Persona 4

I wrote quite a few notes throughout this but I do have to pre-requisite my thoughts with the fact that I did not finish the game. I put around 20+ hours into the game and I did not manage to finish it and I got fatigued massively with it. I think I gave it a fair try though.

I found the story really interesting from the beginning. I thought the mystery was fascinating and I was actually quite gripped on the outcome of the story in general. I did look up the ending and I think I would have grown frustrated towards the end, but I won’t say much on that as I did not reach the ending. The voice acting was good, it wasn’t a bad English version at all. I found the characters to be a mixed bag, some were interesting and had layers, others just felt like stereotypes or caricatures of what they were meant to be representing.

I found the social link feature to be initially interesting but it did become a bit tedious over time. The idea that dialogue and decisions could impact the battles and levelling directly was cool. The dialogue was such a mixed bag though. I felt gripped in some places, especially within the mystery, and other bits were incredibly jarring. A particularly memorable moment was when Yosuke rings you after viewing a new victim on the midnight channel and you discuss who it might be. There is some fear and concern and then he is like “oh which girl do you like more?”. That was frustrating. I did find about 5-10% of the game to be pretty pervy too so wasn’t a fan of that either.

The combat was fine. Its turn-based, you can counter things, you aren’t really involved. The AI is fairly intelligent, I didn’t mess with tactics too much as they acted fairly intuitively. Not many games manage to make turn-based combat interesting to me. Undertale does a good job and so does maybe paper mario/superstar saga games. I feel like I need to have some impact over the actions rather than making it just a numbers game. I did like that fact that in the dungeons, if you find the stairs to the next level and continue exploring, you can move to the next floor at any time without having to backtrack. That was greatly appreciated.

I did find some of the optional content to not be clearly marked as optional and it was hard to tell if things were beatable but just hard, or come back when you are highly levelled. I got destroyed by the optional reaper boss so badly that I had to Google if I had done something wrong.

The game was just too hands off for me. It became more like a visual novel, akin to the walking dead games, then an interactive experience. That is why, for me personally, I give it a 4/10. If you like JRPGs, turn-based combat and rich stories, this would easily be a high quality game for you as it has so much content for you to enjoy. For me personally, it just wasn’t something I enjoyed.

Devil May Cry 3

I was looking for a slightly faster paced game post-Persona and I was incredibly lucky with rolling DMC3 as the next game. I had some very minimal experience with the DMC franchise in the form of DMC5 but this was a different experience in my eyes.

The levels are quite linear which I actually appreciated for the game. The gameplay loop overall was tight, the pacing was great and I didn’t feel like it took too much of my time at all. 20 missions with bosses and secret missions. I have not fully explored this games depth, I have only done 1 playthrough when you can definitely do at least 1 more with the new unlocked character.

The game really reminded me of Ultrakill, another game I loved an incredible amount. If you are a completionist, going for full S ranks and completing every secret mission would probably be a satisfying journey albeit a little frustrating if anything like my Ultrakill tries for P ranks. The story was cool but minimal, mostly told through 2 cutscenes per level.

I found the combat to be fun, the combo movesets were satisfying once I got a better hang of how the weapons work. I do think I only scratched the surface though, much more to enjoy within there. The bosses were fun and challenging without being dark souls level frustrating. Once you understood their “gimmick”, they became easier to beat which I enjoyed.

I found the difficulty to be a little inconsistent. I found some bosses to be really frustrating early on, becoming much easier as the game progresses. I think this is probably due to the mechanics of the game having such a big impact of the difficulty of the bosses rather than them actually being difficult. This is supported heavily by the mirror realm fights where you replay the bosses and I didn’t struggle with some of the early ones with the new weapons, knowledge and Devil Trigger.

This game suffers a little bit from the curse of old games where some solutions to traversing the level is just confusing. Though the levels are linear, I was backtracking quite consistently in the later levels which was a little frustrating. Trying to remember which item you need to get where, and then remembering where to go next was the biggest challenge with some of the levels. There is a map but it was actually useless to use as it was such a pain to navigate.

I thought this game was great. I do wonder if my rating will change with future playthroughs as I think I still have a decent amount to explore. Also I believe the below jank meme captures the ending quite well.