| Angelus said: |
It doesn't help either that the game is very poorly paced. Because you're trying to maximize your schedule, you're always either doing a whole lot of combat and palace progression for long stretches, or a whole lot of social activities for long stretches. Perhaps the game would feel less long if these elements were more elegantly interwoven in such a way that both sides of the game continued to feel fresh for over 100 hours, but alas, this is not the case. By the end, both sides suffer.
This is because you actually understood what is the best approach to do the game without losing precious time slots. After all, this is the game about time management. And I think it is meant to be something like: 5 hours in dungeons, 5 hours for social activities, 5 hours for scripted story scenes in preparation for the next dungeon. And that's how game meant to be not to become boring. Because you switch between these types of activities all the time, instead of doing the same thing for tens of hours. But well, I guess you got bored with it anyway.
It's also got the whole GTAIV thing going on, where your cousin, or some other person would randomly call you and wanna go bowling or whatever. Only here, it's well over a dozen people constantly hitting up your phone non-stop to come do shit with them...and when they're not hitting you up to spend time with them, they're doing it to rehash some dialogue pertinent to story topics that were just covered like 5 minutes ago in person.
I've just finished August (summer break) and in case of this month I agree. It's kinda stupid that every day in this month you get a scripted scene every morning when someone texts you inviting to hang out with them. What makes it even worse is that the game teaches you early on how to check notifications on your phone, so IMO it was unnecessary. The worst part though is that after that comes September with the most stupid plot arc in the game.
More gameplay relevant interaction between Metaverse and regular world
I don't think this will change in the future, because once again, it is meant to be this way, the game is built around the idea of time management, where you need to choose how to spend your time slots - go to dungeon, hang out with friends, or raise social stats.
Shorter, more focused main story, and split off some palaces for larger sidequests/optional objectives that can feed into alternate endings.
Then you should play Soul Hackers 2. It's the closest I could think that will fit this description. The main story can be done in 20-30 hours. The local "Mementos" is entirely optional and can be skipped, but you won't get the good ending as a result. All social interactions are built in with the main story with the exception of bar events which can be done anytime. And no time management, no calendar system. The game is very linear.
P.S. I somewhat agree that Atlus went a bit overboard with this one and 120 hours (that's what it took me to beat P5R on PS4) for main story is a bit too much. The game probably could have been and should have been shorter, because I know that this is exactly what turns the most people off from even giving it a try. Vanilla P5 took me 90 hours to beat, so it looks like they increased the game's length by 30 hours with Royal. The good thing is, Persona 4 and Persona 3 are a lot shorter, especially P5, because the range of side activities is a lot smaller in these two games. P4 Golden took me 65 hours and P3 - 85 I think. Also, in Persona 3 you can just skip social links entirely, because they don't give you anything except for Persona Fusion bonus.
P.P.S. It's good for you that you gave up on filling the compendium, because it's not possible to do so in the first run. You need NG+ for that.
shikamaru317 said:
I don't see that they have much choice but to do 3 personally. If PS5 Pro is indeed happening (and recent leaks from reputable sources say it is happening), Xbox has to respond to it, they can't let Sony win back the most powerful console crown. And if they stop making either S or X, devs will become increasingly resistant to wanting to port to the dropped console throughout the 2nd half of the generation. They kind of dug this hole for themselves by doing 2 consoles from the start of the generation. So I do think we will see 3 consoles in the latter half of the generation, because it is better than the alternatives. I think they will learn a lesson from this and not do 2 consoles at the start of the gen next time. What S has done so far is alienate retailers due to more S consoles than X being made (resulting in lower Xbox physical game sales and hurting Xbox's retail presence especially in non-core markets), and piss off some developers who apparently foresee S being a bit of a paperweight later in the generation. Better to have just 1 console at the start of next-gen, and then do a mid-gen refresh. |
If anything that we've learnt from how this gen started is that Series S was a wise decision from Microsoft. So, I hope they do the same next gen as well especially if the chip shortage is still a thing by then. But IMO, with the way how technology goes, I think it's time to switch to ARM for next gen and have a lower end handheld model (Series S), and higher end home console (Series X).
