#the p3 party is up there with kotor 2 as my favorite rpg party | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

thejediexile · 3 months

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Ok another day another persona 3 rant.

Party member controls.

Actually party members in general, Persona 3 knocks it out of the park, better than the other persona games.

Alot of people cant stand that you dont directly control the party in p3/fes but im going to argue that p3 does it right (and because im a petty bitch p3p and bg3 do it wrong)

So in persona 3 and fes you dont control your party members in battle. You can give them general directives but they are theyre own person.

In persona 3 the protagonist isnt the leader of the group, thats Mitsuru, but MC leads the operations (so dumbass redditors who try to say that its a plot whole the mc leads the team for no reason fail the basic reading comprehension test) but both the story and game design reflect that fact.

You can decide when to go to tartarus but you have to ask mitsuru if you can (later fuuka but if mitsuru and aki are out youre sol)

The party all lives in the same dorm (BEST DESCISION EVER MORE GAMES SHOULD STEAL IT) so at the end of nearly every ingame day you go home and interact with your party all in one room. They only have a few lines but even the way they sit around the dorm reinforces the relationships and tensions. Like yukari being distant with mitsuru until their yuri scene or junpei starting to sit apart from the group when he has his own problems in the story (also when he starts struggling mechanically in the game too). The persona 3 dorm was a brilliant idea and i dont know why they took it away in 4 and 5, it really helped the party develop

On top of this the party members all have their own lives and schedules; sometimes yukaris busy with archery team, sometimes shinji has to go brood. You are not the complete authority of the people that make up the party, you just tell them what to do in combat.

Also, you dont have access to the party members inventory or stats at any given time. Yes its mildly annoying but my point is with this half dozen set of mechanics it builds to a very well dont cohesive whole ok.

If you want to look at your partys stats tou gotta ask the navigator or themselves in the dungeon. If you want them to equip items you gotta talk to them. Sometimes theyll give items back after a while if they get a better one or you use one for too long.

So i do really like the whole theme that the design of the p3 party works towards. Yes its annoying when the party member does something dumb (marin fucking karin) but it adds more the game than it removes.

However like the "bad" slinks in p3, portable just removes them and makes them more "fun" because god forbid games have themes that are challenging. Thats my biggest issue with p3p, it tries to sand down the unique challenging aspects of persona 3 that were theyre on purpose and were effective, and replaced them with stuff that was "fun" but not particularly well thought out, or written, or thematic.

In p3 when you (or an enemy) get hit eith a thing youre weak against you get knocked down. That lowerd defense and makes you lose a turn unless you get hit again. Aoe attacks dont grant extra actions like normally hittings weaknesses or crits do.

Its harsh but balanced, you can effectively fight bosses youre underleveled for by downing them and makinf them waste their turn standing up for instance.

P3p removes the loosing a turn, and makes aoe attacks grant extra turns. Yes its more "fun," but now aoe attacks are brokenly powerful. Sometimes a group of 3 enemies hits the entire party 6 times cuz one person is weak to their attacks. Alternatively you do the exact same back to them and get bored.

So how will p3r implement this? Well because its not 2006 anymore we'll have direct access to party members n shit, whatever. We'll see, however p3 and fes weren't "bad" or wrong because they did what they did

#realp3hours #the p3 party is up there with kotor 2 as my favorite rpg party

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