@rebgav said:
Has anyone here played it? It looks like a 2 button Vs game, which seems like a dubious proposition.
I've played it more than my wallet would care to admit. I agree that the game superficially looks like a Vs. game with simplified controls, but in practice, each character's Persona is really just a core part of their moveset. You do summon them regularly and if you can multitask well enough, you can manually control them outside of specials to varying extents depending on the character, but it's more like they're there to do your fireballs and set off your hurricane kicks rather than act as a complete proxy or substitute for your character. If you take a look at the movelists on the game's wiki here, you'll notice that they're integrated into each character's repertoire of attacks instead of acting as a separate entity. The game does a pretty good job of making that point readily apparent soon after you start playing; regardless of which character you play, if your Persona takes four hits, they're knocked out temporarily, leaving you unable to do any specials aside from the very basic physical ones your character can do on their own. Basically, if you treat the Persona like it's a second character in a Vs. game, you're going to lose to all but the least competent players since it's easy enough to knock out somebody's Persona if they keep it constantly out in the open. Some characters like Elizabeth and Yukiko depend very heavily on the player's ability to manually control their Personas in order to win matches, but that's because they're weak physically and even they still have to actively be up in the opponent's face for a lot of combos and general damage-dealing.
@Hailinel said:
@rebgav said:
@Hailinel: I've seen it. Watching the streams linked above I was wondering if it's as mashy as it looks. I know that I'm going to end up buying the game at some point so I want to temper my expectations.
If I had to guess, I'm betting that the game won't necessarily be Vs.-level mashy, but that it's been designed with simplicity in mind because the subject matter will likely attract a lot of Persona fans that aren't necessarily fighting game players. But I could be wrong.
Bingo. The auto-combo mechanic is making a lot of people think that the game is super mashy, but features like that are designed such that existing Persona fans who might not otherwise be into fighting games can still dip their toes into the waters and have a good time playing the game on their own terms. In that sense, I'd argue that like a lot of other ArcSys fighters, the game's only as mashy as you want it to be. You won't even make it very far most of the time in Japanese arcades, for instance, if you take advantage of beginner-level features like the auto-combo because of the timing and strategic issues that they cause.
To try and illustrate my point, here's a recent video that was uploaded that has just protagonist vs. Elizabeth matches. Elizabeth has gone on to become one of my favorite characters to both play and watch in the game because being in control of a match as her requires having very fine control over Thanatos. None of the combos that he's doing are being phoned in, which, while the mark of any competent Persona player, is somewhat more difficult to reliably pull of as Elizabeth specifically since the moves that she can do without his presence are literally limited to two physical attacks and two grabs; even the special moves that use the A and B buttons, which are normally reserved for character-only physical specials, summon Thanatos and that makes using him a bit more complicated, among other reasons. The player using the protagonist is hardly lazy in their control of both him and Izanagi, but Elizabeth and Thanatos are somewhat less intuitive to master.
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