hundley + chef has like TONS of stuff about persona in whatcha playa videogamesa - topic. just fish em out!!!

thank you "superflat," that makes me feel sort of optimistic!  also sorry, i didn't mean to make an unnecessary thread.  the what are you playing one is just enormous and i found the prospect of digging for something that i wasn't sure was even there daunting.  i'll look for their posts, though!

No, it's fine, i can dig em up as well i suppose? Wait, maybe it IS better u dig, ur topic >:^B just trying to be honest here! even if it hurts *gets punched into a jaw*
 
but yeah i did realize some hours after that post of mine was redundant and kinda unco-operative/curmudgeon?? sorry for that. 

this is a rather odd coincidence but i actually decided to pick up and start playing persona 4 a couple of days ago even though i had previously found myself so HURT AND BETRAYED by persona 3 that i had decided that any subsequent atlus games had no place in my life. this was always insanely disappointing, as i'm still legitimately berserk over the first persona games.
 
i'm not finished with the game yet, but i've actually been having a rather good time with persona 4, am sucked into it enough where i'm pretty certain i'll finish it. it's not a perfect game, and it's structurally more similar to persona 3 than anything else in the series, but they do a lot more with everything, they invest an impressive amount of time in the depth of the characterization. it's often not very GOOD characterization, but the depth makes it pretty easy to get reasonably engaged with the story. nothing in the game is really GREAT, but it's sufficiently enjoyable that i'm still playing it.
 
i'm probably going to make some long obnoxious post about it in the what are you playing topic when i'm done and i have a little more free time, but i think at worst this game is definitely worth emulating if you have a decent pc. a bunch of other people i've talked to about this, who generally felt the same way i did about persona 3 and the other persona games, generally seem to feel that persona 4 was a step back in the right direction, even if it definitely is a new sort of persona.
 
oh, one other thing: idk if you are aware of this, and it's slightly off the beaten trail, but a couple good-deed-doers took it upon themselves to translate the first part of persona 2, the innocent sin version, and release it on the internet. i haven't gotten around to finishing it yet, but it's definitely worth trying if eternal punishment did anything for you or you just wanted more of that.

Your first persona story sounds like mine, except I started with Eternal Punishment. Anime in my video games? I thought this was so amazing at the time. Thankfully Persona 2 had a lot more going for it, and I became a fan almost instantly. Then they made Persona 3.... *sigh* I did beat the game and even started playing through 'The Answer' or w/e the expansion thing is called, but I was still very disappointed with it. Thankfully Persona 4 was a decent improvement, still not what I wanted, but fixed a few of my problems with 3, enough to make me not feel as disappointed with the Persona series. Which is good because I suspect they are gonna keep making them in this style for some time(please prove me wrong Atlus).
 
As for the SMT games... I beat both the DDS games, which I loved, but the 'main' series, despite playing several of them to damn near completion, I've never actually beat any of them. If my damn PS2 didn't crap out on me I'd probably go play Noctune right now(emulation of it sadly crap, and I can't use my ps2 controller on my PC anymore, making it annoying to even play).

i spent a lot of time with persona 4 last year. i played it on an even spread over the course of the year - because it is extremely long and the gameplay is samey, so it's something i often took short breaks from in order to want to visit inaba again. which is really the primary appeal of that game for me - it's very light, and like hundley says the characterisation isn't necessarily great but there is a lot of depth to it even if that depth is generally not as compelling as it could be. there are some disappointing character arcs which don't really go anywhere or , if they do, it isn't the most interesting place they could have gone. despite that, some characters i felt a lot of fondness for by the end of it - kanji and chie in particular.
 
i haven't completed any other persona game though. i've only even played P2 and only a few hours of it. i watched some of p3 on youtube and it looks like p4 with all that warmth of inaba drained from it and that sounds like something i can probably skip. i imagine they will take their cues from p4 for the next persona, since it seems to be by far the most popular, so i'm looking forward to that.
 
i could probably say a lot more about it, but i feel like i might just make some kind of video review about persona 4 or shin megami tensei in general at some point and i don't want to preempt myself with that cos it'll kill my motivation to do it. going over pop culture items is only interesting for so long. i am currently on hiatus from playing nocturne - i got pretty far into it and i stopped in the - i think, the obelisk? anyway it's just a particularly long dungeon and i couldn't really be bothered with it at the time but i'll return to it rejuvenated at some point when i get a bit of a life break and can immerse myself in it for a day or two.
 
i like shin megami tenseiers, and atlus are an interesting company. some of what they put out is pretty abhorrent though - catherine is a disgusting piece of shit beyond it's really fun central puzzling mechanic.

First rule of video games: never trust any element to be genuinely satirical. Usually it's genuine.

Anyway, back to Persona, I've only played 4 and Arena. I really enjoyed my time with 4, but I can say that i enjoyed it a lot more having played it with the difficulty on the lowest setting (and I played P4G which I think had even more difficulty settings than standard P4). The RPG battles just sort of felt like they were in the way. I loved the story and characters, although there were some fairly problematic elements that I'd write more about if I wasn't stuck on my iPhone right now. I'm not through all of P4A yet but I am digging it a lot, it's a really easy to get into fighting game with a fairly lengthy story that serves as a sort of bonus chapter for P3/P4.

On a side note Persona is what got me into Weiß Schwarz which I can't play enough of I dig it a lot

oh yeah, bump.
 
i made a post about this in the other topic, but stuff like that kinda gets lost in the sea a bit.
 
persona 4 is an excellent game. the more i think about it, the more i think anybody with any interest in linear rpgs and a reasonably open mind should play this game. the game isn't perfect, it lags in bits, it can get kinda childish and stupid at times, too many of the characters are chirpy and bubbly, but i got totally sucked into that game, found myself pumping in the ballpark of 30 hours into it over one weekend to finish it off. i still stand by what i said above, nothing in the game is really GREAT, but it just works and at the end of the day i probably would have to confess that i enjoyed this game more than anything i've played in the last ten years, and found it more engaging than anything else i've ever seen atlus create. it's almost embarassing to admit this, as i will be the first to admit that atlus has made games that are just more uniquely designed and brighter, more impressively atmospheric and interesting, but for just getting lost in a vivid experience, this is the best i've personally encountered in probably about ten years.
 
actually, i liked it so much i borrowed a copy of persona 4 arena from a friend of mine. it's not earth-shattering, really, can be skipped unless you REALLY need to see more silly shit from the persona 4 characters. i don't care about fighting games at all, and find this one too dizzying to really be much of an exception, although the story is actually surprisingly in-depth for something like this. most of it is kinda bullshit, but there are a couple chapters that are actually surprisingly well-done, the central character's chapter in particular was really remarkably sensitive and emotional for the fucking story mode of a fighting game, bit of a shame it was wasted on what is really not anything more than a silly fighting game. still, someone at atlus appears to actually give a damn about all this, makes me a lot more interested in what atlus will be doing from now on that they'd even put some effort into the story mode of a fighting game. not much to report beyond that, although a couple of the persona 4 chapters were kinda fun. kanji's chapter is pretty cool, as one of his routes is him just thinking it's all a dream and smashing his high school up for no apparent reason, and i liked naoto's chapter as well, mainly because it was a neat change of pace from what everything else in persona 4 was, and definitely something that would have been a lot more fun if it wasn't just presented as the story mode of a fighting game. that's about it, though, nobody is really missing out too much.
 
oh, one really unsettling thing about persona 4 arena: so because the game is just a fighting game, they decided to give the main character a voice during the story mode. i don't really care about that, you know, it's something they need to do and it was kinda cool hearing him actually say stuff, but for some reason they decided to have the actor who voiced the killer in the game do his voice in arena. i've got a really good ear for this sort of thing, but this is literally something i noticed in his first line of dialogue, the actor didn't really try to change his voice, it's literally just the main character talking but now suddenly it's the killer's voice. if you're familiar with persona 4 it's actually kinda worth looking at some videos of the story mode or something just to see how fucking weird this is.
 
i guess the only other thing of note is that this site is a countdown for the big reveal of the next persona game which is supposed to take place in a couple weeks. i don't even mention this because i expect that many people to give a shit about a fucking pr campaign atlus is running, but more because it really says a lot that a couple weeks ago atlus was literally DEAD TO ME and now i'm actually pretty interested in what this stupid little site has to say. didn't think this would happen. it's a couple weeks late, but that's my answer to this topic, anyway.