Tuesday, December 4, 2012

SMT: Persona 2: Innocent Sin impressions

After Daxter decided to freeze, puke and corrupt my save file, I was not exactly excited to fire it back up and replay the first half of the game again.   So I decided to start the second game in on a series that I've really wanted to get into but for one reason or another I had always put it off.

Close to the end of the end of the PS2 cycle, I read about a game call Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3.  The more I read about it, the more interested I became.   I began doing a bit more looking into the series and found that the Persona games were a sub-series of the Shin Megami Tensei series.   I found that there were a whole slew of games that I needed to experience so then the collector in me kicked in and I began looking for all the SMT games I could find.  Eventually I had them all, Persona 2: Eternal Punishment, Nocturne, Digital Devil Saga 1 & 2, and finally Persona 3 right when it released.

Of course I didn't actually play it then because I had also heard that Atlus was bringing the original Persona (a title that I had not been able to find yet) to the PSP.  And not only that, but it was to be re-translated, and retain the whole Snow Queen quest which was removed from the original PS1 US release.   Because I like to experience a series as it matures, I waited.

September 2009 rolled around and Persona finally hit US shores.  I fired it up and played off and on for a year and a half before finishing it.   At one point I found that I had made a very bad decision that would have ended the game very prematurely so I went back to an earlier save and replayed a large chunk.   Overall I liked it, but it did show it's age.   And the encounter rate was off the scale.  I couldn't move more than 3-4 steps without getting into a battle.  But I did beat and I'm glad I did.

So its now been over a year since I played the first Persona and I'm long overdue for the next one.  Lucky for me, the never-before-domestically released Persona 2: Innocent Sin was also ported to the PSP and brought overseas so I can now play the next game in the Persona series.

And already, I like this game much better than it's predecessor.  The game builds on all the things presented in Persona, but everything it a bit more streamlined.   Battles seem to flow much more smoothly (they dropped the grid-based combat which really slowed the battles down), and the game is taking it's time to acclimate you to the concepts as you go.   I can tell there's still a lot to learn but I don't feel overwhelmed like I did in Persona where I felt that a strategy guide would have been hugely helpful (RIP DoubleJump).  I also like the addition of the turn order as well during battles.

Another big change is moving to an isometric top down view instead of the first person dungeon view.   I don't really mind the first person dungeon view but changing it to an isometric view make it more consistent with the rest of the game.

Well, I'm only a couple of hours in and I'm really enjoying what I'm playing.  Hopefully that will last for the duration of the game!


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