Persona 4 changed the way I viewed RPGs. It was a huge step forward in role playing game storytelling and despite the technical limitations of the PlayStation 2, it managed to suck me into its world for over 80 hours. In short, Persona 4 is amazing.

Now, having said that, I must be upfront about my experience with Persona 3: FES. I played this game after I played Persona 4…and even though I know most games in retrospect seem inferior to newer versions (which is why I always try to play the earliest games in a series first to get the maximum, intended effect from each one), I don’t think I’m alone in doing this with Persona games. While Persona 3 may have gotten quite a bit of praise upon its initial release, Persona 4 was more of a critical and mainstream hit than its predecessor, so I think a large chunk of its players experienced it after Persona 4, just like me. If you fall (or expect to fall) into that group, this review is for you.

I’ve been going back and forth for awhile trying to figure out what to say exactly when it came to putting my thoughts about Persona 3 in written form… …because what I’m about to say may sound horrible to Persona fans. But I must say it. I have to say it. If I don’t, I would be lying…and when it comes to games, I can’t bend the truth to make turds become gems.

Persona 3: FES is a disappointing and laborious experience. Even when not compared to Persona 4 the game falls far short of the standards set by other games in the genre over the years…so I can understand why it was only a niche hit years ago and not even in the same league as Persona 4. For starters, the story is abysmal. You start off almost immediately being caught up in a  supernatural battle with no explanation whatsoever. Then you are living in a dorm with other students who go to High School and within a few weeks of school you are already part of school clubs, most likely dating, knowingly defending the world regularly and basically doing everything at the wrong pace.

Since RPGs rely so heavily on storytelling, the slowness at which the main plot unfolds is maddening while the character progression is often too fast for its own good (for example, super quick n’ easy dating or giving away too much too soon – like becoming part of the Dark Hour group). I didn’t have nearly the drive as I did in Persona 4 because the story takes forever to develop and even at 15 hours in I was bored out of my mind. At that point all I discovered was that during the Dark Hour monsters attack, there’s a giant building named Tarturus you have to explore and your classmates are mostly useless (including the ones you live with).

It’s weird. There’s no person to connect with, no mysterious story to get wrapped up in, no major hints towards what is going on for the first dozen or so hours of the game. Perhaps there was going to be a big reveal an hour beyond where I stopped playing, but it doesn’t matter. Point is, if an RPG takes over a dozen hours to even get you interested in the story, something is horribly wrong.

Even if the plot was a bit slower than usual in starting up, the battle and exploration systems could have made up for it if they were done well. Well, in Persona 3, expect nothing but major disappointment in both of those areas (especially if you liked Persona 4’s variety and depth).

In Persona 3, you must make your way up the colossal Tarturus one floor at a time. You can’t go down a floor once you go up stairs so if you didn’t explore enough or aren’t sure you can make it up several floors in one run to reach a teleport back to the ground level, you basically hit a road block. The enemies also seem much harder to avoid than they are in Persona 4 which leads to aggrivation on my end because there are many times when it’s better to sneak by than to fight certain baddies.

As far as the combat system goes, the battle design in Persona 3 is utterly broken. There’s a reason why you rarely see RPGs where the AI controls your opponents while you play: Because computer-controlled characters are idiots. Unlike Persona 4, you don’t have the option of controlling every action of all your characters. In Persona 3, your one, playable main character essentially turns into a healer by default because if you don’t heal allies, use items, replenish their skill points or revive them no one else will (or if they do, they’ll use the wrong thing at the wrong time). That stupid design decision turned even the most basic of battles into frustrating time wastes where you end up feeling like more of an observer than actual participant. It also made the battle system insanely shallow because if you can only control one character and not four, you’re going to play the game much “safer” and not even attempt to bite off more than you can chew enemy-wise and hope for the best. If you don’t have full control of your party, you don’t even have a chance to be strategic.

And to top it all off, we have an unforgiving exhaustion/fatigue system thing that effectively makes your characters useless if you try to grind and explore too much in Tarturus for too long. So, if you know you have X amount of time to level up before the next big event, you can really only do so much between now and then because if your teammates are exhausted for days on end (and sometimes outright refuse to go even if they’re rested). The whole tired/rested bit is one of the worst things I’ve seen in gaming ever. Imagine if you were playing a game that you needed to play a lot to build up your strength…and the game blocked you from playing every other day because it determined you were playing too much. What the heck.

Oh, and lets not forget the collection of Personas. The “not enough info” interface, menus, descriptions, etc. are much more vague than that of Persona 4 and will no doubt cause confusion for those who played P4 first (because a lot of Persona stat checking and collecting was required in it—and this was a non-issue in that title). It’s just not as easy, fun or rewarding to deal with Persona collecting or maintainance this time around.

The music and voice acting in Persona 3 are equally underwhelming and at times outright terrible. The looping, bizarre Japanese rap/pop songs are bad in a way you can only imagine and the voicework is forgettable. Don’t not be shocked if you press mute every now and then while in town. I will say that some tracks are okay (same with a few voice actors here and there) but unfortunately the bad outnumber the good in this department.

Last but not least, the characters in Persona 3 are lame. Well, at least the ones that you interact with for the first 15 hours or so. They all seem snobby or flat out stupid (one of the two extremes) and unlike Persona 4 where you looked forward to hearing what your group had to say, in this game your eyes glaze over and ears close when the key characters chat about whatever it is they like/don’t like at the moment. Plus, Junpei looks and sounds like a little twirp with that stupid soul-patch…I couldn’t stand that character at all (he looks awfully sickly as well – terrible character design).

But, on the upside, while you are zoning out during the story bits at least you have a few seconds to think about what other games you’d rather be playing instead.

Graphics: 7 | Sound: 4 | Play Control: 4 | Fun Factor: 4 | Final Score: 48%

In late November I received an invitation from Blizzard to re-activate my World of Warcraft account and try the game free for 7-days. Initially, I was tempted just to delete it because I hadn’t played World of Warcraft since March of 2006, over 3 1/2 years ago. But, something in me said, “Just wait…maybe it’ll come in handy…” and over the next week or so I started getting all these subliminal hints (the email, my buddy starting up WoW again, me finding a WoW guide at a thrift store, etc.) that a return to Azeroth might be worth doing at least one more time.

I won’t go into detail…but the installation/setup process for WoW is still as annoying, long and convoluted as it was in 2006 and in late 2007 (when I attempted to play WoW again but gave up after a never-ending loop of installation issues). Blizzard and other similar MMORPG companies who force constant updates need to be shot for not coming up with a better, more intuitive way of handling updates now that this genre has been around for over a decade. Case in point: Why, if I’m just a low-level character playing on the original WoW world w/ an original WoW race do I need to have GBs of updates for content ONLY found in high-level areas and in the expansion packs?

By the way – what’s up with the required Battle.NET account merging? I’m never a fan of forcing users to merge accounts against their will and while I know what Blizzard wants to do with Battle.NET (make it into its own version of Steam…whcih is why you’ll probably never see Diablo or Starcraft on Steam), I still don’t like it. Shame on you Blizzard.

Anyways, once the game finished setting up though I was happy to find myself playing the game once again. Props still must be given to Blizzard for their excellent work in sound, music, cinematics, rich world/history and sheer scope of environment design. If it takes me ten minutes to cross an area on foot, just imagine how long it took to make all that content I traveled by in that time! On the downside though, the game still looks as dated and crude as it did in 2004 –and– if we all think back to then, it was far from pushing visuals at launch (EverQuest II was and still is gorgeous and the Doom III/Half-Life 2 great looking releases came out in Fall 2004 as well). In terms of graphics, it’s pretty bad Blizzard has done zilch over the past half-decade to make it look better. Also, even though it’s neat to have a world in scale by making zones so big they take 10 minutes to travel on foot…my idea of playing a game does’t usually involve just moving in one direction doing nothing else for 5-10 minutes at a clip. *yawn* That’s one reason why I want to get a mount…because I think they significantly decrease travel time, one of WOW’s biggest annoyances.

In terms of gameplay, this time around I avoided the Night Elves and went for a Tauren named Mootaur so I could be on the Horde side and try a new class/race. You can find my profile of Mootaur here on WoW Armory. Compared to my buddy’s character, Demesria, my little guy is nothing when I finished up my trial. I was able to get Mootaur up to Level 16 before I quit (the same level my original WoW character was when I gave up on it…though that character took longer to level up even to that point) and based on the stats my friend has accumulated over the years (he recently got to a Level 80 character), I have completed approximately 5% of the game. I’ve probably spent 15 hours total with Mootaur in my second trip to WoW and have killed 691 enemies (4% of Demesria’s #), died 14 times (8.6% of Demesria’#), completed 62 quests (3.3% of Demesria’s #), etc. (all other stats seem to fall in the 3-10% range).

Basically, after seeing my stats, I came to the conclusion that if it took me 15 hours to get 5% of the game done (if I think Level 80 is “finishing the game”), it would take me about 300 hours to get to Demesria’s level. I have never in my life played any game for 300 hours…or even 200 hours. I think the games I have played the most over the years were Phantasy Star Online (100+ hours), Persona 4 (80+ hours), Civilization 4 (70+ hours) and maybe 2 or 3 others past the 60 hour mark. Most game nowadays seem to be finished in the 10-15 hour range, so that’s why I think me putting in that much effort on two ocassions for WoW is more than fair in coming up with a review of it. In fact, I still don’t disagree with my review and rating of WoW that I made back in 2006.

I will say I enjoyed WoW more this time though simply because the quests and exploration seemed to progress faster and more naturally with the Tauren and the beginning zones you deal with. That being said, I still feel as though one of WoW’s biggest issues is that there’s no real, significant, worthwhile, meaningful, experience-changing moments, enemies, quests, items, areas, etc. in the first dozen or so hours of the game. The quests are very much a boring mix of “Kill X amount of this” or “Collect X amount of this” or “Deliver this to that” sortof thing. I’m sure once a player gets to the mid-20s they become strong enough to party-up and take on some big dungeons and monsters…but it seems like Blizzard has never, ever had any intention of making the first 25 hours or so of the game be anything BUT monotonous grinding/boring quests.

I should also point out that since 2006 my MMO-ish gaming cravings have been answered with Capcom’s Monster Hunter series, a series I feel is much more accurate, challenging and rewarding than WoW or any other standard MMORPG simply because it’s truly real-time and reflex-based. If you are good at Monster Hunter, it’s because you are GOOD. If you are a super high level character in WoW, its because you have nothing but time on your hands and don’t mind spending $15/mo. to pursue your gaming goal. I’m not saying WoW players are dumb or bad players…I just mean that you don’t have to be that coordinated or fast-thinking to succeed in WoW (in that respect, WoW is a lot like everyday life, huh? :P)

Like I was telling my friend, me not continuing my account this time doesn’t mean I hate WoW. I don’t. Like I said, my experience was better this time around and I was progressing faster in leveling, items and quests than I was in my first go-around. However, my schedule right now, tight finances and other non-game obligations would not work well with the all encompassing/engrossing experience that is WoW. So, for now, my account remains inactive.

Should I ever decide to return to Azeroth, however, Mootaur is waiting for me, hoping, praying and mooing for me to buy him a cool mount and get him some much need Axe Proficiency lessons.

As I’ve brought upin previous posts, my game backlog has become outright ridiculous. Seeing as how my progress is getting nowhere as of late, I thought it’d be therepeutic to list ALL the games I have to play (that I own) and what my progress is with them. After reading through the list, you should let me know on what you think I should play next, get rid of or give up on altogether.

PlayStation 2:
- Persona 3: FES (NOT FINISHED ~15 hours in)
- Disgaea: Hour of Darkness (NOT PLAYED YET)
- Monster Hunter (NOT PLAYED YET)
- Shadow of the Colossus (NOT PLAYED YET)
- Onimusha (NOT PLAYED YET)
- Rachet & Clank (NOT PLAYED YET)
- GrimGrimoire (NOT PLAYED YET)
- Dragon Quest VIII (NOT FINISHED ~15 hours in)
- Twisted Metal Black (NOT PLAYED YET)
- Final Fantasy X (NOT FINISHED ~10 hours in)
- Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (NOT PLAYED YET)
- ICO (NOT FINISHED ~5 hours in)
- Gran Turismo 3 A-Spec (NOT PLAYED YET)
- God of War (NOT PLAYED YET)

XBox 360:
- Project Gotham Racing 4 (NOT PLAYED YET)
- Sonic the Hedgehog (NOT FINISHED ~2 hours in)
- Elder Scolls IV: Oblivion (NOT PLAYED YET)
- Ultimate Alliance (NOT PLAYED YET)

PlayStation 3:
- Metal Gear Solid 4 (NOT PLAYED YET)
- Grand Theft Auto IV (NOT FINISHED ~3 hours in)

PlayStation Portable:
- Monster Hunter Freedom 2 (NOT FINISHED ~40 hours in)
- Patapon (NOT PLAYED YET)
- P2 (NOT PLAYED YET)

Computer:
- MLB ‘09 (NOT PLAYED YET)
- Messiah (NOT PLAYED YET)
- Crysis (NOT FINISHED ~4 Hours in)
- Half Life 2 (NOT FINISHED ~15 hours in)
- Half Life 2: Episode I (NOT PLAYED YET)
- Half Life 2: Episode II (NOT PLAYED YET)
- X-Com: UFO Defense (NOT PLAYED YET)
- System Shock (NOT PLAYED YET)
- Day of the Tentacle (NOT PLAYED YET)

Nintendo hasn’t been having a good past couple of weeks, months, quarter or even year. Apparently the world has *finally* woken up and realized the Wii is a pretty crap system and got sales mostly through gimmicks and high profit margins by using circa-2001 hardware. Now, though, it seems, EA’s CEO John Riccitiello is speaking up about his disappointment in the system and the way Nintendo is treating their users and third-party publishers.

“To be honest with you, I think the Wii platform has been a little weaker than we had certainly anticipated. And there is no lack of frustration to be doing that at precisely the time where we have the strongest third-party share…”

EA is undoubtedly the Wii’s largest 3rd party supporter so I can see why they’d be upset a bit. However, that being said, when EA constantly pushes tripe like Charm Girls Pajama Party, MySims Racing, Nascar Kart Racing, Smarty Pants, etc., I can’t feel too bad for them (in total EA has released 50+ Wii titles since the system’s launch [>1/month]). I mean, if they wanted to point fingers for undelivering products, they need to take a look at EA. In other words, physician heal thyself.

“Frankly, I think they need more beats in the year than they get out of a first-party slate – to be able to have the Wii software platform perform as well as they would like.”

That is a good point because I think it brings up a key issue in WHY the Wii, its games and Nintendo (at this point in time) are doing so poorly and have reputations that are getting worse and worse with every passing month. I mean, what was Nintendo last BIG first-party game? Super Smash Bros. Brawl? That came out in March 2008. Over a year and a half ago. Sure, you could argue that Wii Sports Resort & WiiFit are “games”…but for hardcore gamers, those are a far cry from anything worth lumping together with Zelda, Mario or even Super Smash Bros. franchises.

To get even more insulting and stupid, I went to Nintendo’s site and went through all 838 games released for the Wii since it’s launch, looking for first party titles. I didn’t count Wii Ware releases — just Nintendo published titles. I even included casual titles like Wii Sports & Wii Fit. Here are the total #s of first party games released in each year, since 2006:

• 2006 – 2
• 2007 – 12
• 2008 – 6
• 2009 – 8 (4 are re-releases of Gamecube titles)

My point is this: Nintendo — as it has done with every console system since Nintendo 64 — is ridiculous when it comes to keeping platform interest high through 1st party releases. In fact, one could say the only reason why the N64 had as good of lineup as it did for the first few years was solely because of the help of 2nd-party Rare producing games like Banjo Kazooie, Diddy Kong Racing, GoldenEye, Donkey Kong, Conker’s Bad Fur Day and Perfect Dark.

Since 2006 not one new console IP has been created under the Nintendo label and Nintendo has all but ignored franchises like Star Fox, Pikmin and Kid Icarus for proper sequel treatment. Instead, gamers get Mario over and over and over and over again.

John continued saying, “…because very, very few multiplatform titles are succeeding on the Wii.”

Well, duh. A quick look at Nintendo’s official release listing page for the Wii shows a terrifyingly high number of crapware — games no one over the age of 5 would ever want. If it weren’t for the useless casual gamers, hipster middle-aged folk and clueless grandmas in the country, no third party trashware would be bought. The solution? Keep making Wii-exclusive third party software instead of just porting over superior console’s games and hoping for the best. And, if you’re gonna make a quick n’ dirty Wii release (eww, that sounds nasty when written),  just keep it as a Wii Ware title. Less risk for a publisher and less chance of consumer disappointment if they buy it in a store, hoping it to be a quality title.

I know 3rd party games in general have been failures on the Wii, but couldn’t publishers have made games like Madworld, Dead Space Extraction and Monster Hunter 3 back in late ‘06/early ‘07? They could have…but they didn’t. I’ll tell you why — because when the Wii was announced, every 3rd party publisher (including EA) thought it would suck and get crappy 1st party support as usual, just like the Gamecube. After they realized it was a hit (thanks to moron casual gamers and gimmick-duped hardcore gamers), they all rushed out to release as much crap as possible to grab some consumer money. They had no plans to come out with anything unique at any point and after seeing the types of buyers who were getting Wiis, they became even lazier because, let’s face it, casual gamers will buy just about anything.

To hear EA moaning now about lack of 3rd party success 3 years into Wii’s life is pretty funny, actually. If they had done more than port crap and release shovelware for the first 24-36 months, perhaps their Wii endeavors wouldn’t have been so painful.

Finally, John said, “…we are reaching out to Nintendo to find ways to partner to push third-party software harder.”

So what, EA wants to bundle its games with Wii hardware? Yeah, that ain’t gonna happen EA. Please tell me what incentive Nintendo would have to pursue something like this. I mean, look at them — they would have kept the Wii at its $250 price for another holiday season if it weren’t for the big drops in PS3 and 360 pricing this Fall. And even with a drop in Wii system price, there is NO variation in the bundle from what was originally offered in 2006. Nintendo simply has no plans to give anything of value away to consumers this generation and they just don’t care. They know full well a game-hungry consumer (after they had their fill of Wii Sports) will aim for a Nintendo-brand game next before they even consider a 3rd party game. That’s why Nintendo published games released 2-3 years ago still have their $49.99 price tag…while 99% of 3rd party games go to the bargain bins within a few months of release.

UPDATE:
Finally, in what I call icing on the cake for this ridiculous situation is the newly announced plan for EA to FIRE 1,500 workers and spend about $400 million for casual game maker Playfish.com. So one hand you have EA’s CEO crying about Nintendo not doing a good enough job making a system attractive enough to consumers so they spend even more on 3rd party games and on the other hand you have EA making huge, dramatic changes internally so it can focus even more on the casual markets it apparently hates so much (you know, the ones who WON’T buy 3rd party games…because they’re idiots). Bravo EA, bravo.

Alright, it’s been pretty obvious that I thoroughly enjoyed Ultimate Alliance 2. I loved the variety of characters, powers, levels and story. In fact, I enjoyed the game so much I happily played through it a second time to see everything (something I rarely do) and by the end was still craving more levels to explore and characters to try.

Then, I heard about UA2’s DLC and the disappointment set in. Here was a game I was totally up for playing again and again because I liked the formula…and the developer/publisher pretty much killed me wanting to do so within weeks of playing it. I mean, according to this post on Kotaku, the DLC pack for UA2 features 5 new characters and 4 challenge missions…for $10. So, while I’m all for extra characters being added…what’s with the lame challenge maps and $10 price tag???

Seriously, what the hell people?

I mean, I already shelled out $60 for the game. It’s barely ONE month old. The characters can’t be that hard to create (afterall, the game features two dozen of them). And the challenge maps are not even comparable to REAL, ACTUAL LEVELS.

This is what pisses me off about DLC. From what I’ve seen over the years, DLC is a major waste. All developers see it as is an added way of getting money…but beyond the “getting money” point, they seem to not care at all about the GAMER’S experience. When I say that, I mean look at what was done in UA2’s case: The game’s not even two months old, hasn’t dropped even to $50 on store shelves yet and despite some less-than-stellar reviews, most people seemed to enjoy the game. In other words, at this point, if a developer is going to release DLC, it should be either content TRULY WORTH purchasing -or- even if it’s so-so content, it should be completely free.

I don’t really care if free content is so-so because it’s FREE. You don’t have to pay anything for it (Even Arkham Asylum’s short DLC was fine because it was FREE). That being said, if the content you need to “get online” is actually stored on the disc…AND FREE, than I think that content should have been available 100% w/o online activation from the start. (RE5’s Vs. mode comes to mind). That especially rings true with PAID DLC that actually resides in full on the original game disc (again, RE5’s Vs. mode comes to mind). Paying $10 or more to download a 100k “access key” that unlocks data on your game disc is just shady business.

But, like I was saying, FREE content doesn’t make me upset. PAID content, however, does. And it REALLLLY pisses me off. Here’s why:

You have a game that costs you $60. Let’s say it has 24 levels (actual story levels, NOT challenge maps), 12 hours of story-based gameplay and 24 playable characters.

If we were to say $10 was a reasonable price for additional DLC, shouldn’t it also be reasonable to assume the following?:

$10 (which is 1/6 of the original game price) should consist of 4 new, real levels, 2 hours of story-based gameplay and 4 new characters. Period.

But that’s not what we’re getting. Gamers are expected to pay 17% of the game’s original price for 5 new characters and 5 challenge maps (which may only provide an hour or so of gameplay, if you like them). There’s absolutely no new story-based content and there’s no new, real levels to explore with your new characters. It’s complete BS. Essentially what the developer/publisher is saying is that this $10 DLC pack is equivalent to 1/6 of the original game’s appeal.

NOT IT ISN’T.

It’s not worth $10. It’s not worth $5. It’s not even worth $1.99. I don’t see anything of significant importance that required any extra development time. If anything, I suspect the developer (like so many others), made X amount of content for the major release and then purposely subtracted Y amount of content in order to release that as “premium DLC” later on.

I just feel like DLC is a waste. And it’s not like Ultimate Alliance 2 is the only game I have issues with in regards to this topic. Halo, Little Big Planet, Pain, etc. are all games that sell content that is either completely underwhelming, should otherwise be free or both.

I may be a curmudgeon for saying this but back in the day before all these internet-connected consoles developers couldn’t pull this crap on gamers/consumers. If you wanted to put certain content in a game, you made sure it was included from the start. If that meant delaying a game’s release or cutting back on other features to make it happen, so be it. In the end, it was the gamer who ultimately won because when they bought a game, they got everything they were expected to have from the start. There was no going back later and saying, “Hey, I realize you like Character X or Stage Y…but in order to play those, you gotta fork over another $5 or $10.” Even up until the last generation, this crap was a non-issue