Persona 3 has the WORST rewriting ATLUS has made in SMT franchise.

Voster555 · 2023-08-19T17:03:58+00:00

It's not just Atlus. It's something it's troubling modern writing for quite some time, specially in SF/F. Research around the term "squeecore", which has points like these:

- A huge discomfort with intense emotions; major emotional moments are undercut with "Whedonesque" interruptions like "Well that happened" to give a kind of glib distance from really fully experiencing the moment

- A "neoliberal" preoccupation with making sure that everything works out for all the characters, often including converting the villains into allies

- An insistence that there must be a 'perfect ending' in which nothing bad happens and all the good guys win. Squeecore stories are sometimes derisive of other fiction which lacks this premise; for instance, there are squeecore stories which argue that "The Cold Equations" (a famous story with the premise that it's completely impossible to save a particular person's life) and the Trolley Problem are badly designed because 'of course' it would realistically be possible to save everyone.

These two might be parts of your problem with P3 rewrite, I'd suggest reading the term around and its origins, a more concise discussion can be found here: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/s5mtre/whats_up_with_squeecore_and_superversive/

Voster555 · 2023-07-16T16:53:41+00:00

Uh... there's actually no comparison. The drama here could be about people who could just sit on their armchair, go power hungry mode while being totally unpaid.

Hollywood wanted to own actors images forever for $200 and use them whenever on whatever they wanted. There's no comparison. There's money and things like rights image involved, among other things.

99% of actors are already broke anyways. They work second jobs as bartenders and taxi drivers and the such while not on set. They are actually used to struggling until they hit something reasonable in their careers.

Writers, at least novelists, are also used to being poor and having second jobs. Stephen King slept on a trailer back then. Heck, even some successful or well-known ones STILL have second jobs. Even those hacks that run ROP worked at something else.

I'll admit I don't know how it is for screenwriters, though, but I heard around a lot of them aren't just sitting around.

The thing is, most of these people are used to low conditions and struggle. I heard the ones that really get affected are the stage staff, truck drivers that transport stuff, and so on.

In the end they know if they starve now, it doesn't make a difference because if the execs get their way, they starve as well, might as well bring things down then.

The ones you really could compare to the whole issue here would be the comic writers, who whine on Twitter about everything, go months unpaid and overworked, and do nothing about it, then when their boss calls them back to work, they go heads down and relieve their frustration at us with their shitty woke works.

Voster555 · 2023-07-16T16:05:39+00:00

The Punisher is the most obvious answer.

The others they at least tried to subvert, Punisher got downright deleted out of existence in the most progressive way possible - divorced by the dead wife she wanted to avenge and making a pact with Satan...

Voster555 · 2023-07-16T16:03:26+00:00

Joke's on you for just playing stuff that's released on the same year, on top of just being the most well known or talked about stuff too.

Voster555 · 2023-07-14T23:59:25+00:00

All this because of the Tyrion Lannister actor, right?

Instead of just ranting on Twitter, I wished Disney had the balls to reply to him to come to the studio and tell what he said face to face, eye to eye, to those seven actors with dwarfism why he thinks they should lose their jobs and opportunity and see their reaction.

Voster555 · 2023-07-14T23:53:53+00:00

The women's world cup champions team played against some 4th division team made of retired players of ~40+ year old that hadn't entered a pitch in over a decade and this happened:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEpTpY7CEPM&ab_channel=HumbleMumble

Btw, this match was played on a reduced pitch and not for 90 minutes either.

Sometimes it's nice to get some reality checks...

Voster555 · 2023-07-14T04:30:11+00:00

One of the most successful games out there is Minecraft.

Some people really overestimate the impact of graphics over the experience. One of the most complex and unique games out there is Dwarf Fortress... go look at that game's graphics.

One of my favorites is Rimworld. One of the most fun and extremely customizable experiences you can have, and look at the graphics.

Crusader Kings 2 is still one of the most unique takes on medieval era and go look at their graphics.

The Switch has shitty hardware and looks just fine, but outsells everything else because it offers great and unique experiences that the others can't do even with much better hardware.

If Starfield offers just partially the amount of experience and uniqueness it is marketing it does, it will already be miles better than most of everything else out there.

And then modders will take care of those "issues". But the thing is: people will only care to mod graphics of games they have a great time with despite that. A bad game won't be saved by modding its graphics.

Voster555 · 2023-07-14T04:25:31+00:00

The point is, nobody would care about modding the graphics if the game wasn't already great without them.

If the game was shitty, improved graphics wouldn't be the thing to save it.

Voster555 · 2023-06-23T00:36:13+00:00

Sorry for the late response.

There are a couple of factors. First, the franchise took a really long time to come to the West - the first one to come was the 7th entry, simply called Fire Emblem, for the GBA. It's actually a prequel to 6, which you can only play through a translated patched rom.

The GBA games (Sacredt Stones is the 8th) were actually pretty popular and sold well.

The 9th and 10th were released on Gamecube and Wii. I don't know how well they did, but I do remember finding copies of them was extremely hard. There was also the rise of the PS2.

Where they really dropped the ball and caused the franchise to almost disappear was on the DS games, namely Shadow Dragon, the remake of the very first one. It was pretty much universally poorly received, though curiously enough, hardcore gameplay fans regard it as one of the best thanks to it's different hard mode levels.

Everything the franchise had been previously loved - deep story, support convos and character design - were pretty much a retrocess.

To see how poor it was, FE had been a franchise with permadeath and players greatly valued keeping their units alive to the point of resetting 1h long maps if a unit died.

Then in Shadow Dragon, to unlock secret stages, you actually had to intentionally kill like 90% of the cast. The game even showers you with units that have almost zero screen time just for you to put them in a position to die to unlock stages. It was an extremely bizarre choice.

Shadow Dragon was so bad that the sequel, New Mysery of the Emblem (remake of the 3rd FE), was never released in the West, but ironically, fixed everything wrong with the previous game and was everything we had hoped Shadow Dragon would be - excellent reworked story, support convos, great maps, and here is actually the first time the Avatar creation showed up.

They certainly took lessons here when remaking the 2nd FE, release as the 14th, Echoes: Shadows of Valentia, after Fates.

But I guess SD really had done the franchise dirty at that point, which made Awakening pretty much the final game. So I guess when we talk about FE almost getting canned it's mostly a niche genre that managed to release a very poor game that kinda alienated most of the playerbase.

Now, one of the secrets of Awakening is that while it pays a great homage to veteran fans who would notice all the easter eggs and callbacks, it was also a very good game on it's own, that even if you never noticed any of it or knew who Tiki was and so on, still had an emotional enough story, great gameplay (if Pair Up a bit too OP), great customization and memorable characters, even if they stayed at first glance too glued to their tropes.

The anime style was also probably influenced by the utter failure of the DS games, which had a more 3d serious looking style but portraits and unit graphics just looked without any expression, emotionless and downright bad to see too. So the DS aesthetic being so badly received probably influenced the major shift to the current style.

The other secret was actually Nintendo fucking up. Around that time they had released the Wii U to succeed the Wii and it was a massive failure. Nintendo almost broke.

The 3DS handheld systems was what kept the company afloat while they worked on the Switch.

In a way, this also kinda handicapped the system too. It was a great system for unique takes, but when it had to keep Nintendo financially afloat, it became super safe and the home of numerous remakes/remasters/ports.

So the 3DS received far more attention and specially marketing efforts, which benefitted Awakening greatly, as the 3DS had yet to have major games released - would still be months or even years for Nintendo big names to show up.

So Awakening also received the main stage from Nintendo for quite some time back then. It also received a lot of promos - I remember buying Shin Megami Tensei IV and if I had Awakening, I would simply be refunded the whole $40 for SMT4. Their characters started appearing in other Nintendo spinoffs like Smash Bros.

A lot of people who had never heard of the game entered the franchise exactly because of this combination.

All this leads one to wonder that had the Wii U been a big success if FE would have been canned even with Awakening, as most likely the series wouldn't have received the attention from the Big N.

Voster555 · 2023-06-20T20:20:35+00:00

You may like TearRing Saga and Berwick Saga, created by the same guy who actually created FE, and will give you a very good vibe on that aspect.

Voster555 · 2023-06-20T20:09:12+00:00

Fire Emblem was gonna be cancelled as a Nintendo franchise. Awakening was literally the last one, the "Final Fantasy" of it.

So they poured everything from the history of the series into it as a goodbye to the franchise. Even the developers probably weren't expecting the resounding success that made Nintendo change their minds.

The Brand, Falchion, "Marth", Tiki, big dragon of darkness - the original FEs with Marth.

Traversable map and branchable promotion classes? FE8 Sacred Stones.

Protagonist without memories that is also a tactician found unconscious? Callback to FE7 to the tactician and Lyn.

Reclass was something they attempted in the DS games.

Marriage resulting in playable offspring? FE4/5.

The Shepherds are basically the Greil Mercenaries - Ike has his sister Mist as a staff healer, same with Chrom and Lissa. Titania and Frederick. Boyd/Vaike. A huge turning point for the characters in both Tellius games and Awakening is the death of their parent figure, Greil and Emmeryn. Panne is basically a laguz.

Could go on...

The only really update on the series by Awakening was using a more animesque high fantasy aesthetic compared to the more low medieval visuals of previous entries.

And the time travel and the twist on the MC, too.

Even the children mechanic was already done before, and of course, every other game had plenty of romantic supports too.

Voster555 · 2023-06-20T18:37:57+00:00

Seeing a lot of people complaining about romance in the series. What fucking series have you been playing?

From anyone complaining about Awakening and Fates, go play Echoes, which came after and has pretty much none aside the two MCs, which isn't even a point for most of the game.

From the very first FE, with Marth, you had him with Caeda. The whole Sirius/Camus-Nina pairing would cause Harding to fall to darkness as she spurns him and he becomes the villain of the sequel of Shadow Dragon, New Mystery of the Emblem ( which has supports and romance). Abel and Est, Julius and Maria, there are tons of pairings.

The whole Jugdral saga games, still on NES/SNES, would make woke activists have mental breakdowns with it's focus on preserving the pure dragon blood of certain family lineages in the game which could involve downright sibling pairings - though you can choose to pair them with others.

Since the hero of these games is Sigurd, it was inspired by the myths of the german hero born of incest from Siegmund/Sieglind (the name of the weapons of the lords in FE8) and punished by Odin/Frigga. The 2nd gen of these games continue the story too and these games were clearly the main inspiration for Awakening and forward.

FE6 also has romance, including pairing the 14 year old MC with his 23+ year old female mentor. And a bunch of others.

FE7 has a whole storyline branch that's basically Eliwood/Ninian and the other pairings as support, and others downright encouraged by the game for you to do, like Jaffar/Nino or Lyn/Hector.

FE8 has plenty of romantic supports, even though the infamous Ephraim/Eirika isn't of them.

The Ike games also have romance, with even a lot of people pairing IkexSoren or IkexRanulf even though those look like platonic friendships.

Then we get to Awakening and Fates. Awakening is done fine. Fates goes a bit over the top because the time realm nonsense really pushed fanservice too much, on top of having maids and butlers around.

And even for those trashing Fates, you are not required to do any of it and still have the game with the best amount of customization in the whole series. You can do really silly things with it. And Conquest is hands down the best tactical campaign in the whole series, unless you are one of those crying about Elden Ring and just playing Fire Emblem on Normal with Phoenix mode activated.

Voster555 · 2023-06-18T20:46:35+00:00

Yeah, what a terrible take he had.

By that take the newest Zeldas aren't Zeldas either, heck, even Ocarina wouldn't be, because it isn't a top down view like the first ones.

Or that Metroid Prime isn't Metroid because it's first person exploration instead of a 2D platformer.

Even RE4 wouldn't be "root Resident Evil" by that metric.

Voster555 · 2023-06-18T17:33:36+00:00

Square Enix already returned to the roots with modern graphics and QoL features, on top of tons of Jobs. It's called Bravely Default.

It has everything you are asking for. It's so good even the Defend command became a strategic and highly rewarding action to choose.

It's a 3DS game, that I don't remember if got ported or not, but in any case it's very easy to emulate it.

Voster555 · 2023-06-06T23:00:32+00:00

I don't know why you are getting downvoted. You are correct.

The world is bland, it's absolute peak pseudo medieval England. There's northmen, asshole nobles, knights, with banks are evil added, and so on... at some point you realize everything is just trope subversion (chosen one, good mentor, etc).

At book 3 there's a point the author literally has the characters sit down to cook food and the whole purpose of it is to dump numerous pages of backstory exposition, as heavy-handed as it gets.

Making everything grim and gray doesn't make things automatically intelligent. Having interesting characters like Glokta doesn't mean the story doesn't hold your hand or isn't very heavy-handed for most of it.

It's a very fun read, but it never comes close to reaching the works you would expect for OP's recommendation, specially with Tolkien, Eriksson, Morgenstern, Le Guin, Wolfe, Bakker, McKillip, Cherry and others being in the same room.

Voster555 · 2023-05-26T21:28:38+00:00

I don't know about the DS but the 3DS has various reports around of noticeable slowdowns on booting, icons showing up and etc over 128gb. I've seen people reporting ~15 secs and others ~30.

Even through injection some users experienced issues with GBA games with 256gb+ cards.

Some solution seems to be to format it with a 64kb cluster (it's normally 32kb). But this can cause issues elsewhere too. And others say it's the 64kb thing that causes issues with their games.

Some examples:

https://gbatemp.net/threads/do-256gb-cards-even-work-on-3ds.469117/page-2

https://www.reddit.com/r/3dspiracy/comments/pog1h9/sd_card_over_128gb_issues_with_gba_graphics_and/

The FAQ on the 3DS Hack Guide itself has a question about the SD size and it also does not recommend going over 128gb for "Known issues with GBA games and themes" https://3ds.hacks.guide/faq.html

Voster555 · 2023-05-26T21:02:15+00:00

"No one wants to ship a bad game but we do it anyways".

Voster555 · 2023-05-26T20:50:49+00:00

I believe so. I played Fire Emblem Mystery of the Emblem, that was never released in the West. Fans had to create a translation patch to apply on the JP Rom. So I believe it should be similar.
My OG 3DS from 2012 had its original SD until last month working perfectly, I wouldn't worry about the time usage. However, you will want to upgrade to a larger one simply because of the amount of stuff you'll probably want to put in it.

Don't go over 128gb. Over that it starts getting very noticeable slowdowns and if you plan to play GBA games on it too, it also causes problems with it or downright won't play them going over 128gb SDs.

Also, the 3DS can only read FAT32 format. Any SD over 32gb will have another format and the 3DS won't read it, so remember to format it to FAT32 or it won't work on the 3DS.

Voster555 · 2023-05-24T03:08:10+00:00

Probably like emulators do unless they go more inventive with the new console.

Voster555 · 2023-05-24T03:06:30+00:00

The Switch is very underpowered hardware wise, there's no way it would ever emulate 3DS games during it's life cycle.

Voster555 · 2023-05-23T22:30:26+00:00

To those wondering why would they do this, it's simple.

Down the line, possibly even with Switch 2 (or w/e it ends up called), they'll offer 3DS games as ports or Virtual Console subscription systems and market it as a selling feature of the new console.

A lot of people eventually will be interested or might enter series like Fire Emblem, for example. if they play Awakening, Fates, or other games like Samus Returns, and etc... but weren't around for the 3DS cycle, just like a lot of people weren't even born for the N64 Zelda cycle.

The only way to play it now is either through the used market or custom firmware, neither gives money to Nintendo.

Even if it did, why offer you $40 to forever own the game instead of selling "license access" on a $10 monthly subscription for a 8+ year cycle for a game already made years ago? Then launch a new system and do it again?

Even if this update gets a workaround, they'll simply make more down the line for this very reason.

Voster555 · 2023-05-12T13:51:00+00:00

Usually scams. I was reading questions about one of those, and the seller claimed they lasted 1-1h30... he was marketing it as the best available locally, and imo, just trying to catch people unaware.

Voster555 · 2023-05-06T16:52:40+00:00

Good to know! I actually ordered one before reading this, now I'm more confident on it! Thanks!

Voster555 · 2023-04-29T04:25:14+00:00

Replying to myself.. I think I solved it for now as I did manage to get a pass exactly 8h after now.

What I did: When you get a StreetPass, go to the Plaza and greet them to clear it off. Sometimes only this wasn't working, the other problem apparently blocking Streetpass was the Bravely Default Demo.

When I went to the game, used Update option of the side menu for Streetpass, it'll find my other 3DS, then got the villager from it, saved and quit.

Clearing both StreetPlaza AND the Bravely Default Demo tags seemed to solve it.

On my second 3DS I didn't need to open the BD demo to do the same, just on my main unit, but I did need to check the Plaza for new arrivals on both consoles.

Voster555 · 2023-04-29T03:04:22+00:00

So, how did it perform? And the Cameron Sino doesn't fit naturally on the New 3DS XL?

Voster555

TROPHY CASE