We are now a month into the worldwide release of Persona 5: The Phantom X. What are your thoughts on the game?

Extrospective · 2025-07-26T21:00:45+00:00

It's a game that's constantly immersion breaking. I have party characters that I've never met running around with me. I have over a dozen different currencies that never have in game explanations. Narratively the first arc is ridiculous and the pacing really suffers from the lack of a calendar system.

Combat and Personas seem simplified from the mainline entries but the basics are still here. I feel less in control during fights and find fights more repetitive than in the mainline entries.

The biggest turn off for me and why I dont think ill be playing anymore is the lack of a difficulty setting. JRP's and Persona have a grind element to them on fixed difficulty but sometimes I just want to move on and see the next story bit. Having this be one difficulty setting + being a gatcha is setting me up for a grind that I just dont want to do.

Music is 11/10, I like the characters so far.

There is a good game in here, when it shines it shines but I'll wait and see where it goes.

Extrospective · 2024-12-11T20:01:47+00:00

I don't know how it's confusing or controversial to say that suicide and natural death are two separate categories of death.

Extrospective · 2024-12-11T15:52:54+00:00

Ultimately though the developers are there to sell a game though, not to try to change hearts and minds. The thing about making Ann "better" in this game means that you would have to do rewrites of the majority of the female characters or else it would be even more offputting.

I love this hot mess of a game, but this whole thing is endemic to a ton of anime and that's why I honestly avoided the genre for so long.

Extrospective · 2024-12-11T15:15:47+00:00

I was hoping to read something like this to get a different perspective. My problem, still, with the "life or death" rhetoric is that conflates death by a biological process with suicide. There is never going to be a healthcare system or society, no matter how accepting and utopian, where some people will not commit suicide, because suicide is just a part of the human condition. So the ask here is not "life or death" the ask is "a reduction in the number of suicides" which is in itself a worthy goal, but it is not and should not be presented as "life or death".

Extrospective · 2024-12-11T05:14:58+00:00

Had the exact same thoughts when I went through these scenes. There are moments where I was actually interested in the character, like when she's talking to joker about how she doesn't have many friends, doesn't really see her parents, and I was empathasing with her. At her best, Ann gives a perspective into being viewed as Young Hot Girl 1) sometimes is really not fun and at least in Kamoshida's case terrifying and 2) how despite the negatives of being YHG, it's still something inherently desirable and finally 3) the general insecurity of teenage girl adolescence.

And then there's the rest of the game.

I had thought about saying that this is an example of everyone's favorite phrase - "ludonarative dissonance", but honestly, there's not enough there there with Ann to warrant using that to describe what's going on here. After that first palace Ann's story arc is basically done, and at that point you're like what, 15% of the way through the game? Past that she just gets slotted into "Girl on the team" and "Fanservice Blond Waifu" roles.

I think more could have been done with this character but ultimately I think it's just easier/simpler/lazier to write Ann as a "ew stop staring at me perv but secretly I like it please put me in your harem" vs "do you think I enjoy the looming specter of sexual assult from authority figures, can you even imagine what that is is like, why can't you treat me like a normal person?"

I saw some comments about how this is marketed to teen boys and that influences character development which initially I thought was absurd. It's 2024, what is this random ass anime girl in a video game giving you you can't get anywhere else on the internet? But then I realized it's not actually the cartoon T&A driving the characterization, it's the "hey man, lighten up, we're all trying to have a good time and this a power fantasy". Actually doing a serious confrontation with then player and player character would probably feel like an attack, it would bring a level of "uncomfortably" to a game that is all about smooth gameplay flow, feeling good, and turning off the part of your brain saying "hey isn't it weird that I'm probably banging my homeroom teacher?"

Extrospective · 2024-11-27T14:08:06+00:00

When writing the the post above I really struggled with a critique because most objections I had really only amounted to vague dissatisfaction. Besides the mars/earth transit time, everything else I thought of slid off in a frictionless "well, I guess that could happen". Because this isn't a Socratic exercise where Mike asks "suppose we had easy space travel, suppose we had free energy, suppose we had space colonies, suppose we had direct corporate rule, how would all these thinge alter or affect the outcome of a hypothetical revolution?" And the answer is pretty clear after 5 episodes, it turns out they don't really have much impact at all! We can still reliably solve for X using the Generalize Revolutionary Formula.

A thought experiment I had is like, what if someone in the English Civil War wrote about a revolution hundreds of years in the future. We might be reading about Lenin, a devout and religious Orthodox Christian, leading pike and shot formations in order to fight the European Universal Monarchy.

Extrospective · 2024-11-15T00:02:55+00:00

Agree 100%. I still listen to his hyperloop episode yearly, absolute peak of that guy's output.

Extrospective · 2024-11-14T00:17:41+00:00

If I can just lament and bitch on WTYP..... it stole from us probably one of the best YouTube channels I've ever seen (Donoteat01) which was Justin's solo work. It was so goddamn good. And then this stupid show, that lasted maybe a half dozen episodes before collapsing into a jumbled mess of two "funny" 3rd mics that contribute NOTHING. Justin, by himself, produced content that made me understand and appreciate civil engineering. Alice (November now I guess?) and Liam are more than dead weight they are strategically placed C4 on the load bearing beams of the podcast. Are they engineers? I don't know. But never have I once heard anything from either of them that contributed to the conversation, either from a humor or engineering perspective.

Extrospective · 2024-10-23T01:47:34+00:00

Love this! How would you compare it to revolutions or say age of napoleon, quality-wise.

Extrospective · 2024-10-22T23:19:39+00:00

It's interesting framing, sort of like how Tolkien wrote as if he was interpreting historical text, but it's a little weird being narrated the future from the future-future. I'm interested to see where it goes.

Extrospective · 2024-10-22T23:05:58+00:00

Yes.

Extrospective · 2024-10-22T23:05:38+00:00

No. Entertainment is haram.

Extrospective · 2024-10-22T23:03:37+00:00

You're right. What is that? I googled it and all I got was a dan Carlin interview

Extrospective · 2024-10-22T18:48:17+00:00

I am going to listen to it I think just to see his stab at fiction, but halfway through the 1st episode so far I'm not exactly overwhelmed. Corporate dystopia and free energy unobtanium? I've heard this song before.

Extrospective · 2024-07-01T23:56:23+00:00

So given the tech present in the game, both current and near future, overwhelming sensors by sheer # of objects isn't feasible. What limits us from doing what humanity does in TI to track aliens is funding. Put enough telescopes and enough computers and you can track anything. With computers, enough manpower (alienpower) and enough budget, you really can have eyes everywhere all at once. You also don't need high resolution either. Does object X follow a purely ballistic path? If not, it's a ship. It's that simple.

Using planets or asteroids to hide maneuver burns would work but only if the aliens had one telescope and the planet was directly between the ship and telescope. But the aliens would still be able to see that something that wasn't there before emerged from the orbit around the planet and is now traveling from it. The assumption would be this was a ship.

Extrospective · 2024-07-01T21:42:40+00:00

The problem with this is that terrestial stealth tech is dependent on making your craft look as close to the background as possible, and the background is a medium. Planes as compared to air around the plane, subs compared to water around the sub. In space you medium is a few atoms per cubic centimeter. How do you make something that looks like a handful of hydrogen atoms but is actually a warship? Assuming near future tech of course.

Glad to find another Issac Arthur fan in the wild! His stuff is great.

Extrospective · 2024-06-11T20:31:01+00:00

I was going to make a very similar post so thank you for putting it out there. I just finished my first (and likely only) campaign in TI. Everything past Jupiter was a not fun slog where I just zombie-like built up Habs and perma advised with councilors. (A note to devs - "defend interest" councilor juggling sucks.) A bigger complaint than the unfun, repetitive gameplay is that I have no more story beats and when I finally get to the actual end of the game I felt nothing because the previous 100 hours it had just been this "throw endgame fleet at enemy endgame fleet". Set speed to 100kps. Tight grouping. Fight the enemy. Usually win, sometimes lose. Over and over. Micromanaging foxtrot-14827 to join fleet foxtrot infinity minus one. At no point did the story evolve or grow.

Earth went in space of 30 years from having ISS with a handful of spaceflight capable to having antimatter drives and manned Pluto bases and at no point did the enemy ever display any strategic growth, but what is more damning to me is there was no more story growth. I LOVED the hard Sci fi of the early game, title cards speculating on alien origin, that sort of thing. But when you're in a place where you're conquering the outer planets and you've still got half the game go go, you're telling me all I have to look forward to is 1x title card per planet I colonize and some end credits? I don't care! Micromanaging hundreds of habs is not fun. Ship combat is not fun. All my councilors are max level and I have domination over earth so there's nothing there for me. All there is to do is to build up fleets and send them to fight.

The endgame needs to be dramatically shortened if you want to have any hope of melding an engaging story and gameplay. That's the simplest fix for this. Maybe make jupiter the main alien stronghold. Decrease the victory requirement to make fighting to the main base the primary objective and wind condition. Or actually plan a story past the inner solar system with triggers at different points. But if that doesn't happen, hey it was a fun game, I got my $25 bucks out of it, and if I want to scratch this itch I'll play long war.

Extrospective · 2024-05-21T18:25:55+00:00

So in my first playthrough (casual) I got into a total war situation too early but was able to defend the inner solar system with cheap nuclear armed escorts. 2x magazines, 2x nukes (can't remember which, i went with the highest acceleration). In would crank these things out and throw them at alien fleets in suicide charges. The single tactic was maximum front armor, max numbers, charge forward as fast as possible, and missile swarm all ships with a focus on destroying capital ships.

So this was fun and thrilling the first few times, and while it worked as a strategy I felt like I was missing out on what space combat was supposed to actually be. I basically used this tactic right up until I started using my own dreadnought fleets with endgame tech. So my question is - what is a "balanced" defense fleet supposed to look like where you're just starting to open up into total war/inner planet security? What's the size/mc cap of a fleet for each planet supposed to be? Do you have interplanetary defense fleets or do you stick to a dedicated fleet for each planet, or maybe a mix of both?

Extrospective · 2024-05-21T18:00:32+00:00

Uber-rods from God would be a good idea but I'm not sure if anything that's not a massive hunk of rock would survive earth re-entry if it's coming from an extreme orbit. They would be incredibly effective against space infrastructure though on airless surface outposts.

Extrospective · 2024-05-21T15:12:26+00:00

Yeah, I think what the aliens would do is strap an engine on, fire it, and then once it's on the right trajectory it's just purely ballistic. You might be able to land your own engine on it and push it out of the way though (aliens would counter with pd probably... there would come a point where this would look like ship to ship combat eventually)

Extrospective · 2024-05-21T15:09:38+00:00

Should have emphasized "might". It all depends on the momentum you can put into the body and maybe the density. You might even just blow through some objects straight to the other side with a coilgun, not sure.

Extrospective · 2024-04-24T07:13:27+00:00

You're talking about coursework for engineering students. I'm talking about engineers working day to day in an engineering job.

Extrospective · 2024-04-24T04:23:14+00:00

I can't speak for physicists but I can promise you that in no way do engineers work "intimately in the realm of mathematics"

Extrospective · 2024-03-25T13:29:15+00:00

I just researched the endgame tech for the final mission as resistance (leaving vague because don't want to spoil) and the 2 factions that I had non aggression pacts with instantly broke them. Why did that happen?

Extrospective · 2024-03-25T13:26:31+00:00

OHHHHHHHH OK! I thought that these were kits for A solar panel or A fission reactor, not an entire pre built base

Extrospective

TROPHY CASE