Wanted to make a proper thread for our thoughts on the demo.

Starting with Vita version it pretty obvious that it smooth as hell from the visual novel segments to the labyrinths. The 2D art are both smooth and colorful with lots of expressions and the 3D model, while not super details, has a nice style. Gameplay has a nice twist with attack enemies from different sides to hit a weak point and when a enemy sets up for a power attack you can take a chance to do chain attacks to earn extra exp, cash, and BP for the creation of Children, who are the Persona or pokemon of this game. You get them by "Classmating" with the 7 heroine of the game (In the demo it 4) and depending of the level of relationship you have with heroine will effect the stats, level limit, and abilities the child has. Voice acting is up with Atlus's standards and while some find it hard at first it not bad and could be far worst. I also find it better than the Japanese VO where the voices tones don't fit with the characters from videos I seen. The characters are pretty typical anime fare with the hardworking girl, best friend character, sassy teacher, teacher who is your age, shy girl, etc. However, they aren't 2 dimensional as they have a mind of their own and not mindless beings. The main character has a bit of dept to him as he talks a bit, with a real voice, and has a little more personality in his dialog choices.

There some odd stuff like how there a weird amount of boob jiggle in the game that wasn't needed. The classmating scene that makes it look like they are doing it but realistically it not. And some dialog that wasn't needed.

It a pretty nice game but it not for everyone. It also not Persona in the way many would want it to be but it a decent RPG that has some moves. Interested in trying the full game out.

I played a bit of the 3ds demo.

Definitely a bit weireded out by the things you mentioned, especially the classmating scenes. Still might pick it up just because it's so fucking strange and I want to support strange ass shit.

The 3ds version felt pretty choppy in the dungeons and the frame rate took a noticeable hit in there. Vita version might be the way to go.

I played the Vita demo to completion, which took about 2.5 hours. I played about 15 minutes of the 3DS demo.

• Anime cutscenes look nice, though the character transformation sequences are pretty silly (which, I guess, fits the overall tone of the game perfectly).
• I actually like the voice acting overall. It can get pretty bad for characters like Mark, but it can be surprisingly awesome with characters like Ellie. Ellie's whole character goes from potentially annoying as hell because of her design to great simply because of her voice.
• The constant movement of the 2D character portraits during dialogue scenes looks weird. That 2D breast physics, especially. The 3D breast physics are also something.
• Music varies from bad to good. That battle theme... it's no Reach Out To The Truth, I'll tell you what. It grew on me a bit after hearing it a few times, but there are some other songs that I just can't stand while there are others that I appreciate.
• The systems for the Vita demo are overwhelming as hell. Thousands of pop-ups going on at all times made me eventually just skip them all and figure things out myself because it was too much.
• The 3D models look really good on the Vita. The whole game looks really good, actually, and the frame rate is consistent (I believe it's constant 60 FPS?). Not the same at all for the 3DS version, though, with what seemed like jittery framerate and nothing looked quite as crisp as the Vita version.
• From what I could tell, the bottom screen on the 3DS version wasn't really used for much that wasn't possible with the buttons on the Vita.
• The battle system is kinda interesting, but I'm not quite sure if I like it. It was a lot to get a hold of when I played, but having character attack angle be an important element of the battles was interesting and so was managing multiple enemies since they exist apart from each other on the field.
• I like that when the party is much more powerful than an enemy in a dungeon, the enemy will just immediately die when touched by the protagonist instead of having to transition into battle mode.
• One of the Star Children said this during a dungeon run: "Ugh... it's the same scenery over and over." And, well, that's not a good thing. Hopefully dungeons would look different in the full game, because that shit was boring.

The most important part of the game, though, is of course how the title comes into play. I don't think I realized how important the act of "Classmating"—creating a Star Child by performing some kind of sacred ritual with a female that is pretty much sex—would come into play. And boy do they play up the sexual element of it. Kinda creepy, but way too over-the-top to be full-on repulsed by it. Here's some of the pre-Classmating banter:

Gallery

With this being the process:

At least, since Atlus is localizing it, they make the writing self-aware about certain things, even though the story as a whole seems to be pretty bad from the demo:

The relationship scenes with the female characters to get to know them better in order to make stronger Star Children are pretty underwhelming and short.

All in all, not too sure if this is my kinda game. The Vita demo will transfer over to the final game while the 3DS one won't, so something to consider if you're gonna try it out.

@fluxwavez said:

Did..did you alter that? Or Is that just a Screenshot?

That's just a screenshot.

@fluxwavez: XD golden

Played both the jp demo and the us one. I can safely assure you. The voice work are terrible in both version imo but the game is ok.

I would say the English voice are better since they fit the characters.

Wow, prior to this thread, I had no interest in this game at all.

Now it sounds freaking amazing, haha. I'll try the demo out at the very least.

I played the 1st one on psp way back. There are not many changes in this one though, so I'm a little disappointed. That said, if this is ur first Conception game, it's not that bad. Combat can get tedious pretty fast but u can always hop into the dating sim part of the game to balance it out.

I would recommend this game to any persona fans and anime fans as well...

I have mixed feelings on the demo. I was only able to play the 3DS one, but having played the original PSP game in Japanese, I was more or less up to speed with the mechanics, although I totally do remember it taking a while to come to grips with it all when I was playing that first game. There's a lot there and that 3DS demo isn't particularly great about giving you some breathing room to really experiment before it's all over if you don't know what you're getting into. So on the mechanical side of things, I'm more or less pleased that what I liked has stayed in the game. It seems like all of the organizational systems and whatnot are present so you don't have to be overwhelmed by hordes and hordes of statistics and whatnot if you don't want to be and the socialization system with the girls and how different ones are better to bond with for certain class types is a mechanic I legitimately like.

But on the flip side, the things that I wasn't super keen on in the original game still seem to be here, too. The battle system has seen some improvements over the original game, but I'm worried that the general time investment for levelling up still favors too much grinding. The fact that you automatically defeat really weak enemies without having to enter a proper battle with them is nice and was in the first game, too, but naturally, you tend to not see those very often if you're just doing normal progression stuff. Even with the fast forward and auto-battling features, stuff just seems to take a lot of time. Granted, I didn't grow up on RPGs, so my patience levels for grinding tends to be a bit less than proper genre veterans, but the pacing still seems to be about as slow as the last game. Really wish it had a feature like Bravely Default where you could change XP and enemy encounter rates because the pacing issues were the big reason why I put down the original game after about 20 hours despite otherwise generally liking the rest of it by and large. If your party levelled up like two or three times faster, I'd totally be way more okay about dealing with its otherwise okay battle system.

Even more worryingly for me though is that it looks like this game plays up its concept with a much straighter face than the previous game. In that first game, there are still a lot of innuendos and whatnot, but it's written as really hilariously biting satire of sexualization in anime and games. It only plays things with a straight face for about 20 minutes before the game starts calling you out as a lecherous asshole for thinking you'd be playing yet another one of those games and it's great. I think the writing for that game was done by the people responsible for the Dangan Ronpa games and it totally shows. But for this new game, I remain unsure whether that humor is still really intact. I've asked around and done research, but I've got mixed signals on it; Japanese reviews in particular from what I read didn't really state it was a humorous game, but they didn't catch onto the satire in the original game by and large either, so I'm not sure what to make of it. I'm contemplating just buying the Japanese version of this new game because I know some of the humor in that original game definitely doesn't translate very well at all, but yeah.

But then again, RPGs tend to make for bad demos in general. I know people really profoundly hated Vesperia's demo and that game went on to be very widely loved among RPG fans on the 360, so I've got hope. I'm a big fan of Spike Chunsoft in general, so regardless of my personal feelings, I do hope that this localization is successful enough to keep bringing their other games over. Dangan Ronpa has shown that they very much so have what it takes to make internationally appealing games and a lot of their work is similarly very well written and it would be nice for people to not have to be a translator like me to get access to their best stuff. We'll see!

@pepsiman: Interesting thoughts. If you can, I'd really suggest playing the Vita demo because the 3DS demo is extremely weak compared to it. From what I gather, it's just playing the first 2-3 hours of the game itself, so it gives the player breathing room to do what they want much more than what I experienced from the 3DS demo, which was essentially tunneling the player into what they wanted to show. It's probably also why players will be able to play the full game from where the Vita demo ends, unlike the 3DS demo.

And it's a bummer about the game potentially playing its concepts more straight now instead of how the first game apparently handled them. From what I experienced, there wasn't any tongue-in-cheek about it except for the fundamental hilarity that is "Classmating" and how characters react to it so sincerely.

@fluxwavez: I don't have a Vita, but I've definitely heard that demo is better representative of the full game. I think I more or less know what I'll be getting into either way because it looks like it plays similarly to what I already know, but I'll probably still check it out once I eventually get a source of income a Vita.

It'd really be a shame if they tonally changed things for good. The original Conception was one of those very pleasant surprises where I went from playing it out of very morbid curiosity to outright enjoying it, grinding issues aside, especially since the girls in that game are all assertive and have actual characterizations. Satire tends to be one of the few genres of writing where Japanese is typically lacking because that sense of humor tends to brazenly go against various social sensibilities, but that original game just didn't care at all about hurting any otaku player's feelings and it was a tonally much better game for it. I'm still willing to give this second game a chance as a Spike Chunsoft fan and out of general curiosity, but I'd definitely be bummed out if the writing didn't turn out to be anything to write home about. Their writing staff is what both the Spike and Chunsoft halves have been primarily known for in Japan for years and years now and it'd be a bummer to have seen them drop the ball for this game.

Tried out the 3DS and man it lacking in terms of checking out the game features. It only main attraction was meeting with Torri, the strange girl of the game, but it very tunneling and not letting you experimenting with the features a little. Also drop in frame rate, audio, and lack of dual screen use (Put the damn map on the bottom screen!) and it pretty obvious that the Vita is the clear platform for this game.

Vita demo is definitely the way to go. The 2D animations especially look quite nice, and the party building and dungeon stuff are all pressing the right buttons for me. As for the whole Classmating thing, it plays like harmless fun, just over-the-top enough (without being lecherous) to feel as if there's the slightest hint of a knowing wink to the audience. I'll be picking it up on launch, but it might not be my primary focus until I finish other stuff. I liked the demo though, it looked great and was silly, and the actual gameplay was pretty good (though yeah, super easy, I'm hoping that's just the demo/first chapter).

I played both versions of the demo and am definitely leaning towards the vita version, even though they are 2 very different demos I am sure the game will more or less be the same on both the vita one may just look nicer/run smoother. Though I will say the text seemed small but still totally readable on my 3DS OG which makes me wonder if they made it for the XL since it seems like most people traded up to that one. Game looks interesting if nothing else which is reason enough for me to pick it up. Combat is a little weird at first but seems simple enough to grasp. I still really dislike the voice acting but I may just have a super low tolerance for English voice acting in Japanese games, especially when the original dub isn't included for some reason (which is apparently the case with this game). If nothing else seems like a good enough time killer till mind0 comes out in may. Though how did this thread get into the teens without anyone bringing up the amazingly bad music when a star child is born.

@pepsiman: I hope your right about the tonal stuff, I have a high tolerance for animeness but the game you described sounds much more interesting.

@metalsnakezero: Your probably right about the vita version being the way to go but I wouldn't write off the 3ds version just yet. They may of had to condense the demo on that platform for some nintendo rules about demos, the vita version of that demo took like 45 minutes to download and was 600meg while the 3ds version only took like 5 minutes and was 1000 blocks whatever that means.

@dizzyhippos:

1000 blocks is approxmiately 125 megabytes, so yeah, the 3DS demo is MUCH smaller.