Ben_H

That feature along with anyone you can talk to appearing as dots on the mini-map are both game-changing features that rule so much. There's several little additions to this game compared to even P5R that are all really great additions.

Separately, incredibly trivial non-story spoiler The TTS (Time To Stupei) is this game is quite different compared to the older versions of the game. I was wondering if they had removed any reference to that nickname but they saved it for a key moment further into the game. In FES they basically open the game with Yukari calling Junpei an idiot and then referring to him as Stupei.

As a random aside, the MC's MP3 player had me randomly thinking about old tech (though the game calls his MP3 player cutting edge, which is hilarious). Did anyone else have that type of MP3 player? I had a stick MP3 player like that with the neck lanyard and everything. It ruled. It was 128MB and only held like 2 albums worth of 128kb/s MP3s. I still have it somewhere. It was an iRiver that one used a single AA battery and had a radio built in too. I eventually graduated to the first iPod nano but I still got a lanyard case for that because it was such a useful form factor.

Yeah John Elkann nepotisming his way into running Ferrari and then chasing out most of the people who seemed like they knew what was needed to fix the team has been a huge bummer to watch as a former Ferrari fan. He is extremely averse to making the types of changes needed to fix the team's many problems. Ferrari's strategy and race management has been a problem for the better part of a decade now yet somehow in the last few seasons has become even worse.

The team finally seemed on the upward trajectory at the start of 2018 but after the death of their previous leader, all of that progress stalled out and has in some ways regressed. They are now basically a midfield-calibre team that occasionally builds frontrunning cars. They could have a car almost at Red Bull levels of dominant and still somehow screw up enough operationally that it would make the championship close.

Yeah, this announcement seems awkward for the teams in the same way the 2020 announcement that Vettel wouldn't be getting a new contract at Ferrari was since he was still contracted to drive for that year. It did make for interesting watching though when the season actually started since Vettel was much less risk-averse and did a lot of bold things he previously wouldn't have done (most notably, going against team strategy several times. Each time it ended up benefiting him. It almost felt like he was making a point about how bad Ferrari's strategy team was. It also was reminiscent of when Kimi lost his contract with Ferrari then stopped following team orders and had much better results including a final win). Hopefully we see something like that from Hamilton now since he's no longer tied to Mercedes' future and is mostly just driving for himself now.

More concrete reporting has popped up that Hamilton may be taking his race engineer, Pete Bonnington, with him. Mercedes has already acknowledged that talks on this subject are probably going to happen soon.

Yeah, there being new ways of upgrading social stats (the strip mall restaurants, the computer software shop, the jobs, etc.) makes it much easier to justify spending additional nights in Tartarus. I'm on the second section of Tartarus and while I technically finished it in one go, it is not the way I'd recommend doing it for newer players since it was much harder than leaving part way through, buying better gear with the money earned on the first run, then going back and finishing it off, which is what the game seems to want you to do.

Are there ways of optimizing a playthrough to make going through a section of Tartarus in one shot without it being a pain? Of course. I've thought of several different ways to do that. But I'm not going to for this run since for my first runs of Persona games I tend to follow the game's signposting for what to do and when to do it since that's their intended experience. With their intended experience and going to Tartarus at times when they mention to (which is what the large majority of people playing do according to their stats menu thingy), the best way of handling Tartarus is to do it in multiple goes, not unlike how it went in Persona 3 and FES. According to the stats menu, most people on the section I'm on are several levels lower than me and stopped part way through the section, which is what I expected given how they seem to be intending you to handle Tartarus (see spoiler section for explanation of why I say this).

In general, most of my concerns about how the various changes they made to the game work have gone away as I've played the game more. They put a lot of thought into how to improve this game while still making it feel like Persona 3. Tartarus is still Tartarus. They didn't make this game noticeably easier based on my experience of recently playing FES. If you push too far into Tartarus without the right levels or gear, you can still get wrecked pretty quickly. Tartarus is still a slog, it's just less monotonous now.

Tartarus Mechanics that appear in section 2 spoilers within:

The voice acting in this game in general is great but the added voice acting for S-links rules. The person who did the voice for Yuko (the team manager) did an excellent job.

I really dig what they did for Tartarus. I was initially concerned about the changes they made with regards to SP and stamina, but in reality it hasn't been a problem. When first starting you are low on SP a lot, but they chuck items at you constantly and after you've levelled up enough you can just fly through the first 10 floors over and over and collect more items since some of the stuff on the floors respawn. I'm using items as I get them rather than hoarding them like in the old games and it's making it so I almost never have issues with running out of health or SP.

I've been seeing a lot of folks say Mercedes should buy Piastri's McLaren contract out. I actually agree with that. Oscar was very clearly a rookie last year but we already were starting to see some flashes of brilliance from him and on a few occasions he looked better than Lando already. He still has to come to grips with the tires better and become more consistent, but if he manages to fix those things he may become one of the best drivers on the grid. Mercedes need that if they want to win championships. Russell, especially last year, seemed to crack under pressure a lot and put in a lot of performances that have made him seem less like a championship-calibre driver than he used to. He threw away a probable win in Singapore and made several other rather costly errors. His qualifying hasn't been fantastic either generally, even factoring in the Merc's weaker performance.

I somehow doubt Zak Brown is interested in trading away Piastri after all of the work he went through to get him on board in the first place though. It would have to be a pretty big cheque for him to allow Piastri to leave.

I think a thing that massively harmed the new Prince of Persia was the price. For a game of that scale and type, it is hugely expensive compared to the competition. In Canada, that game is $70 when most of the non-Metroid competition in that space is $20-30 when not on sale. Why would I buy the new Prince of Persia at that price when I can get something like Dead Cells with all of the DLC for much cheaper? Does Ubisoft really think people will pay that much money for a game that seemed like it was made on the cheap? Or is this just another instance of the big publishers trying to push game prices up even more? Maybe both?

I would imagine there's also a bunch of people waiting for a sale for it. Ubisoft has essentially set the expectation that the game will be on sale for a substantial discount within a month or two since that happens with most Ubisoft games outside of the mainline Assassin's Creed games.

I don't see any evidence he's slowing down. Lewis' 2022 season wasn't great but he also had sacrificed his season to try to experiment with setups to get Merc's overly complicated car working well, which didn't end up happening. His 2023 season was exceptionally good. He was third in the standings in a car that looked incapable of winning and Hamilton basically carried Mercedes to second place in the Constructor's standings. Without losing a bunch of points to that disqualification that wasn't his fault, he would have been within sprinting distance of beating Perez, who was driving the statistically most dominant car in the history of F1, to second in the Driver's Championship. Hamilton also dumpstered George Russell and made him look extremely average last year.

That said, I'm still unsure of how this all will go. Hamilton is used to a team that is operationally top notch. Mercedes is an extremely organized team that has plans for basically every situation and never hesitates with strategy calls. Ferrari is essentially the opposite of that and I could see it becoming increasingly frustrating for Lewis if Ferrari keeps up their decade-long tendency to make garbage strategy calls and throw away good results. The rumours that Hamilton is bringing Pete Bonnington, his race engineer for the last decade, with him make a lot of sense. I'm sure he doesn't want the guy who Vettel and Sainz had as an engineer since on occasion both of them got so angry at the guy that they ended up doing their own race strategies (which, funnily enough, usually worked out well for them).

I'm also curious who will take Hamilton's seat at Mercedes. Sainz is supposedly going to Sauber/Audi after this year so he's probably not in the running. Alonso is obviously great but his age is up there and could catch up with him sooner rather than later. An actual realistic option is Alex Albon, which is wild to say given where his career was at a few years back. He's driving well enough now that I wouldn't even blink if they announced him. Other than that, we'd be getting into the territory of Mercedes buying out contracts, which is way harder to predict. Merc can certainly afford to buy out contracts given that they're not paying tens of millions a year for Hamilton now. It'll be interesting to see what happens.

I'm about 45 minutes in so far. This seems great so far. It follows the source material almost exactly. I randomly replayed the first few hours of P3 FES a couple weeks back so I remember it all and this game is almost identical. It's extremely noticeable how much smoother this game is to play compared to the old version. When you get to the school they actually tell you what to do rather than vaguely saying "You should find what class you're in" then dumping you to figure out what that means on your own and the minimap makes finding things a lot simpler.

I was worried about how the music would end up but it seems pretty decent so far. It's different but still works. I was reserving judgement until I got to a section that had "When The Moon's Reaching Out Stars" (that name is still hilarious) because that was best song in the old game but the new version is good too.

I really like the intro cinematic.

There's a pride flag pin in the one of the intro anime scenes and a female student talks about how much she... admires... Mitsuru. The old director guy that seemed shitty is well and truly gone.

My first "Wait, what?!?" moment was... seeing that the hallways in the school are now all one area, which, why wouldn't they be? It's not a PS2 game. It just surprised me because I've played Persona 3 several times and that's how it's always been.

They fixed the scaling for the bed in the MC's dorm room. It no longer appears to be 12 feet long and 8 feet wide.

That's good to hear.

That year or two where the forums weren't on the front page anywhere did seem to do a big hit to the number of people using the forum. That combined with the rise of Discord has caused a lot of folks to be over there instead of here. I'm not a big Discord user anymore which is why I'm mostly here.