Persona 2 play log 2: Joker rumours & Mu Continent

Continuing with the Persona play log, here’s part #2! Covering two days of gaming this time.

After finishing Kasugayama High, our party needs to find more leads to the Joker since they have exhausted all their options so far. So we go around the city asking our Rumourmongers about new things they have heard of. A new area named Konan opens up after you talk to the first three Rumourmongers and a fourth one is located there.  Unfortunately the Kuzonoha detective agency is empty at this point so we cannot spread rumours yet =.=

In the meantime, I decide to feed the cat there. Apparently, if you feed it 10000 yen, it’ll give you an Incense Set which increase your stats. Easy right? If we didn’t have to feed it in increments of 100 yen!

Pop it in? Strange way of putting it. *pops in 100 yen* *pops in 100 yen* *pops in 100 yen*…

After 10 minutes of this nonsense, the cat finally spits out my Incense Set. YES! However the madness doesn’t stop here… next area is the police station in Konan.

We find a dog here that also wants my hard earned money! Another 10 minutes wasted popping in money for more stat increasing items. Then we go take a look at Maya’s apartment.

Maya’s awesomeness went up tenfold after that scene. It’s a change from the clean rooms that protagonists have *coughSoujicough* At this point the detectives should be back at the agency, so we go and spread our rumours, buy some weapons, then follow a rumour about a ghost closet in the Abandoned factory…

Hm what a light picture, dunno what happened there. We run into the boss after going around a bit. It’s a freaking CLOSET! I wonder if the table enemies from Persona 4 were modeled after this boss here… It wasn’t too hard a boss though, cast a few fusion spells and it went down in a few turns.

Next destination is the Mu Continent casino where we heard that the idol group named Muses were gathering for a show. The back of the casino is home to a whole entire DUNGEON. I should stop capping random words, but this game is really, really strange.

That dungeon is huge alright. Ran in there for two hours and finally got to the end of it. I still have to collect some Tarot cards so I’ll be spending some more time there but imagine how much money the casino owners must’ve spent on a dungeon extension…

And to finish, the usual party stats. Gained 3 levels since the last log and added 3 hours of gameplay. I really hope it’s not going to be one level per hour ^^;

Persona 2 play log 1

Finished Kasugayama High today, it took a while as I am following an FAQ. I’m not quite sure that it’s making my life much easier though ^^;

The part that took the longest was trying to get Lovers and Strength cards to be able to summon new Personas. Freaking enemies always got angry at my answers for some reason. I’m just trying to be nice!

After playing for two hours I’ve finally managed to obtain the needed 72 Lovers and 48 Strength cards.

Success! Ah, those tarot card illustrations are so pretty aren’t they?

After that grueling training, the team went back to finding the Kasugayama student president. He then tricked the party into a maze without light, which took FOREVER to get out from (thanks Atlus for that traumatizing dungeon). I had to increase the brightness of my screen to even see anything. Cheating? I think not!

Then we go back upstairs in hopes of finding the school president once and for all. Oh and to beat the crap out of him for making me go around in circle around the school for two hours.

Ha! You’re going down!

Up to 8:38 hour of play time after some throughout asskicking. Only level 13 though. Seems like it’s just as slow as Persona 3 and 4

Taking a small detour to the gameplay now.

I have to say, I really like the cycling of attacks until you decide to cancel them; you can work on something else while the battle takes place! It gets a little annoying only if you need to heal someone since you need to switch targets, but it works for stuff like Media.

Ah, we still get maps in older PSX games. The maps are already pretty streamlined, plus I suppose they were needed since there are much more places to visit compared to the latter games in the series.

One of the plot points revolves around rumours becoming true. You can gather rumours from people in the city then go to a detective agency to spread them. You can change how often you get items from events, or the price and quality of weapons and armour and even have optional boss fights. Pretty cool stuff!

The only truly tedious part so far is collecting Tarot cards to summon Personas. It takes forever and contracts break way too easily. How are we supposed to know how devils think?

Persona 2: Innocent Sin finally patched

Finally after my fourth time patching Persona 2, (oh why couldn’t it be the third?) it started working. The first and second disc wouldn’t even load, while the third would lag during the save/load screen, making it nearly impossible to save. I didn’t have this much trouble with Tales of Phantasia, wonder what happened this time?

Haven’t finished playing Persona 4 yet, but the last dungeon I went through drove me nearly batty. Going backwards in the series sounds like a good plan no? Ya right. At least I can play the Persona 2 games in order now that Innocent Sin’s been translated.

Woot, got to the title screen unscathed. Behold the pixeliness! It’s hard to go back to the PSX when games look so good these days.

The menu screen, in full gray glory. The transitions between menu screens are pretty spiffy to see.

The battle screen. Very different system from Persona 3 and 4, but it’s still strangely addictive. Must be the customization aspect.

All in all, I’ve had a blast during the 5 first hours of the game. Here’s hoping that the rest is equally as good

You know you’re a geek…

… when one of the reasons you like a character is because that character assembles PCs and uses Linux?

I know, shocking isn’t it Naoto? You just become more and more awesome by the day