Is that the Waikiki scene, or is that the beach episode with Futaba? When I went to the beach with Futaba I did the babe patrol with Ryuji and Yusuke, so I think that's normal, but I think Cheese is talking about who you spend time with on your last day in Hawaii. I got the option to spend it with either Ryuji or…

Not finished this game yet (I'm 105 hours in, and it's December 15th) but by and large I'm willing to confirm that this is a good and correct list. Morgana fucking dunks on previous mascot characters (I even like Teddie more than most, but jesus christ) and is a talking cat whose little head bobs up and down, which…

Persona 5, natch. I speculated last week that I'd be done by now, and while I'm in the final stretch, I still clearly have a ways to go yet.

It's been a week, I've levelled Futaba up to Rank 5 or so, and now I've finally witnessed the glory of that scene in the diner with Mishima. Good lord, I've never seen a character receive such a roasting and live. And then the idiot tried to ask her out and utterly ate dirt. Hoo boy. I think I like Mishima more than…

I'd heard of Botanicula but decided to give it a miss, not even knowing it was by the same studio. Samorost is news to me, and after about 1 second of curious Googling looks like exactly my sort of thing. If it's easier to penetrate than Machinarium was, I might have to take the plunge. Thanks for the heads up!

Ah, I've swallowed this pill a few times myself. The first example that comes to mind for me is Machinarium, a Lucasarts-inspired adventure game set in a detail-rich, sepia-toned machine world that looked like what you'd get if Arthur Rackham did the environment art for Akira. It should have been right in my strike…

Hahaha, yeah, I submitted this piece something like 2 days before P5 came out, and every day that I've played it I've wished that I'd had time to incorporate it into this. I think the line from Jet Set Radio to TWEWY to P5 is so clear that they can be considered a sort of loose, unofficial trilogy about Japanese youth…

Hang on let me just consult my extremely plump and heavy copy of Healthy Depictions Of Same Sex Relationships In Video Games, Revised Edition, wait there must be a printing error because there's writing on like the first two pages and the rest are blank, and half the entries just read "these characters could kinda be…

All I can think about now is if you could play a female MC or if M/M romances were an option, how much creepier Mishima would be.

I think an interview with Katsura Hashino resurfaced recently in which he claimed that there was no female MC option for Persona 4 because a story about moving to the country "made more sense" or something with a male MC, a statement that received a fresh volley of rightly-earned scorn. I think, and I bet most people…

If Bernie is levelled automatically that'd be a huge load off, because I don't think I've ever even seen a Sun Persona. Would that make him similar to the Moon Confidant, then? Like, you can still choose "correct" dialogue options during his scenes to earn more points, but Moon is levelled up by completing requests,…

Yeah, I've been having trouble wrapping my brain around Hierophant, wondering if maybe there was a soft lock on levelling it up before passing some plot gate, or something like that, or if it really does just take a crazy amount of time to level it. My theory now is that it's just balanced differently. Because you…

Even as I type I have Persona 5 paused, waiting for me to finish writing this comment. I'm about 60 hours deep now, and in one of the super plot-heavy, gameplay-light sequences that precedes a proper Palace infiltration—the space station this time. A lot has happened, natch, but where do you even start?

In terms of whole-package nostalgic experiences, a recent favourite was I Am Setsuna. Which is a little odd, because its whole shtick is evoking nostalgia for an era that I didn't experience until years later anyway: that of SNES JRPGs. Its closest analogue would be Chrono Trigger, but it's also heavily evocative of…

I'm about 35 hours into Persona 5 and hot dang I'm still 'bout it.

During the "Don't Move!" segments your controller is supposed to shake, both to freak you out and to prevent you from just putting your controller down on a table. But you can disable controller vibration from the PS4's settings menu, so that's exactly what I did. By my third playthrough I knew when all the Don't Move…

As old school as possible. So far I have yet to discover a control scheme that works better than "press buttons to make your character do a corresponding action."

Yeah, other people have said something like this already, but in Persona games the difficulty curves of the workaday battles and the bosses are way off one another. Common mobs start out pretty non-threatening but by the end of the game any old regular enemy group can slap your shit around unless you're playing at the…

Hell yeah. I had to dash this post off because it was like 5 AM but I'll probably be dropping in every week if I can manage it with my running commentary.

This is about as newcomer friendly as Persona games get, and every entry is totally unrelated to the others in terms of plot and characters, so you can go in blind and get the full experience. That said, your first experience with a Persona game can be pretty overwhelming considering the incredible number of things…