gentleman and a group of "inhabitants" in the old town community center. The latter will give a large series of tasks to complete and I regret not getting the start on them sooner, because I believe doing these will unlock more sections of the game faster, and give you access to rarer materials that you need to really get your farm going on a more autonomous level.

Technically, the game runs for two years of time before you get an evaluation. Essentially each month is a season and each season is 28 days. During the course of the months you will find that each citizen has a birthday if you want to give them a gift (which is a fast way to build up with others), and during the months there will also be little village festivals where you can meet people, buy rare items, compete in festival events, and get your little romantic heart completely and utterly shattered by the heartless denizens of Pelican Town.

Stardew Valley, I didn't need to re-experience my the majority of my goddamn high school life. In the early goings of my life in Pelican Town, I made a habit to make sure to give flowers I found to the lovely ladies of the city as I played along. And one of the early festivals of the spring is a flower festival with a big celebratory dance where you can pair with one of the eligible singles. OR SO THE GAME FUCKING SAYS. I got shot down by every single one of the girls, and some of them harshly so. AND one of the guys. So I had to watch my sad little avi sit in the corner while everyone else had fun. And people wonder why I don't leave my house anymore, (It took effort but I did eventually get Abby to marry me, because she is clearly the best choice).

Ice cold, Leah.... Ice cold...

As you can see, the game is true to life becuase I wouldn't bother to dress
up for shit like this. Eat a dick, Sebastian. Abigail is mine.

Gifting doesn't just affect the romances either. You can gift everyone in town, and the more you do so and the more affinity you raise it unlocks cut scenes with each of the people of town at certain points. Doing this gives you a little more context to everyone in town and their life there. Easiest way I've found to do this is at the Pub after 7pm. Lots of people gather there at night, even more so on fridays. People fuckin' love Salad in Stardew Valley and a lot of the dudes love beer. Both of which are sold there. They are 200g a pop but if you dont mind spending its the fastest way to raise affinity, and DON'T forget their birthdays!

So here are some tips that I've learned from the early going: First things first is to collect 300 wood at the onset right after you get your first seeds planted. There is a bridge on the beach that can be repaired and it opens up a little side area where you can find coral, urchins, and other washed up sea treasures you can sell at the bait shop for a quick an easy couple of hundred. There is a lot of forage in this game and the stuff on the beach are some of the best. So start saving up that money.

Storage space. Once you get up to 2000 you'll want to buy a backpack to double what you can carry (and again when you can afford it), and you will want to build a few chests back at your house because at the very least you will want to save one of everything you pick up or grow. Some you will need for festivals, some of them you will need for character requests, and some you will need for the collection missions.

Don't make my mistake and skip those collection missions. I let the whole first season go by without doing any of them and I regret it because completing it quickly is what will open up an area where you can get the best ore for the best materials in the game. Namely, iridium. Iridium is the resource that will allow you to really blow the game wide open with top ranked materials, and more importantly sprinklers. Once you start getting iridium sprinklers in place the plant aspect of your farm will basically run itself, so get that iridium ore and get some battery packs.

If you don't grow those 5 gold parsnips at the start, you have to wait till year
two to try to grow them again. Don't make that mistake, the greenhouse is huge.

It is not worth staying up past midnight so time management is key. Losing all your energy or passing out at 2 am causes you to lose a significant amount of money and have little energy for the next day. Therefore, coffee is your best friend in this game. It's 300 at the pub which opens at 2pm. It's pricey in the early going but when you are scrambling to make it out of the mine or on the far side of town, that extra move speed will save you.  You can eventually make Pepper Poppers which last longer and eventually can get a horse which is fastest, but until then it doesn't hurt to have a few coffees ready.

Berries are eff'n OP. You will want to grow a little of everything for the major requests you'll want to fill but once you hit summer, the game becomes blueberries, blueberries, blueberries. They just print money for the entire summer month, and you'll want to grow as many as you can feasibly care for. Cranberries to a lesser extend in the fall but fruits will make you a killing in the summer and year round, really. Start cramming the low value ones in kegs or preservative jars to give you artisan goods and sell the rest to start making that bank.

This is only like a 4th of what I planted. Blueberries FTW.

Fishing and questing are best done when it rains because rain is basically a free watering for the farm. So use the weather appropriately to get as far down as you can in the mine, or catch those couple of fish for requests that are are tricky to nab otherwise. I smashed through much of the mines very quickly doing this because there is a reward for reaching the bottom and its also where you can find the better ores.

It's usually recommended to hold off on animals until you have a relatively steady money flow to keep them happy and well fed. Most people tend to recommend waiting until around year 2 to start focusing on your farms. Make sure you build a silo before you actually start getting animals because it turns all the grass you cut into hay to feed them, which will save you tons of money. Although personally I don't know how I'm going to find that time between blueberry harvests.

Yes, my animals are just as immaturely named as the rest of the farm.

The honestly I could probably keep going on and on about this, but from what I am learning is that there are a whole bunch of little secrets and things to do and or find as you play through this game. This definitely seems like one of those games that you won't just play one time and be done with it. From a content perspective it just seems much too deep of a game for that. Like I said prior, I haven't even completed a full 2 years of the game, and I already have well over 65 hours of the game logged and I haven't even come close to unlocking or doing everything it seems.

As eluded to above and as you can no doubt tell from the screenshots I have used,  it keeps its roots as a spiritual successor to Harvest Moon by designing it in a 16-bit pixel style of art work. RPG portrait dialog system, mixed resolutions on many of the images instead of one uniform look. I have seen a number of reviewer have mixed opinions on the graphics, but personally I eat these kinda games up.

Kinda gothy, Loves the rain, plays the flute, avid video gamer?
Abigail was clearly the girl for me.

Similarly, the music so also somewhat reflective of that too. I won't go as far as to say the game is chiptune because it's range goes much wider than that. All of the music in the game is charmingly composed for the scenes or seasons at hand. Nothing feels out of place and for lack of a better explanation, I find its soundtrack very cathartic to listen to. I wouldn't say anything is overly catchy or notable I suppose, but it feels right.

I will say though there are sometimes very long straights where the music will just stop. Now when night falls this makes sense because then the game just reduces to just the chirps of birds and animals as you walk through town at night. That's fine, they do a similar effect sometimes in the mines when the music will stop and you will just get the occasional drip of the cave walls. I can dig it, shows how deep I've gone in this area.  But there will be times where I'm working in my field or fishing where the music will just stop outright. Maybe this happens for every area and I'm only noticing it in these sections but it seems very weird when I do notice it.

Oh by the way. Mute the sounds of your footsteps. I tried to ignore them when I started the game but after a few hours of "clomp clomp clomp clomp clomp" I had to pull up the menu to turn them off. I don't think that I could honestly deal with that sound for the whole sixty five hours I have already logged playing this game. It's enough to drive me to madness.

No girl in Stardew Valley is more of an unappreciative snot than Haley.
Elliot is probably a close second. Not everyone in town is nice.

Is the game fun? Well, I guess that goes by what your definition of fun is. By my definition??? Ehhhh maybe? It's one of those games that give you a lot of little menial tasks to do in the hope of having that one big payoff. I won't lie, there were a handful of moments where I was looking for stuff to do between waiting for my next crop to go, but the moment I cashed in I'd be like "WOO! What the fuck to upgrade NEXT?!" It's got a very addictive quality about it that makes it incredibly difficult to put down.

But to give it an even further special mention, Stardew Valley isn't just winning the hearts of the steam community over by just being a charming and entertaining farm life simulation game, it's also generating a lot of good will because this game has just a single creator working behind it, ConcernedApe. He's already put out an update pack, and when people tweet at him with a bug in the game, he pretty much gets on top of it to fix it immediately.

I don't know what causes it, but sometimes a fairy appears and grows some
of your farm for you ahead of time. Thanks fairy!

People are loving it so much that pirates who are stealing the game are regretting it and paying for it legally. People who don't like that pirates are taking the game for free are actually purchasing copies of the game to give away to pirates just so they are using legal copies. The game really is something special if its motivating people to really do the right thing to support a dev like that, and it seems like the goodwill is being rewarded on both sides.

The community itself has also gone buck wild with mods for this game already. Some of them affect the core gameplay some to tailor the experience, some of them are purely aesthetic. Some of them are good, some are great. Some of them are shitty, (Come on, did we really need a mod to make the only two black characters in the game white? God forbid there be a little diversity). I haven't dabbled with trying to mod it yet but I might soon.

Spiritual successor is the term a lot of people are using to describe Stardew Valley, and I think that is a fair description because it really is a successor to the old 16-bit Harvest Moon games. I may not have ever had the opportunity to sit down with one of those like I wanted to so long ago, but I more than made up for it in my time with Stardew Valley. It is only 15 bucks on steam, and it gave me well over 70+ hours of entertainment, I highly recommend it. 

Haley will never love you, the rotten twat.

Persona Q (3DS): Yo Dawg, I heard you like Mashups.

Alright alright, I know what you are thinking: "Oh wow, CannonMan is going to gush about how much he loves the Persona universe again. Talk about how much he loves the characters, and wishes they were his real friends. Yadda yadda blah blah." 

Damn fucking right I am. Let's do this.

PERSONA Q (3DS)

Depending on which protagonist you start with, the storyline's opening starts off around midway through the points of Persona 3 and Persona 4. For example, if you choose to play the game as Yu Narukami from Persona 4 the game opens up during the Yasogami High Culture festival, and when Yu goes to get his fortune read by Margaret at her fortune telling booth (after the group date cafe bombs), they wind up in a variant of the Velvet room, when they leave they find that an old Clocktower that has long been destroyed now stands tall.

On the Persona 3 side, Mintao Airsato (the P3 hero) has just gotten over a cold and decided to take the team into Tartarus on their mission to discover the what the dark hour is and why it appears over Gekkoukan High. At the base of Tartarus, Minato enters the Velvet room where he finds Elizabeth and Theodore. There is a disturbance, a chime of a tower bell, and the rest of the Persona 3 team finds themselves in the Velvet room as well. The elevator that holds it begins to plummet to a crash, and when they exit they find themselves at some alternate school having a culture festival.

Depending on who you picked, you search your way through a dungeon/exhibit called "You in Wonderland" try to find your way back home where you come across two mysterious students named Zen and Rei. They appear to be trapped in this bizarro school as well and they can't use personas, so they decide to join up with your team to try to escape.

As you fight your way down to the bottom of the first dungeon you get confronted by your first boss, and just before you get overwhelmed by shadows, the other team comes in for the assist. They both realize that way home must be through 2 suspiciously locked doors in the velvet room, and going through the culture festivals dungeons will unlock the locks that hold the door shut. With that, the two classes decide to work together to see this through.

Don't ask me why they felt they needed the dance poses for the assist... I have no idea.

Alright cool, seems like we have a interesting mashup of Persona's two most lovable casts of characters. That'd be great for an interesting one off. But more surprisingly to me, is that according to the developers, this game is supposed to be canon to the story. That just doesn't make sense. the Stories of P3, P4, and the 2 fighting games happen chronologically to each other, so they clearly aren't all the same ages. They also didn't know each other when they met in the fighters, so that wrecks havoc on established story.

I assume this will all be determined as the story plays out and I approach completion, but as someone who has become somewhat obsessed with this universe, its doing a pretty good job of twisting my brain around trying to figure out how this can be considered canon. I'm just hoping it doesn't end up one of those "They don't remember what happened" things at the end of it. It probably will. :(

Now, let's make no mistake here. This game isn't a single mashup. Nope, its not just the mixing of P3 and P4. In addition, its also a fusion of the Persona game franchise, and the Etrian Odyssey (a series I had never played). It mixes aspects of the two game types together so while I have familiarity with some of the aspects, others are completely brand new to me and in some cases a little disorienting.

The biggest change is that game fronted me is the dungeons. This game uses the Etrian system for dungeon crawling which is basically done on first person grid based maps. I, HATE, first person. We all know this, and I was pretty worried that it would turn me off to the game completely. I am very bad at navigating an environment in first person and more than likely will find myself getting lost.

Persona Q tries to assist this by allow you to make a map of the floor on the bottom screen of the 3DS. It gives you a myriad of options to draw walls, place icons for doors, stairs, chests, and other things like place notes that you can type for yourself. To be honest it was a tad overwhelming, and I know at least one person it sort of turned to game off for.

Ugh.

However, as I played along I realized that some of the icons you can place change automatically depending on how you discover things, and drawing the walls aren't overly important because it will at least shade the squares you have already stepped on.  So if you tend to just focus on doors and portals, and maybe chests or important events, it makes the whole thing a little easier to manage and less time consuming. Mitsuru complained to me it wasn't detailed enough but I seemed to be able to navigate it easier.

The battles are sort of a hybrid of the two games as well and that definitely threw me off. Now, I've played games that have the two rank battle formation system before, Final Fantasy IV specifically comes to mind. Easy enough, heavies up front, weak in back. But what makes it a bit more challenging is I have to remember what characters have ranged weapons and can actually deal better damage from the back rank, the game tells you but I did have to shift my lineups a bit to compensate for it.

So far, the game hasn't made me split up. But I'm leveling a bunch of people just in case they do.

Also, the weakness system changes things a bit too. Normally in a Persona you can just spam whatever elemental weakness someone has and knock everyone down, then crush a massive all out attack. Not so easy to do in Q, because most importantly hitting an enemy with an elemental weakness doesn't always knock them down. It can, but its not guaranteed. Also, if you are slick enough to get everything knocked down, you aren't promised an All-Out Attack either.

If you hit a weakness or critical on a baddie, your character's little icon will glow gold. What this does is gives them an MP free action on their next turn, so long as they haven't been hit. This allows you to maintain your assault without draining your very limited MP without the cost of the expensive casts. But on top of that, you have a chance for an All-Out Attack when people are fired up, and its more likely the more characters are. I've had it happen with at least 3 people fired up, but if you can get all 5, its pretty much guaranteed.

They have also added a feature from Etrian in the form of visible wandering bosses known as FOE's. Each map has a number of them that wander the map in specific paths or are triggered by certain events. Sometimes evading them is part of the puzzle to complete the level, and typically when you first meet them, they are significantly stronger than you are. Most of the time you will be prompted to run away from them if you get locked into an encounter. They are worth some middling experience but you will usually get a decent persona if you beat them, so its good to go back and grind them once they are easy enough.

Some FOE's can be downright infuriating, which makes them satisfying to grind later.

The game remains contained to the school they are trapped in, so there aren't a lot of  NPCs you can interact with outside of the residents of the Velvet room, so there really is no social link system in this game. There are however quests that you can do for rewards, and many of them require "taking a stroll" with your comrades which allow you to get your hilarious persona interactions from the crossing over casts. This is kind of a hit or miss.

On one hand, its great to see some of the personalities of the two casts clash, and see what you could considering the sprouting beginnings of certain characters relationships with each other. But on the other, if you have played and love both Personas 3 and 4 then you pretty much already know what character types they are, and it can make some of the events a little predictable. For example, at one point Yousuke complains about being hungry, and the team gets into the idea of a cookoff. It's a rehash of a Persona 4 joke, but now they add Fuuka to the mix, who was also a bad cook in Persona 3. You can save Yousuke by making the right decisions in prepping the meal, but it still goes bad for him like you would expect it to.

I'm a bad fan. I am so disappointing in myself about it to. As we've heard me say a billion times, one of my favorite characters in this game is Kanji Tatsumi: the tough looking, rough n' tumble, and possibly sexually confused thug with a heart of gold and passion for sewing & cute things. Part of what makes me love this character so much was Troy Baker's performance of him. As I was telling a friend how much I loved how he did in this game, I looked it up to realize that Kanji in Persona Q is actually played by Matt Mercer. But he did such an exceptional job that I didn't even notice the difference. To make matters worse? I learned that he was the voice of Kanji in Persona 4 Arena Ultimax too, and I didn't notice then either.

So this game kind of spells out for you that there are only going to be 4 dungeons for you get through. This at first kind of miffed me. Only 4 dungeons? Tartarus in Persona 3 had well over 100 floors. The TV world in Persona 4 had well over 4 dungeons, so I thought this game was going to be a 20 hour breeze. I was wrong. With just 4 dungeons my first save of the game already has well over 80 hours. Why is that? Because this game is GRIND-TASTIC. I know JRPGs have some degree of grind to them but this is ridiculous. There is no easy way to do it and I'm getting the sense you have be at level 100 to beat the game.

Kanji just wants to wuv a puppy. Quit being a baby about it Koromaru.

They added some nice features to the Velvet room in this game that make fusing personas much easier, and you have the ability to choose what skills you want to transfer over rather than just randomly trying to get them. I found this super helpful. They also added a sacrifice feature which allows you to dump 2 personas for a big XP boost for the one you are leveling. So basically you can just grind for weaker personas and use them to boost your currents, OR you can use the compendium to get similar types for a fee and get a bigger XP boost. These are great features and I hope they appear in the upcoming Persona 5.

The music in these games are so awesome. I don't know why I love it so much but I do. Every song is just some well constructed theme fitting melody, and almost every song uses almost genre of music and meshes them together into something wonderful. The P4 hero's battle music "light up the night" is this mix of Ska, Rock, Hip-hop I'd guess? And as much as I can't stand horns in my music (and trust me, I usually have a visceral reaction to ska) this theme is just perfect. I find myself listening to the boss battle music all the time just because I love the background vocals "WhooaaaYeaaaahhhhh". Persona always gets a gold star on music.

In addition to the music, the game operates in a more "chibi" style art for the characters which gives it a more cute feel to it. And I gotta tell ya, as dumb as I thought it was to start? Inside of a few cutscenes I fell completely in love with it. It felt right at home and in some scenes made the game seem even funnier, (why won't Koromaru let Kanji pet him!?). Combine this with a number of returning voices and it all falls right into step.

So what didn't I like about the game. Grind. Grind is the end all be all problem for me in this game. Yes, I understand that Etrian games have a tendency to be a bit grindy. And I know that Persona is no slouch to doing that either. But there has always been kind of a unspoken rule when it comes to JRPGs in that in the majority of them, unless there is some easy form of level grinding, typically around level 60 is when you can beat the game. Well, I'm pushing my characters past that and I'm still struggling with the last dungeon.

Zen and Rei are the only 2 characters out of place. While they fit right in, they obviously have a few secrets.

The persona level cap is always a point of annoyance for me too. It makes sense that you can't build personas past the level of your main character in the game, so that doesn't bother me all that much. But one of the features of the street pass is that you can share a persona and get ones from other people. The problem is, these are also restricted by the level despite being in your pass book. So I have like 5 different personas locked in my book that would be game changers and help me finish the game, and I can't purchase them because some of them are like 20 levels higher than me. Why bother letting me see them in the first place..

The game can actually be kind of insulting too. Through out the game there are a number of puzzles you find and have to solve. I won't lie to you, a number of them are actually pretty difficult. Hell, one of them in the later stages forced me to use fuck'n algebra to solve it. Guess what Persona Q, I passed algebra with the lowest possible D. I'm not that smart. Some of them, not all, the other characters will solve the puzzle for you. They'll be one I couldn't figure out and Naoto will just step in and do it for me. Not for the fuckin' algebra one though.

Absolutely love the little Catherine reference used in this scene.
Fun fact, the "Love is Over" end theme appears in the P4 Animated series.

The biggest problem of all though, is that I didn't finish it. I couldn't finish it. Some people love the grind of games, I don't. I want a fun experience that will take up a great amount of time with a good story to go with it. If its designed well and the music is great, so much the better. And while Persona Q seemingly has all the intangibles that would make me give this game a fantastic rating, I hesitate to do so. Why? Because I got bored, and boredom is the kiss o' friggen death in a video game. I've gone on and on this point before, but if I hit the point in the game where I become bored with it, I move on. It's that simple.

I am going to eventually come back to this, but I have to say the amount of excessive grind really took the wind out of my sails personally. But if you are a fan of JRPGs and more specifically the Persona universe then this game is going to be right up your alley. It made me laugh on more than on occasion, the battle system is and interesting hybrid, the music is fun, the puzzles are hard, and I certainly dropped a huge chunk of time on it.

Reviewers have been going batty for this game and giving it scores of 8's, 9's, and I have even seen a few 10s. While I think perfect scores are a bit high for this one, the rest I would say is pretty accurate. While perhaps not the best Persona game I've played, Persona Q: The Shadow of the Labyrinth is a very welcome edition and hold over till the release of Persona 5. I would give this a strong recommendation to any 3DS owner.

And like all persona games, Ken rides the bench.
Because he sucks.