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When I started Persona Q2: New Cinema MazeI had an absolute explosion. This was not surprising, since its predecessor, 2014 Persona Q, was an excellent game, and the series draws from these games, Etrian Odyssey, is also excellent. So it is with a lot of expectations that I jumped into a hard mode game on my 3DS, ready to scramble maps, map and socialize through difficult mazes and battles of exhausting bosses. I had a bit of that, but where I expected to be dazzled, the game finally fell a little short.
Persona Q2 is a turn-based role-playing game where you cross multi-story mazes and map them: draw walls, add icons for treasures and shortcuts, and mark the location of puzzle components like switches, the swing doors and fans your party across big gaps. The enigmas of navigation revolve around progression while avoiding the FOE, enemies on the map that will project your team into oblivion. The challenge is to decide when to progress and when to go back based on your limited resources. Having to leave the maze just before activating a new shortcut can result in the retreading of an already difficult dungeon section, but a breakthrough can result in an expensive game and a loss of painful progress. As Kotaku Jason Schreier, editor-in-chief of the editorial, said: these games all deal with resource management.
Like many Atlus games, especially the Etrian Odyssey games from which this series draws, Persona Q2 requires you to use skills and resources that you could accumulate otherwise. You do not just keep good shit for boss fighting in these games. You must use your skills and your magic to exploit the weaknesses of the enemy, because even allowing a regular random encounter to hang over a lap can result in a sudden end of game. Each character has a limited set of elemental, physical and support skills related to what is called a Persona, supernatural entities born from the subconscious (essentially). The personas can be merged and transmit skills, creating a wide variety of combat options. They also provide life and skill reserves that are replenished with each battle – an invaluable resource that can make or break a journey through the maze.
Persona Q2 'The first acts of the couple were strong. The rate of progression, rest and personalization of my characters was incredibly satisfying. The mystery of how teens throw Character 3, 4 and 5 ended up trapped in Q2The movie theater was convincing. While the gang ended up having to get into the movies and change their purposes, I was excited to see what kinds of movies could inspire labyrinthine worlds. The introduction of new characters like Persona 3 PortableThe female protagonist kept the interactions interesting. The game looked at the pleasure of meeting characters from different games – sparks spout out, for example, when Persona 4 and 5 the protagonists meet, shown in an elegant and fully animated scene. The phased introduction of usable party members has kept the fighting possibilities fresh but manageable. I had a good time playing in the first two movies. The special sessions, the side quests organized in delimited sections of the main labyrinths, seemed amusing and varied. Unfortunately, the game failed to keep up with that pace.
On the one hand, the battles were not very interesting in the set. Although it is possible to Persona Q2 so that your entire party may be flattened at one time, it was far too easy to get out of the labyrinth and heal. I hoped that the removal of the nurses' compensation mechanism from the nurse's office – something that made me happy when I had written impressions of the game in May – would be offset by a similar increase of the game difficulty. That was not it. I found myself crossing places where Persona Q or all of it Etrian Odyssey games on similar difficulty settings would have already kicked in the ass. That's what became most obvious in boss fights: bosses did not force me to think too far out of the box, as they did in others Character or Etrian Odyssey Games.
QUOTE FROM THE BOX
Your protag x reader fanfic came alive with a monkey's paw
TYPE OF PLAY
Role play robot / dungeon
LOVE
Music, animated scenes, style and details, fun references to pop culture, first acts
Tear
Uninspired mazes, stale fights, tone problems, Teddie can fall off a cliff
The fact of throwing me this story in the face added to the frustration. At first, I was relieved to find that the new game noCharacter The characters, Hikari and Nagi, did not appear too much in the story. As labyrinths continued, intrigues were underpinned by easy and harsh narratives about avoiding conformism and being oneself. The characters reacted so verbosely to everything that I started to believe that I was playing a special after school. In addition to that, the characters have so badly bitten the scenery every time Hikari seemed sad that I feel physically unable to care for her. "THIS IS SO SAD! YOU MUST BE DAMAGED ABOUT THIS!", Said the game with a seriously lost.The characters began to proselyte the glory of being oneself with such urgency that & # 39; They felt stupid, which is unfortunate because the story of the end of the game has relatable and even intelligent thematic traits about depression and self-realization, but they come too late.
As a result of all this, the side quests – the variety of which decreases as the game progresses – are not very fun because they usually offer many additional scenarios for overused gags. It was fun to see new characters interact as they were introduced, especially with comments from Futaba's super nerd on pop culture. There are really fun times, a scene where "Oh, that's it "pops up as a dialogue option made me scream with laughter – but much of the dialogue came back to recycled jokes, like a weird bear costume wearing Teddie as a flesh of hen, Morgana and Teddie arguing over who's the best cute and – fuzzy mascot for the group, or muscular boxer Akihiko talking about protein. Persona Q was also a stupid, sometimes discordant take on the source material more serious, but the gags in Q2 so exaggerated that without the support of more powerful gameplay, I could not stop myself from rolling my eyes.
In the last act, the mixture of a creaky story and a fierce fight happens to me. Each labyrinth had a new gimmick that resulted in a similar formula: a blocked path meant that I had to take the a another path, press a switch, and try again. It's hardly a puzzle, unless the labyrinths printed as you do in pencil in elementary schools. Each of the game's labyrinths even had their own custom icons (the map creation tools provide a nice touch, including dynamic icons that change as you interact with objects). But that did not make the puzzles any less deep, and exploring every corner of the dungeons did not seem as rewarding as I would have liked. In addition, the conceptions of FOE's deadly enemies, both their graphics and their pursuit patterns, left much to be desired. Here is a dinosaur. Here is another dinosaur, but this one is flying away. We are in the land of science fiction. Here is a robot with demolition ball hands. Here is a robot with crazy drill hands. Here is a sentinel robot.
Late in my game phase of Persona Q2, I found myself completely perplexed. I was in the middle of the penultimate labyrinth of the game, navigating in a series of uphill and downhill elevators that could either block my progress or create new lanes. After unlocking a shortcut between two congested labyrinth sections, I stopped and reassessed where the elevators and switches were. There was a part of the map to which I had apparently not accessed, blocked by a lift, but the use of the switches made the trip more difficult and released areas of freedom. I felt slightly annoyed that the game had waited so long to give me no trouble. I've drawn my finger along the map to chart possible action plans. As I drew more and more roads in my head, the solution seemed more impossible. This It was the kind of mystery I had wanted to miss.
That is to say until I realized that I had badly marked a door close and that I could go straight. It was the "solution". There was not even any treasure to find in the other direction.
I got angry at the match. Persona Q2 had barely tried to understand me, and the only difficulty with this labyrinth came from my own stylus error. The puzzle solving elements of Persona Q They were not really a genius, but they were creative and thoughtful, had increasing difficulty, and often required pattern recognition, experimentation, and careful planning. Hungry for challenges at the end of the game, I realized that the simplicity that had been helpful to introduce earlier gameplay elements had turned into a disappointing anticlimax. Persona Q2 is not an easy game, but it is certainly not the hardest.
J & # 39; Love Etrian Odyssey. J & # 39; Love Persona Q. If you're a hardcore fan of one of these series or hardcore RPGs in general, you might like the first one Persona Q more. And although the reduced difficulty may be an advantage for the newcomers of the series, the means Persona Q2 falls short makes me reluctant to recommend it as a gateway. There is a lot of fun to have in Q2but there are better ways to get your feet wet.
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