AtheistPreacher

@ben_h: Glad you're still really enjoying it. I thought I would be going at this game harder, but the "problem" has been that Helldivers 2 came out a week after P3R's release, and that game has diverted my attention entirely (I did have it on my list of games 2024 I was looking forward to). It's so good, one of the best cooperative online games I've played in years. At this point I'm just hoping I can finish P3R by the time Dragon's Dogma 2 comes out on March 22. But I think I'll still be helldiving for a while.

@efesell: I mean, all the characters are F2P, though you're going to end up with all the 4-star characters pretty quickly since they're so much more likely to appear, and some of them are guaranteed to get through non-gacha (though getting all of their "constellations," which sometimes really make a difference, is another matter). And yeah, my understanding is that some of the 4-stars continue to be great for support, e.g. Xingqiu and Bennett.

But for me at least, when I was playing by far my most important characters were Ganyu for damage and Zhongli for defense--both 5-star characters. Those two were so good that it felt like the rest of the team barely mattered except for elemental affinities. It has been quite a while, though, and I'm sure I wasn't completely hip to all the hottest meta nonsense at the time.

@cikame: I mean, the game certainly pressures you to get new characters in the sense that the 5-stars are usually much better, and their pull rates from banners are appallingly low, so that if there's a character you want, good odds you won't have the currency to get them. And turning down the world level doesn't help if you want to progress you characters, which you can only do by fighting the higher level bosses. Also, good luck beating the Spiral Abyss without some real bangers.

But IMO the worst part of the F2P nature of the game is that it doesn't actually let you meaningfully progress after you've done all the one-time gameplay. I.e., once you do all the available quests, collect all the little floating thingies in each zone, and find all or at least most of the treasure chests, then the only things you can do to progress require spending resin, which recharges on a timer. Even if you never spend money on resin (I never did), a lack of it effectively stops you from playing the game. Sure, you can run around and collect ore and fight random enemies, but the XP for enemies is so miniscule as to be meaningless, and eventually I literally maxed out on some types of ore.

That's largely why I quit shortly after Inazuma had been fully released and I'd explored it all. There was nothing left for me to do except wait for more content, and log in every day to spend my resin, which caps off in less than 24 hours, but can be completely used up in about half an hour. This is a thing gacha games do, incentivize you to keep logging in and playing every day for engagement, so that you're more likely to spend money... but also keep you from playing as much as you want, so that you're left frustrated and wanting more. All part of the psychological warfare.

Admittedly, now that it's been a few years, I'm sure they've released enough bespoke content to keep me occupied for quite a while if I logged back in. New regions to explore and quests to do, etc. But I have enough to occupy me without jumping back into a game that's been deliberately made worse to service its monetization.

Even though I now think of P5R as one of the greatest JRPGs of all time, there's no denying that very slow start. I played it again recently and paid attention to how much time was on the clock when it first gave me actual control to make decisions, and it was about four hours. Yeesh, just let me play the game already. It's the one warning I have to give people when recommending it.

I played Genshin for about a year starting around when it first came out. Eventually I gave it up because the F2P gacha monetization was just too oppressive (I quit shortly after the second section of Inazuma had unlocked and I had explored it all, I know they've added a lot more world since).

But the great tragedy is that, save for that incredibly shitty monetization, it really is a pretty fantastic game. Gameplay-wise it's very Zelda, but without some of the mechanics that annoyed me intensely in those games, like weapon durability and rain draining your stamina more (in effect, addition by subtraction). The world is large and fun to explore and run around in (well, at least until you get all chests and collectibles, because nothing respawns, so afterwards it becomes quite barren, though still very pretty). And the writing, while mostly fairly generic and tropey, does have its moments, and is all-in-all better than average.

In a better world this dev team would be devoting their talents to a non-predatory game, and I would be enjoying the heck out of it. Sadly, we do not live in that world...

@efesell: You're not wrong. I did have the same thought. The speed up feature seems to work really well for whenever you have to use the Rewind feature and speed through conversation you've already heard. But for battles where there are animations happening, for some reason they don't actually seem to speed up that much.

I just finished my second 20-floor dungeon romp up to floor 40-something, wherever the barrier is that point. Game's pretty good so far but I'm still waiting for the story to really get started.

@ben_h: Good to hear! I've still barely started, I was busy with work this weekend but I'm planning to play it more today.

Agree, and of course this is exactly what P5 ended up doing, it was just that they did it through the rank 10 Temperance confidant ability. Frankly, I'm a little surprised and disappointed that they didn't add these sorts of bonuses to P3R's S.Links, it would have made ranking them up even more rewarding, added more of a strategy layer to who you rank up first, and could have loosened up the tight schedule all at the same time. But oh well, I guess. It is what it is.

Now there seems to be confirmation from data-mining that the DLC rumors are true:

"The Answer" + music and costumes. As an "expansion pass."

Yeah, think I'll probably just skip that.

However, even though Atlus has said they have no plans to do an expanded re-release, I just don't necessarily believe them.

“We are not considering a revision like with Persona 5 to Persona 5 Royal, which involved significant changes and additions to the original title,” said production manager Kazuhisa Wada. “Fans can rest assured knowing that Persona 3 Reload offers a complete experience.”

Seems like that could easily just be a line they're trotting out to get people to buy their game now, only to in fact re-release it with FemMC a few years down the line. I'm going to remain skeptical until and unless we hit at least 2026 and still haven't heard anything. Atlus just loves their double-dipping so much.

@efesell: Well that's disappointing.