Forum Overview :: Reviews :: You will hate them

[quote name="FABIO"]Only played Persona 3, but I hear 4 is just a refinement of it. If you hate anime teen dialog you will despise it. Half of the game is like an anime version of a Bioware game where you hang out with your needy co-dependent party members to hand hold them through their ridiculous personal problems. The other half is an anachronistic dungeon crawler and combat. You can only directly control the main character and your party AI is retarded. If the main character is disabled by a status ailment you lose complete control of party commands; they will continue to be retarded instead of help you. If the main character is reduced to 0 hitpoints at any point you are booted to the main menu. Attacks that take off one-half to two-thirds your health are common. <b>Group effect instant death attacks have a fairly high success chance and the main character is not immune.</b> There hasn't been this amount of crazy grinding and harshly unforgiving combat since the late 90s. There's supposed to be strategy with disabling enemies with their elemental weakness, but like recent shitty Final Fantasy games scanning is disabled for boss fights when it would matter most. Try to guess their weakness by randomly throwing spells at them and hope they don't reflect one back that kills the main character and sets you back 45 minutes. The only good points is an amusing meta plot about apathetic teens dealing with angst over not imagining a life beyond high school by blowing their brains out with a gun (the only fun part of combat is a character cheerily proclaiming "I can do it!" before swallowing a gun and pulling the trigger), and there's some funny dialog with the two best friends. This is canceled out by the <b>actual</b> plot which is boilerplate anime idealists vs nihilists (as soon as the goth kids show up it all goes to shit). They must have had a different writer doing the two best friends, because every other character is the same generic shit horrible writers come up with: trying to have characters sound smarter than they are by simply making them overly articulate. Also late-90s is the horrible level of voice acting for the non-best friend characters (you WILL shut the voices off). Like Disgaea, it starts off promising with an original dark tone, some amusing dialog, and a combat system that promises strategic depth. Pretty soon the plot turns anime, new characters with grating speeches show up, and the combat system ends up being monotonous frustration.[/quote]