Probably more Stephen King, judging by Aguirre-Sacasa's previous retooling of the brand.

Basically, his social link doesn't address whether he's into dudes directly, but I'm pretty sure he is. I mean he keeps being hot for Teddie. Also, as a gay dude, I think the guys are kinda good natured when they bust him about it, and when they're not (looking at you, tent scene) the joke's more on them than on him.

Haven't played Golden. P4 vanilla just has the weekend trip and the hot springs, which are light comedy but it seems to lean in more to developing the characters and their relationships.

Well, that's why I stipulated that I was comparing persona with the top WRPGs. Persona feels, to me, like it's going after the same thing as games like Fallout or Mass Effect, but it's less operatic and overbearing and there's a lot more specificity to the character's problems.

It does give the Inaba kids their own scrappy though? I guess? Small mercies?

Basically all you need to know about Persona.

Marie is a really shitty character and part of why I'm holding off on buying P4G even now that the PSTV is a thing on this side of the pacific. She's just a solid dollop of lame anime cliches squirted out onto Persona 4, which was so much better than its predecessor, in my opinion, because it either avoided or…

I think a lot of the criticism of P3's hermit comes from the fact that a lot of people read a weird sexual thing into it. I don't think that's really there. I mean there is a kind of love there, as there is at the top level of all social links, but the fact she's your teacher doesn't really enter into it. It's more…

Oh no, she's shallow and petty, but she's probably got the more coherent vision for the future of the show, if only because she's so invested in it as her ticket to stardom.

Basically it's a tragic arc. The freaks ARE just people who have been dealt a raw hand when it comes to physical appearance/disability or (in some cases) mental disability.

P3: Hermit

Ni No Kuni, I think, really wanted to just coast on its art direction. It needed someone like, dare I say it, Shigesato Itoi to step in and actually give it an interesting story and setting and world and shit.

See, I've always summed it up like this:

At best it's staged marginally better and has slightly slower pacing, but it's still pseudo-VN the way Persona 4 is. Portraits and so on. It's also way easier to miss shit in the PS2 version because it's often pretty bad about indicating what is and is not interactive.

Their issues were just a lot more relateable too. I mean, Kanji's confusion about his sexuality, Rise's fear that she's just playing a part for approval, Yukiko's anxiety about feeling forced into the family business?

P3P is actually a step ahead of FES in a huge number of ways, including better combat control and the gender sensitive improvements to the social links.

Yeah and that's part of why the game feels inauthentic. Everyone has over-drawn transgenerational trauma going on, and it's handled in a really soapy way.

What I find really interesting is all the people on other sites going on and on about how Marvel TOTALLY ISN'T GOING TO REINTRODUCE THE INHUMANS U GUISE because the Inhuman Royal Family isn't slated for a film. Even though they've been hitting the Kree and Kree Science p. hard, they're not going to introduce them…

It doesn't really. It's got a really urban feel and a shitload of crowd shots. It's less about a town and more about your own little urban life and the shop-keepers you know and your school friends than it is about the idea of a town or town life or whatever, and also it's got international travel and sexy robots. So…

The article be all fucked up. If you want one that focuses on a small community and depicts that community well, play Persona 4. Persona 3 delves into world-saving and freaky deaky animu shit and sexy robots way too fast, and it never really coheres into a town because the setting is a kind of generic big city.