Persona-3

In their last show as a band, the Sex Pistols played one song and left the stage. Before leaving the stage, Johnny Rotten quipped, “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” The thing is, I don’t feel this way for the reasons everyone else might think I might. I suppose we’ll go after the biggest point of contention first. Linearity “Final Fantasy XIII is The Worst Final Fantasy Ever (TM) because all the dungeons are straight lines and there are no towns.” Guess what. The non-linearity of those Final Fantasy games you all hold so dear is an illusion. Final Fantasy XIII draws so much ire because it has the gall to tell you what you already know. ...

When you’re on a 2.5 week trip, it hardly seems like it’s ever going to end, but it was my last day in Tokyo and it felt pretty surreal. It would be my last chance to tie up all my loose ends, so I headed out to get my final souvenirs and replace that stupid sake cup that I broke. The plan was to go over to the Square Enix store to grab a CD for Min, the Tokyo Seibu Loft to try and replace the sake cup, somewhere to find another bag because my suitcase was now too full to travel, the Tokyo Dome to get Fighters jerseys for Eric, and maybe a CD shop to look for a live Persona music DVD/CD. ...

Insert another credit, because it’s time for your weekly video game news and you’ve just hit the Game Overview screen. July was an interesting month for sales. It seems that if your name wasn’t EA or Nintendo, you didn’t even crack the top ten list for game sales. In fact, Nintendo’s month of dominance is even more astounding when you consider that the top sellers included New Super Mario Bros. and Mario Kart DS, games well past their prime. This tough economy is making it rough to be anyone but Nintendo, but I’m sure that the holiday season will bring other games to the forefront. There’s lots of good stuff in the pipe. ...

Insert another credit, because it’s time for your weekly video game news and you’ve just hit the Game Overview screen. When I was a kid I became saddled with the unfortunate notion that Japan did pretty much everything better than the United States. I don’t think I would have gone so far as to call myself a Japanophile, but it was definitely close. Their video games were all sweet (FF VI and Chrono Trigger!) and their cartoons sure beat the heck out of the asinine stuff I was sometimes watching on the Disney Afternoon. This may have had something to do with the fact that I was watching Bubblegum Crisis and Ranma at a time when the best cartoon I could watch was Timon and Pumbaa, but it would be foolish to think that the allure of the unknown didn’t factor into it too. ...

I’ve known about this game for about a month or so already, but this is the official IBNttT Persona 4 exists (!) post. Details are still a bit light stateside, but here’s a breakdown on what I do know: The Persona 3 engine is being recycled for use in this new game (this will be very obvious once you see the embedded videos), which also means that the latest Persona game will be on the PS2. ...

The other day when I was talking about Persona 3, I got a comment about the SMT series being a Western-based RPG instead of a JRPG. To start off with, the original game for the Famicom was based on a Japanese book about using the digital world to summon demons. From this point forward, no matter how much the first-person dungeon crawling might be reminiscent of Ultima or other Western RPGs, we cannot call the game Western, but we can do better than just this. ...