Venting Frustrations: Leaving things up to chance in Persona 4 · 7:35pm Oct 22nd, 2017
Here's a perfect example of one of those frustrating little situations you encounter all too often in Persona 4. Stop me if this sounds familiar:
You encounter a party of three enemies. Two of them are weak to Fire, one is weak to Wind. The two that are weak to Fire hit HARD. The one that's weak to Wind can cast Red Wall.
It immediately does so upon one of the others.
You've got Yosuke and Yukiko in your party. The hard-hitters are going to move before Yukiko's turn comes up, let alone Yu's. Yosuke, of course, goes first. Yosuke ALWAYS goes first.
So you hit the freaking Red Wall caster with Garula and knock it down. Then you've got the two others, and one's been Red Walled. You can't get an AOA kill with Yukiko now because her Maragi/Maragion won't knock one of those assholes down.
So you take a gamble on triggering a follow-up attack from either Chie or Yukiko by having Yosuke throw a Firecracker at the one that's still weak to Fire.
If you're lucky, the gamble pays off and you've got your AOA. If you're not...
Yeah.
I was DAMN lucky and Yukiko did her followup to crit the third enemy to set up an AOA, but this right here? This strategy that relies entirely on chance? YIKES.
(Don't even get me started on enemies that are AOA-proof. 
)
These games are hard, and not always in a fun way. As much as I love a lot of things about the more recent Persona games (I have not played P1 or either version of P2, although I've heard good things), I'm seriously considering just watching the rest of P5's story on Youtube or something instead of actually playing through it. There are only so many hours in the day, y'know?
Ugh. Don't get me started on those fights. Especially on floors where you see enemies you've fought before and then they decide to throw something new at you with those and have to figure out this new weakness and adjust your strategy on the fly.
I only have my short experience with P3P to share when a friend let me play it. I loved the story and found the characters interesting. The actual GAMEPLAY however was a massive drag that managed to combined everything I hate about JPRGs into one big mess.
I still regret not finishing that game but I just could not enjoy the story if it meant I had to sit through that horrible battle system. Even watching Let's Plays are no good as watching someone else slog through the battles is even worse.
4705426
Really? Because I've always found the battle system in Persona to be one of the most enjoyable experiences in RPGs. But the difficulty can get brutal if you're not prepared.
When in doubt, use a physical skill.
4705465
May just be personal preferance. To me it combined the level grinding and meat-wall of HP bosses I hated from JRPGs like Final Fantasy, and the "It's super effective" spam of the pokemon games yet fails to capture the good sides of either.
In FF JRPGs you can at least reach a point where you can basically auto-battle to grind up your level to ignore the lacking battle system later on.
The super effective problem is a bit more complicated as the problem is that type advantage in Persona can lead to you being stun locked, but unlike Pokemon you can just swap out party members to avoid it on per battle basis except for the MC.
Basically the battles require both too much and too little attention. You have to grind for hours to progress but every battle demands full attention (and a bit of luck) to succeed or you wipe and have to return to your last save. Result is you want to just progress the story but first you have to put in several hours of grinding otherwise you get straight up meat-gated, and that's frustrating.
How about this:
You flub a first strike and get Enemy Advantage.
The first enemy uses Mahama. It hits Yu. Game Over, no chance to dodge. Back to the entrance for you.
4705637
Ugh, yeah. -.-
4705679
Luckily, if you happen to be a sucker like me who shelled out for Golden, there's like half a dozen new mechanics just to prevent that one scenario. Like being able to retry from the start of the floor when you die, or growing eggplants.
4705699
Or putting Null/Reflect/Drain Bless on your primary Persona and changing the setting so that it's always the one you start battles with even if you ended battle with a different one.
In Persona 5 Rangda is IMO basically the best possible Persona because you can get Null or better for every element not just most of them.
4705736
Only problem is that in the part of the game in which Instant Death is the most dangerous, it's unlikely that you'll have a Persona that nulls both Light and Dark. In fact, most Personas that null one are weak to the other.
4705740
I guess since P4/G didn't have Bless or Curse damage abilities they also didn't have as many sources of resistance cards/skills for them huh? It's been a while since I played through it and I never got around to crafting an "immortal" Persona when I did.
Here's a question I got for you are you letting your party do as they see fit or are you using Direct Commands?
4706646
Direct commands. Used to let them run wild but I prefer to be in charge now.
4706690
I always found the AI is usually smart enough to fight on there own but I can see why you would need to take direct command of them.
4707487
They tend to waste SP and make things harder on me in the long run. Also, after Mitsuru's Marin Karin spam in P3, I loathe party AI.
4707505
I've only played Persona 4 and 5. I'd play P3 if they ported it to playstation 4. They probably do use up a lot of sp but than again so do I. I usually take direct command in Persona 5 now that they added things like baton pass and interrogations. I like how you fight other personas now instead of the same generic color swapped shadows over and over again.