That’s literally every game though. It doesn’t describe anything specific about Persona. You can probably guess that things like boosts and amps increase attacks. Though the level of attacks would basically be unknown later because the choice of words is ass.
@@Stop1601 I had no idea about buffs and debuffs until my second playthrough. #Looking back I still have no idea how I beat Shido let alone Yaldabouth.
@@Stop1601 except that's what makes this guys opinion so invalid, he plays literally every persona game lmao. but people who have no previous knowledge on games or p games would get shit on in merciless- they would definitely need guides or just finish the game once to understand how to beat no NG merciless
@@kieroncampion120 The flaw in an argument like this is that well... there are tons of games where you can be as good as you want but it's hella hard anyway. Persona is not difficult but really who the hecks cares? I veer towards SuperButterBuns opinion on Persona difficulty where it's more about the experience itself, I just want cool animations and abilities.
@@cocorico2-gm5vi My personal opinion was that difficulty doesn't matter because it's easier for newcomers to enjoy the game so I'm really not understanding this comment. I have played every Persona game but I don't know how that's entirely relevant because the only reason I mentioned negatives regarding the difficulty was to be fair and see it from both sides, which I followed up on by mentioning all the positives of it as well. Maybe I'm not understanding where you're coming from, so if that's the case, let me know.
My first persona game was Persona 5 and, in reality, if you're playing without knowing the bosses,it's quite difficult because, for example, i was stuck at Madarame's boss fight. Then I played Persona 3 Reload and the hanged boss fight was very difficult for me.
Yeah I agree. When I first P5R, I had already played P3 and 4 on their hardest difficulties, along SMT 3 on hard mode. I had heard Merciless makes the game too easy (I tried it in NG+, it really does) so I went for hard mode and I got killed about 16-20 times in the first 2 palaces, after that I didn't die at all until Okumura, but after that nothing could touch me. I think with basically all of the persona and SMT games, the early game is the hardest, but when it opens up to you more, if you know how to build your character you can melt everything.
Yeah like with most RPG's P4's main source of difficulty is in the early game where you have extremely limited resources so recovering SP isn't that easy making grinding quite challenging. After that though, it's honestly the easiest game in the series IMO.
This is true of all 3 Persona games, the most fun you can have with the dungeon crawling is completing all of Thebel, Yukiko's Castle and Kamoshida's Palace in one day
@@Akechi_The_Phantom_Detective I mean, the only two bosses that ever game me trouble were Shadow Teddie (defeated at first attempt regardless), Shadow Yukiko (took me far more then I'd like to admit), and the Contrarian King (that bitch!). But even after that I'm still struggling with SP management.
@@Akechi_The_Phantom_Detectivethere are also very specific tactics for shadow yukiko and kanji fights, like wanting chie either mabufu or having rakasha against kanji which even the anime showcased that funny enough, it’s just very linear for some reason which is strange how afterwards you can beat the rest with a vague strat that’s more or less the same
totally agreed with what you said. I played my first persona game a year ago (Persona 5 royal) and it was my first turn based game. The fact that it wasn’t too hard made me a lot more engaged in the game. Now that i am good, i still find persona 5 royal fun to play for it’s mechanics, story and characters
I wouldn’t say FES is easy It’s… more like…. Sometimes they are challenging and the Tartarus bosses were actually fun to face. I wouldn’t say FES is impossible to complete but it’s the hardest in the series besides Persona 1.
Wait people think P1 is hard? I’m playing through SQQ rn and I don’t find it that hard, just kinda annoying (especially Thanatos tower). Bosses haven’t been hard so far.
@@pokestar9994honestly suprised by that, really the hardest persona game is roughly in the midpoint of the series eternal punishment, old versions of p3 (including portable) and p4 vanilla, p3 fes maybe the hardest
Hmm, maybe a good middle ground is to keep the easy-medium-hard the average persona experience while making Merciless's difficulty more akin to SMTVV medium/hard ? (only smt game im playing through so far and basically thebonly comparison i can make) I feel like then we'd have some sort of compromise for both players.
To me persona games are just right at the beginning you're under leveled, as you grow stronger you start to unlock better gear, skills, and personas, so by the time you clear your first playthrough you beat the final boss no problem, then when you go to new game plus you're broke as a reward for clearing the game, and it give you more time to get all the strongest weapons, personas and complete social links you might of miss your first run, so yeah I think its perfectly balanced since persona games have always been about the story and getting all the persona unlock, not how hard is the game lol.
I´d say playing persona for the first time and playing several entries to the series changes the difficulty a lot. Knowledge of the mechanics is such a game changer, without you might struggle, with knowledge you win in the first round of most fights. Part of it is that weaknesses/resistances are not allways obvious like in pokemon for example where you would clearly recognize a water or fire type. But already knowing this beforehand and adjusting your tactics is insane.
Time management is crucial in Persona and honestly, the Life Sim side is what makes it "difficult" I recently beat NG+ Reload... I had an inoptomal use of the Hierophant/Hermit/Moon/Star/Sun and uh.... yeah, bit me in the butt. But that's like the sort of thing you need to know, for maxed out S. Links with the max number of them. If I'd used my time better, well, let's just say I wouldn't have missed Aeon and Lovers (romanced Mitsuru, so since I lost too many days, Yukari ended up taking the hit instead of Mitsuru), just a dumb NG+ mistake, but damn can optimal time usage really make the game far easier...
Thank you to @YandereGogeta for the heart! Additionally, I would like to add, when the Persona 4 "Rerun" that we are kinda half expecting to come out in a few years... I'm just sayin' if they change around Naoto's kit to add in Kouha/Eiha (or rather, Kouga/Eiga minimum), just saying she's 72 Agility and 69Magic (nice), with 50 luck, only 3rd to Chie and Yukiko... (53/60 respectively), as long as no stats are changed for the cast... she's gonna be able to destroy anything Light or Dark weak, with instakills as backup, which is quite nice indeed with her current stat spread! Also the reason why I'm using Golden stats from the "Golden" Personas is I highly doubt that they'd use base P4 since a fair amount of people are now most familiar with P4G between the main release and the re-release of it. Thus, if the do a "Rerun" of it, I'd expect for the "Golden" content to likely be kept in. Would be weird if they didn't, imho.
I would say that later Person games are easier simply because it's less convoulted to IV breed, EV train the "pokemon" you want with the TM you want on them. You got skill cards and you can select when skills your new person will inherit, and you can buy back the personas you used.
I was never much of a turn based guy until like Baldurs Gate 3 dropped. Then I played Persona 3 Reload for the very first time and said “I’ll play on hard” but honestly forgot part way through. It was my first genuine JRPG experience and it whooped my ass until I sat down to really experiment with what I had and what I could do. I ended up beating the final boss pretty easily but every journey into Tartarus or full moon events were always filled with anxiety cause I was never fully confident that I wouldn’t get curveballed. Anyways after 100%ing the game I moved into P4G and honestly…I still got my ass kicked at times. I played on hard again and Shadow Mitsuo and Ameno Sagiri both completely cooked me and forced me to again go and revise my strategies and my set up. I eventually got through but other than those two bosses I think I had learned so much from Persona 3 that I was able to beat that game with a much easier time. These games are only hard to me when you’re learning them and you aren’t actively overpowering yourself whether by choice or by accident. And that’s perfect for me. I love the collectors side of the games, getting all the personas, best gear, costumes, and achievements especially. I’m 6 trophies away from the P4G platinum even. These games have really educated me on JRPG’s and similar genres that hell I even want to play shin megami tensei 3, the one that’s supposedly super hard but has fucking DANTE. So TLDR, yeah they’re easy but that’s never been a fault for me at least
Even if some people find the original versions (Not FES, Golden, or Royal) of Persona 3, 4, and 5 too easy that's not the same as the games actually being easy. A truly easy game would be something literally anyone could beat, and games that easy do exist. The Persona games aren't something everyone could finish getting to the end of, and that's why it's difficulty matters. No different than any how some people can't beat other hard games, while others find those games pretty easy themselves.
Persona 5 Royal had weird difficulty - Merciless boosted the damage on hitting weakness for both the player and enemies. You're theoretically more able to be one-shot by enemies. However, Madarame's Will Seed item allows you to eliminate Joker's weaknesses, and the extra damage you get from your half of the effect allows you to one-turn many more enemies and pass boss dps checks much easier - and dead enemies cant one-shot you. Then theres the Royal additions of Showtime attacks, Persona traits, Confidant changes and Baton Pass changes, all of which make Royal much easier than vanilla P5. It turns out Hard difficulty in Royal is much more likely to get you stuck at certain bosses, since its harder to get enough damage. Okumura in particular was a brutal DPS check that basially required abusing Baton Pass with Joker, Noir, and two teammates using Psi damage items (hope you brought enough!). Not knowing this, I did my P5R playthrough on Hard. Anyway, I recently decided to replay base p5. I chose Normal difficulty. Despite proving myself capable of higher difficulties, I'd rather not force myself to optimise the fun out of the game. It will probably start feeling too easy regardless, but Im mainly here for the story.
I agree with what you said while Persona 5 Royal is to easy for me the gameplay of Persona 5 Royal is polished that it makes me love playing persona 5 despite it being easy.
At the end of the day, it boils down to preferences. Some people are more casual and want to play on an easier difficulty, while other people want to be challenged as much as possible
To put it simply, no and I kind of feel that's the case with most RPG's because it's a numbers game and once you figure out how to turn them to your advantage you can't really unlearn that information. In RPG's I always find the only true challenge on repeat visits are self-imposed challenge style runs. I do appreciate Episode Aegis coming back with Heartless Difficulty and I think Strikers and Q2 did a fantastic job with their Merciless and Risky Difficulties as well.
I think Persona can be easy overall, but I enjoy the combat mechanics too much for the devs to just get rid of them all. Baton Pass, Theurgey, making unkillable Personas, etc. are all fun things to take advantage of. And they certainly COULD make challenging fights if they wanted. Just look at Elizabeth in P3R. If I didn't look it up online, I'd have no idea how to defeat her, and even then it was a pain the ass! And with SMT, I'm able to take out most enemies easily, yet I'm still having a rough time trying to beat Shiva right now. I've got all my party leveled to 99 with some great abilities, yet I still can't beat him. I'm sure I'll get there eventually, but I'm trying to not look up easy strategies online. The point is it's not the tools Atlus gives you that's the problem, they COULD make more challenging fights, they just choose not to.
I think the reason they choose not to is because even though they can be pretty good at communicating to the player how to make yourself stronger, they try to idiot proof it to an extent. There's nothing wrong with making a game that just about anyone can get through from start to finish, but I'd rather that be saved for normal mode. But honestly I think P3R on the hardest mode is the best balance, you are able to die fast but they don't take any of your tools away, so you still have plenty of ways to counter it. A bit too many if you're well versed in fusion but overall I think P3R did the best job of it.
I’ll have to disagree. If you have to mod the game to make it even slightly challenging, then it’s a flaw. I get wanting newcomers to become adjusted to the game’s overall mechanics but that’s what Normal Mode is for. Veterans should be able to enjoy a more difficult adventure. Persona only got easy when they started doing the remakes and tipped the balance in the players favor. Persona 4 OG on expert mode is extremely difficult but the challenge was still fair in my opinion. The Devs give you all these options but don’t adjust the enemy’s to respond to your added skills. Maybe in higher difficulties, they could implement more aggressive enemy formations and strategies or debuffs that limit your super moves or something. The 1st palace or month of P5R and P3R respectively were perfect in terms of difficulty in my opinion. Everything falls apart afterwards because they don’t take into account the confidant buffs or theurgies and passives. I really do hope that the Answer is a more difficult section of the game but it’s prolly not likely lmao
Yeah this pretty much hit the nail on what I was gonna say tbh. The problem is that in the case of P5R and P3R the games are barely designed around the 90 mechanics you can use to destroy enemies it seems like they're really only designed around the party before they unlock them. I think both (especially P5R.) are fun games but I just wished the games would bite back more often. I like your idea for increased difficulties having more aggressive enemy formations. Imagine a weird ass Tartarus boss in P3R that would just turn off theurgies on merciless.
@@spinballproduction9678 Yeah I still believe both games are tons of fun, I just agree with you wish they fought back against you. It’s frustrating talking about the topic of difficulty with someone and their first response is “if you want it to be more difficult, don’t use theurgies or showtimes”. If the game is going to introduce me to new mechanics, I would expect them to balance the game with those additions in mind, not to nerf myself on purpose.
@@LuisParson i’m kind of mixed on that because on one hand i agree but on the other I think P4’s combat is super dull compared to every other mainline game so a way to speed it up is nice.
@@spinballproduction9678 You can speed it up by turning the difficulty down. Persona 4 Golden even has infinite revive when you die. This feature is good for those that just want to play for the story.
I'm actually happy that games can have those super easy modes. I have a full time job and have to deal with other shit in my day to day life. So having easy games were I can experience the whole story in persona without having to grind an already stupidly long game is appreciated. I finished P3R and P5R and if it wasn't easy I wouldn't even finished them bc those are incredibly long as they are
One of the few not great parts of p3r in my opinion is the difficulty for sure. I'll admit though, I got bodied sometimes. Yet, for the most part, I never grinded and avoided leveling up as much as I could late game in fear of making the bosses too easy. Which still inevitably happened, but the fights were so hype and fun that it didn't really impact me in the end. Having episode aigis take it one step further though sounds fun for sure.
After playing reload, I actually had a minority opinion on it’s difficulty I didn’t pay for the day 1 dlc which let’s be frank makes it easier and why royal gets easier by the day as they kept intergrating the DLCs in the base game and no longer becomes a pay2win and my run of the reload I felt mostly fair not too easy or hard somewhat on par to p4g, i even died a couple times
@nightwish1453 your reminding me of how broken p5r could really be with ryuji's instakill passive perk and even myriad truths from izanagi-no-okami if someone wanted to just focus on the story. So honestly, p5r may be easier, but I would for sure say p4g is harder than both. That or I just suck at it, either one.
games don't need to be difficult, they need to be engaging and fun. When it comes to RPGs breaking the game IS the game, and it's fun. So it being easy or difficult boils down how well you understand the mechanics, which, you know, is like the point of RPGs. I'm someone who finds Dark Souls pretty easy, because I understand what the game is asking from me. And I don't even create crazy builds, I just know how to dodge well enough and not get greedy. Is Dark Souls easy? Well, for me, yes, but for others no. What I'm saying is, Difficulty is arbitrary, just make the damn game fun, fair and engaging.
I feel like giving the players more options does make the game significantly easier. Not Persona but the same thing happened with Octopath Traveler. The first game was pretty difficult (also my first real JRPG I ever played) but in the second you got latent powers which made every fight trivial, especially with characters like Hikari being able to Hienka and OHKO bosses in one turn. Though if you don’t use the latent powers, I hear the difficulty is more similar to the first game. My conclusion, when games give you these broken abilities, I think they should at least give bosses double the health they usually have.
After finishing Metaphor Refantazio I honestly feel like it hit a pretty sweet spot in terms of difficulty on Hard. Feels like we might get some really solid difficulty options in future persona games!
that doesn't make a difference, some people saying that have never even played smt. Kingdom Hearts 2 is a piece of piss on anything below critical mode, but on crit mode you can die really quickly, but you yourself are capable of dealing lots of damage, so if you play defensively and look for openings it is both hard and fair, making it fun. But that doesnt stop casual players from just smacking stuff and winning. It's the same with these games, if normal is a piece of piss, whatever, it's made so basically anyone can do it so who cares. But some of these games are just not hard even on their hard modes. What's the point of a hard mode that isn't hard? You're talking down to smt fans like they're the problem. While I agree with you that saying a game is bad if it's easy is just stupid, but that doesn't make you an smt fan.
I respect it but I think your perspective on the persona games may be coming from someone who is way too experienced with their base gameplay systems. If you have been an atlus fan beforehand or played the persona games extensively, playing p5 or some of the modern titles is going to feel a bit too easy for you. That does not mean they are easy games. Heck if you’ve played the smt titles you have essentially been through an extended boot camp for the one more system. As someone who started with p5, it was relatively difficult when compared to other games in the jrpg genre. A lot of games have tools to help you break them. P5 royal has more but other players that aren’t atlus trained super soldiers aren’t going to catch those niche systems that would normally make the game too easy.
It’s a sad week to be a Lamar Jackson fan 😔 don’t ask your friend what happened. I did say something similar to this video on your hottest persona takes discussion post although I had a couple of different reasons but in general I really agree with this take. Great video man
The Heartless difficulty for Persona 3 Reload Episode Aegis is perfect if you want a real challenge that is fair but feels like the odds are stacked against you.
@@cringekid3993 Yeah, that fight takes way too long and its very boring, it doesn't do anything till the last phase and even then the mechanic is "Don't hit bad guy if shield is up"
Since playing smt on a long time when i played persona i refused to play anything lower than merciless the normal mode made me feel boring, but that depends on the person i enjoy harder difficulties since it makes me engage with the system and how the game should be played and yeah knowing what to expect and how the turn based didnt change too much makes it easy to exploit it on my favor
i think reload vs vengeance is a good example, both have very fun game mehanics but i find myslef being sorta disappointed with reloads gameplay because the damage output of theurgies can be way too high sometimes and the enemies can barely do much to you, in vengeance your damage output is high and you can pull off some nasty shit, but you also have to work for that nasty shit and the enemies damage output is on the same level as you so you just get punished more so i just kinda wish the balancing of reload was on the same level as vengeance or even FES, which was still easy but not as baby mode as p3re was, at least not until you get siegfried i also just generally kinda like the mechanics of FES like its specific one more/knockdown system more but thats a different topic lol
Persona 3 FES keep in mind it’s like babies first shin megami Tensei but everything revolving Tartarus was harder or at least more stressful It’s not exactly difficult but the fact you can be grinding for hours and then die abruptly due to critical hits or tiredness or the reaper. It was exciting and scary at the level of a horror game. So 3 was my favorite in the series I thought 4 was disappointing and I just hated 5. I’m talking mainly for combat. You know I honestly miss The Reaper In persona 3 he comes out whenever he wants But persona 4 your actively looking for him and 5 and 3 Reload. You’re actively waiting 15 to 20 minutes The fear factor is dead. You know what that’s what I like about Persona 3 the most it had a fear factor
id argue that difficulty matters, especially with merciless' non required fight death thing, seeing as how i died to girimehkala in okumura's palace and then got sent back a month and a half to halfway through futaba's palace
It does matters. Otherwise Persona will just be a visual novel, with a little bit of dungeon crawling with no challenge. The fighting might as well be CGs with text. The reason I replayed Persona 4 many times was not because of the story. It was because of the gameplay and the challenge.
Difficulty does matter depending on what you want and your circumstances. Do you love the gameplay and crave for more of it? Play on the hardest difficulty, you'll spend plenty of time grinding and making builds. Do you dislike the gameplay or do you want to see if you like it while having a playthrough that doesn't stress you out? Play on easy difficulty depending on the game. If the game is too easy you can always figure out ways to end things quickly which can be fun as well. As long as you're having fun that's all that matters, there's a lot of things that stress you out that actually matter in life so when you game you should just relax and have fun.
Persona 5 Phantom X is a Japanese gacha game but it is from a popular franchise and from a really big company so the budget is a lot higher for this game. And it's confirmed to get a console and PC version so this is definitely a game worth checking out
Man i just like getting smacked over and over so when i do get over the hurtle it feels so good like whats the point of doing something if its not a challenge
Personally i like a challenge so id like the persona games to be harder however you can always put self imposed challenges on yourself to make it harder. Stuff like only using the protag or only the base persona make the game harder for you specifically but still lets casual players have a good time. (Although doing a solo minimum battle run of p3r was easier then my casual playthrough since i became so overleveled due to all the xp going to protag so you gotta be careful with every mechanic)
I think the way difficulty works in SMT in general is great. It’s only as easy you want to or can make it if you understand the mechanics of the game well enough, like most games. Know your elemental weaknesses, and you should do fine, more or less. Other than that, it’s down to how forgiving RNJesus wants to be.
Currently playing P3P, P3R & P4G (already finished P5R& P5S), and I would just like to say some BS features exist REGARDLESS of the difficulty, like in P3P, enemies with Mamudo (which barely hits when u use it) somehow have extreme luck boost, making them guaranteed insta kills
More recently, I’ve been trying to challenge myself more with games playing it on hard and even with fighting games, but also just having fun. I just like challenging myself and having fun doing it. I guess you can say I’m like Goku, but I will say I’m more of a Sonic, but anyway. It doesn’t matter if a game is challenging hard or anything above it about having fun with a game, if you’re not having fun why are you even playing it? But that’s just me those.
Would love if you read this comment. So regarding difficulty I have some thoughts about P5R and P3R. So for the first let’s say 1/3-1/2 of the games they have a good difficulty curve (assuming max difficulty on both hard and merciless for P5 & P3 respectfully). Boss fights you have to claw your way through and win on a hairs breath you have to use your items to the max and if you aren’t over leveled there is no telling if even that’ll help you (Think high priestess fight in P3 and the painting boss fight in P5) and the fights have tension. But in almost every playthrough there is almost a guarantied massive drop in the difficulty at one point or another. This happens whenever the player has an overflow of Yen and their compendium reaches a Critical mass to where they can really start abusing the fusion mechanic, and calculators, to create diabolical creations and ANY build in the game halfway through the story. The ONLY limit in terms of balancing that persona has is the level cap from fusing personas above your MC level, which feels really bad and shit imo. Surprisingly enough P5R has a great solve for this with the spending more Yen for higher level Personas but consequently makes this drop in difficulty happen at a set point in time instead. The main issue is unless you are going to overhaul the core functions of the Velvet room (compendium and fusing). The players power is always going to scale exponentially where it starts off SLOW and then goes to the moon within about a hour of gameplay, the gameplay being menus scrolling in the Velvet room. Therefore the main thing i’d suggest to adjust is to stop scaling the game’s difficulty on a linear progression or a small exponential bias and instead makes the enemies scale almost as extremely as the protagonist by mid game. So for P5R I’d say start cranking the scales by the end of Kaneshiro and for P3R by time you get all the party members. Basically force the players to start using all of the Velvet room resources by those points or have NO chance to win. (max difficulty obviously). To indicate this better you can also scale the party members in the same way where in the beginning their there and maybe cannon fodder but by the end the have kits that you’d be proud to have on one of your personas on your rooster. Like a party member learning all auto Ma buffs by max level where you don’t nescissarly need that on your rooster. One way you could make the timing easier for when to crank the dial on the difficulty is to limit the function of the Velvet room in some way until the player is ready to go ham and create a eldric god. So like limit the amount of fusions per day until you level up Igor Bond to a certain point or lock the compendium until you get to a certain point in the story, or severely limit the compendium. The main thing I’m trying to say overall is giving the player access to unlimited fusions (fuse) and unlimited personas for those fusions (compendium) will allow players to create endgame level threats within 10-15 hours or the first third of the game. I know the level cap is still a thing but in P3R it’s Lv55 for a broken Sieg build and I forget the level for P5 but you can make a persona in 5 minutes at lv 25 that’ll last you till the latter half of the game, so that’s a cop out.
FES is pretty similar though. You abuse Getsu-ei until you can fuse Thor and then the game is GG because you just max out Thor's stats and spam Thunder Call.
Could be fairly interesting to have difficulty scale differently as you get more access to broken Personas. I think it would be cool if lets say you have a level 99 Persona, that no matter where you are in the game, enemies could scale up to that level and have attacks and kits to match it. This would most likely be reserved to Merciless or something like that, but I think that would be pretty dope. I don't know if you've played Persona 5 Strikers, but that game on the hardest difficulty kinda does that where in the second playthrough, the enemies are all level 99 and you can even die in like one hit during the tutorial, which makes it a little bit hard even with NG+ Personas. Mainline games could do something like this and I think it would work
I think they did the right thing with new Persona Games. The key is the story, characters, music and fun gameplay. And you can chose how you want to play it. I played a big part of P4G on easy. I only have good memories with the game. The only thing i regret a bit was highering the money and exp (money feels not worth it anymore and with more exp you are way to broken). I played with the difficulty settings and think it is better with locked difficultys and % differences like they did with P3R, that the base game stays balanced. Maybe add optional check boxes on top (if you turn it off, you can´t turn it back on with highest difficulty). But we don´t need outdated mechanics as base imo. I played P3R on merciless and had fun as well. It was hard the first half and then getting more like normal. It depends on with what mindset you start into the game. I played SMT5 V on normal and find it even more difficult with bosses, while normal enemies can take you out, but don´t eat that much time like merciless in P3R. P5 Royal was my first. I played on normal (find it challenging with some bosses and strong enemies, but overall balanced). After the first run i played it again with the hightest diff and hard (testing). I loved the game so much because of all small details you can miss, the different endings... so it was worth to higher the diff for that. At the end of the day fun matters. Even if you would play them on easy to get a faster gameplay flow or because you are new, you would probably love the game. And to me it feels well balanced, if you have many options. They reach way more people which support the game developer and they can produce even better quality games. Frustrating gameplay is not a hard diffictulty imo. But as long they add some stuff optional for the core player, they wouldn´t take anything from casual player.
Been sayin this for years In order of damage (bottom being weakest and top being strongest) it should be Physical Magic Critical Exploit weakness It takes alot more investment to do a crit build and you should be rewarded for it but magic baseline should be stronger than physical since hp is so easily refillable compared to sp, and most bosses don’t even have a weakness anyways so it doesn’t negate magic being strong but having crits be better but require more investment makes magic builds ALOT more viable
Just look at smt 5 vengeance, the strongest move in that game is a magic attack and the second strongest is a physical BUT that physical move does more damage if you crit, it opens the way for magic to be more viable but if you wanted to invest into a more crit build you’d do more damage but take more investment
Surprisingly P3 Reload episode of Aigis is challenging in the hardest difficulty, in merciless on Royal and Reload I died 2 or 3 times only against certain bosses but in The Answer… Damn, trash shadows kill me 2 times in the early for being overconfident. I hope in the future the hardest difficulty is somewhat like in this DLC, I really enjoying so much The Answer.
@@matheu6848 Agreed actually. I’m about 10 hours into the DLC and I think it actually fixed all the complaints I had in this video. I am pleasantly surprised
Have you played eternal punishment? that was super brutal and easily the hardest megaten game in the franchise, alot harder than every smt game but it really all comes down to experience. I think the problem with smt and persona's difficulty is that the player just does way to much damage and has way to many tools at their disposal, people say p5r is the biggest example but i think nocturne is honestly way worse and way more exploitable because buffs and debuffs are broken and strength does way to much damage. Like you can get tornado after beating matador and that skill just breaks like 60% of the game. i hope hope they try to nerf the player more going forward in persona and smt.
Magic was actually good on P3 (PS2 and Portable), cause while it couldn't crit each element could be increase with Boost and Amp skill, for which their was no equivalent for physical skills at the time, and there was no OP skill like Hassou Tobi back then, so I think Physical and Magical were pretty well balance.
While True that Phys Skills dont have Boost or Amps in older versions they usually just had bigger base power numbers to compensate. To show an example Junpei got Kill Rush at like Lv 25ish which was 110 power 1-2x while Mitsuru only has Bufula which is 100 power and wouldn’t get a Dps increase till level 45 with Ice Boost. Junpei five levels later though would get Blade of Fury which is 100 power 2-3x meaning it did more then Medium Magic with both Boost and Amp even at minimum hits.
@@helpihavebats6392 True the Magic Skill user team mate learn their skill a bit late (and they usually don't keep both Boost and Amp but replace the first one), Magic is more usefull on the MC since he can get the spells and Boost + Amp earlier, and he also can get the highest tier spells such as Ragnarok or Thunder Reign which have an higher base power of 650 on top of Boost and Amp.
@@nesoukkefka1741 by the time Mc gets Severe level Magic he should also have Vorpal Blade which if i recall will do more than Severe + Boost and Amp under Great Status while also being able to Crit.
@@helpihavebats6392 Vorpal Blade is 500 base power, x 1.5 on Great Condition so 750 Power when you are on Great Condition. Severe spell are 650 Base Power x1.875 with both Boost and Amp so 1 218,75 Power.
@@nesoukkefka1741is that how the damage formula works? All i know is that they use the Sqrt of Base powers for calcs so i putted in a calculator sqrt of 500 which resulted in 22.36 and then multiplied by 2 for 44.72 and comparing that to Sqrt 650 (25.49) and multiplying by 1.75x which got me 44.61. Im guessing that not multiplying the base power is where i went wrong with Vorpal Blade then. The P3FES fusion Calc says 2x under great for Vorpal Blade and that its Weary Thrust that only receives a 1.5x Boost under Tired so idk whats goin on there. Sorry to bother but where did you get 1.875x from? The site says Boost and Amp are 1.25x and 1.5x so id imagine it’d end in 1.75x. is there another factor im missing?
i don't mind how easy persona games are usually when i'm playing it i'm not really looking for a pain in the ass difficulty i just want too have a good time. I think the only fight i ever struggled with is okumera in royal mainly because i can't function under time pressure it makes me make stupid mistakes. oh i guess i struggled at times in fes but that's mostly when the stupid no party control trowed some bullshit like giving me some stupid status condition so i couldn't use commands.
What P3R did to Nyx was a big joke. Every other full moon boss got their HP at least doubled because of Theurgy and it charging twice as fast against them. Nyx's phases have the same or less HP, and Death effectively had its HP cut in half by removing its 50% innate damage resistance. And, yeah, The Answer trying to put a focus on difficulty was really a terrible fit for P3 FES since its gameplay and the Tactics system weren't designed for that.
Well yes...the first SMT gane I played was Persona 1 in 2003...it was difficult. Nowadays, I play Maximum difficulty since this is the only mode that is close to SMT Nornal. Persona Normal difficulty is a joke
I would say that the biggest problem with difficulty in Royal which I'm playing currently is the DLC it made things comically easy I thought you had to wait to be the level of the Persona you wanted to summon but nope you can summon max level no weakness Personas with the best skills in the game for free with no limitation granted you can only summon them free once but with how easy mementos made running over enemies to grind money you can get them again relatively simply
Do not use the DLC. The game was not balanced for that, so you will destroy the whole experience. But i mean it should be obvious if you look at the level.
@@GokuTributeZ it was obvious when I was weighing my options being walled at the Okumura swarm and I realized I could summon a level 90 no weakness almighty unit for free and there was in fact nothing stopping you from abusing them like I thought
Youll prolly say no and yeah i agree the appeal survives whethet the games difficult or easy as pie. It being easy is just a good reason to put in eons of scenes 😂 which is fine by me
So my thinking is a bit different so I'll throw it in. I think difficulty should suit mechanics and story. Reload? Too easy. In a story about stopping the end of the world where you simply don't know what's going on and people are dying, it should be difficult. And there's just literally no reason to really explore all the options in combat because basic boosts and Theurgy will kill everything. Portable?(Since FES is a different system) Good balance. Yes it's easy if you know what you're doing but it has enough surprises that you still need to experiment and will die a few times on your first go, fitting. P5R? Good, fine. The story is deep but it's more about society then "Oh shit, monsters might kill everyone, we already have several confirmed deaths we have to fight" P3 has, and has nothing like Theurgy to trivialize that last bit, you need some effort in making the Persona first. To go to other series, just as an example. I think Pokemon and Dark Souls are both fine difficulty wise, because they fit the story and the baseline mechanics.
Soooo... I have mixed feelings about this. So I personally find that the gameplay loop is a bit easy. But getting Overpowered and nuking the enemy makes me feel like the OP Protagonist, which I like. But I ALSO like it when Atlas takes that aspect of the game away and makes me vulnerable. The SMT games are a great example of this. And personally, I like the challenge of Persona 3 FES and not being able to control your party members. I know I'm in the minority when it comes to this because they took it away in the next game, kinda. You can still opt out of not controlling your party members, but 90% of people are going to take direct control of them. That was me until recently. I did my first playthrough of Persona 3 Reload by playing it FES style. And yeah, the AI kinda stinks. But it was the challenge of overcoming the stupid AI and having to come up with new strategies that made it fun, although it was still a bit challenging. TL/DR: If you think the game is too easy, try doing a challenge run of some sort to make it harder, otherwise, quit complaining and play something else that can challenge your 300 IQ brain and let the rest of us enjoy Social Life game with RPG elements.
The funniest part of this video is that you failed to mention that actually setting the game to its max difficulty actually makes the game easier for experienced players where a "feature" of the harder difficulty is attacks that hit weaknesses deal even more damage than they do in lower tier difficulties
@@SuperDJWB nope still a part of both games. I had to fact check myself just to be sure but "targeting weakness deals more damage" also applies to your party so i guess thats how they justify it as a difficulty setting. In my opinion hard mode provides the most challenge, though at that point the level of difficulty is based more off of what you know and dont know about certain enemies.
Theses comments shows why atlus don’t make the persona game difficult we got ppl saying they didn’t even know you can debuff and buff the team like whattt 🤦♂️🤦♂️
Mods aren't and can't be a solution to any of the problems you've mentioned. It's understandable for someone to install a mod to make the combat of a Persona game be harder, but if that's what makes the game tolerable to them and they wouldn't play the game without it, then their problems lie deeper. There's clearly an issue with the balance of Persona games, but I feel like it mostly stems from catering to people actually wanting to beat Tartarus sections/Palaces/what have you in one in-game day. Spells either don't cost enough SP, or SP items are too plentiful, or the overall balance simply makes it too simple to be cost-efficient about your exploration for you to feel like you absolutely have to return and come back later. I feel like this is mostly a problem of people who already know and enjoy these games, know what to look out for when it comes to maxing out SP recover items and such. Persona games might need a "I've already played a Persona game" difficulty, which makes SP less plentiful, but then it might be hard to max out all social links if you're playing in that difficulty and spending more nights going dungeon crawling instead of being cost-efficient with your social stats, in which case people would also be complaining.
I'm brand new to this series, and I don't play a lot of JRPGs. I'm so bored by how easy P5R is on Hard, I'm having a hard time continuing. I just am not motivated to use the advanced gameplay mechanics the game has. I've taken a break and am playing SMTV, and it's so much more fun. I really like the story and school aspects of Persona, so this is really a disappointment to me.
Idk, even smt 5 the system gets watered down at higher levels. I was surprised at all the piercing abilities in that game. Kind of invalidates their whole weakness system
The game and mechanics are very abusable, but even with the most broken builds, the super bosses of Vengeance are going to be fairly hard. Not Demi-fiend cause he’s free but bosses like Mastema are going to be tough, especially on higher difficulties, and even then during the main game there were times where I died because I didn’t have a proper build for a certain battle. It forces you to take advantage of fusing more so than Persona ever has
Persona now is made for casuals so they theyll have an easier time and wont stop playing, it about the money and retention. People say i dont wont a hard game cuz i dont have to much time thats what easy mode is for, no said olay the game of merciless. Even Merciless in 5R not hard for a specific reason.
Persona is just difficult on early game Lets take og p4 for example, tha shadow yukiko and shadow kanji can DESTROY YOU ASS if you dont know what to do Ive playing p3r on mercyless and oh boy, the early game was a hell, every atack was a potencial tpk but after like 2 or 3 bosses everything was back to normal and quite easy I dont know about p5 but its strange how the game just become easy with time
Funny enough p5 did get easier at time as the dlc became easier to get and with the latest ports you can steamroll the entire experience with myriad truths if you wanted to, this was something you couldn’t do in og obviously but also in the ps4 royal unless you paid extra
The megaten games have been getting easier and easier as years go by. Nocturne was challenging, 4 got easier, then 5 got much easier with all the stuff they add in each game. Nocturne HD remaster got easier too because now you can add skills to demons. Letting the player add and customize demons and personas have made the games easier. In P4 Golden being able to just make null Yoshitune makes things a breeze, and also for some reason in Persona 5 Royal they made Merciless the “HARDEST” way to play actually easier than hard because criticals do much more damage (which you already abuse) and you get more money and XP! Royal also adds the showtimes combos which make things so easy and you also get party member changes that make things even easier. Also yes the PSP remasters for Persona 1 and both games of 2’s duology sooooo easy. The PS1 versions of Persona 2 are just much better and you should play those instead of the PSP versions
Issue with the tactics was bad AI, it wouldnt be an issue in todays time. And people who say the stamina system in og3 are people who dont like difficultly.
The ai in 3 isn’t as bad as people remember it, you just need to mish and mash in the situation. In p4 that game might have the dumbest ai in jrpg history as they put it in last minute and only figured people would only use them for mobs at most but doing a full run has ai doing the most wack things ever like yukiko punching shadow naoto with normal physical attacks instead of healing or using her fire magic
persona needs to be fun not boring, example Devil may cr 5, it´s easy (u can always adapt the difficulty) but the gameplays it´s soooo good you dont care for the difiiculty you care for mastering the gameplay personas needs to do something like that an entertaining gameplay
Yes. Of course I can only speak for myself, but the overabundance of "convenience features" in favour of the player made P5 and P3R super boring to play for me. I loved P3, but I ended up dropping my playthrough of P3R a couple of months in because of this.
I know for a fact I played P5 as my first persona game that is a jrpg (I played p5 strikers first) and it was hard to finish the first dungeon boss at difficulty hard that I had to lower it because I wasn't having fun losing but after playing P5R and P3R on the same hard mode the gameplay was much more easier and enjoyable since I learned how to play that now I feel like it's difficulty was just right for someone who isn't a beginner nor a pro at the game. Also a game that's a simple repetive and easy game is pretty boring, it's probably why I hated P5T.
Here's my opinion: Are the games easy? Yes. Do I care? Absolutely fucking not. If I wanted to play a game for it's difficulty, I'd go play literally any game made by FromSoft. Which I do and love for it. I don't play Persona for it's difficult gameplay. I play it because I love the story and it's characters. I've played Persona 5/Royal, Persona 4 Golden, and Persona 3 Reload and I loved all of them because I was able to immerse myself into the world and feel attached to the characters. I sympathized with their struggles. I wanted to help them reach their goals. Persona 5 Royal is tied for being my favorite video game of all time, and it accomplished that by simply having great story and characters, fantastic music that I listen to all of the time, and a gameplay loop that's fun and makes me feel powerful. So to me, it wouldn't really make that much of a difference if they games were made harder. Because I simply don't care if it's challenging or not.
I wouldn´t say they are easy. They can be challenging on high and highest diff. And when it comes to SMT it is basically the "souls-like" in terms of RPG.
I prefer easy games because it easier to make games post launch more difficult with nuzloches an mods then to manually try an mod out cheap difficult in games like the answer
yeah, thats the point of dlc persona’s, they’re there to give anyone with skill issue help. Not really any point in playing merciless if you can’t handle it, despite how easy persona is compared to smt.
Unpopular opinion incoming, the games aren't "easy" by a baseline, but they are just intuitive enough that if you paid even a fraction of attention to the stuff it teaches you then you will be fine. Beat SMT3, SMT4/4A, SMT5, P4G, P5R on the hardest difficulty available with SMT3, the only one I beat on normal. Did Reload on merciless and now Aegis on Heartless, and the only real difficulty was the fact you have to reload instead of immediately retrying. There is a reason why "difficult" games like the Soul series are difficult because they expect the player to figure out everything versus turn based games like SMT/Persona where they have so many interacting mechanics that due to being a turn based that you need know how to manipulate. I don't know where this opinion started or came from downplaying something you clearly put time into to figure out how to exploit. That would be like someone who has a PhD. saying that an HS curriculum is easy...like yeah, of course, it's easy because you got a dang PhD.
I will say that playing P5R instead of playing base P5 that giving players the ability to fuse demons higher than their level is broken and totally unnecessary but makes sense for someone wanting to just have fun. Before someone says "oh just don't use it" there is a difference between me fusing a demon 1-2 levels above because I'm working on a specific fusion chain for later and just fusing the highest level demon available at the time. While Heartless on "episode Aegis" is giving me an annoying time by running into battles a little to unprepared, it basically just feels like playing Nocturne again.
The thing about party AI in Persona 3 is that there are games that came out before Persona 3 that have WAY better Party AI and it's not even close. For example, in the Tales of games you can turn off moves you don't want your party members to use. You can also do quick command for attacks you do want them to use or tactics changes that you can do on the fly or you can even configure the priority for the AI to for example, actually use status cleansing items or prioritize AOE healing. Persona 3's party AI is THE most clunky system I've seen for non-player controlled party members in any game so I am still not sure where these people who gas up the party AI came from, but they should talk to their local dealer and get a refund. And no, FES is not a hard game. The main character is so broken that you can solo run the game and it's easier or at least less frustrating than bringing a party. The other thing is an issue I have with SMT and the Press Turn system in general with Persona being a slight variation of the Press Turn system. It's a very static system that they haven't done much with at all. So the only thing they can do to have the games even be a bit different is that they just add more mechanics on top of it. And finally, the other thing not brought up is actually Reload buffed all of the Twelve Shadows significantly. All of them have unique moves they didn't have before, harder hitting spells, and over double the HP. The difference is you're no longer ten years old and can hopefully read how fusion and damage modifiers work, so no shit the game is easier now than when you played it over a decade ago. From what I can tell the game was balanced with a few things in mind. 1. They wanted to remove the complaints about how grindy the game is. The EXP scaling in Reload is actually pretty hilarious since whether you grind or not, you'll actually end up at about the same level. 2. The Twelve Shadows were significantly easier than the Tartarus bosses, so all of the Twelve Shadows were buffed, but the Tartarus bosses weren't. 3. The MC was insanely busted compared to the party members, so they originally nerfed the MC, fusion spells, and weapon fusion in P3P to be more in line with the balance of P4. And then in Reload they significantly buffed all of the party members.
Yeah every Persona game is easy. Even if P5R is one of if not the easiest, at least it's fun. P4G, for example, is easy in the most simple, mind-numbing way possible. Normally, I have a video playing in the background while playing a game, but with P4G dungeons, that *was* the background
I think the difficulty is in the wrong places. Make combat more strategic and less braindead like how single player Pokemon is. Make the social side of the game and maxing social links less difficult/restrictive. There shouldn’t only be a couple of ways to max social links etc. Every play-through becomes the same otherwise. All in all, the difficulty is in the wrong places. Less restrictions in the social aspect = more freedom.
I like some of your points. But some of it boils down to QOL features. For example, Persona 4 Golden was easy. Af. Persona 4 Vanilla was absolutely not. No skill cards and super golden hands to abuse. Persona 3 FES is hard period. The Floor bosses (looking at you Sleeping Table)and the Answer are good challenges. And Elizabeth requires a damn calculator lol. Maniac mode on P3P is hard too. Persona 5 is the only outlier. I barely remember dying on vanilla or Royal so that’s fair
The games are only easy if you know how to play. I died a lot during P5 because I had know idea what I was doing.
That’s literally every game though. It doesn’t describe anything specific about Persona. You can probably guess that things like boosts and amps increase attacks. Though the level of attacks would basically be unknown later because the choice of words is ass.
@@Stop1601 I had no idea about buffs and debuffs until my second playthrough. #Looking back I still have no idea how I beat Shido let alone Yaldabouth.
@@Stop1601 except that's what makes this guys opinion so invalid, he plays literally every persona game lmao. but people who have no previous knowledge on games or p games would get shit on in merciless- they would definitely need guides or just finish the game once to understand how to beat no NG merciless
@@kieroncampion120 The flaw in an argument like this is that well... there are tons of games where you can be as good as you want but it's hella hard anyway. Persona is not difficult but really who the hecks cares? I veer towards SuperButterBuns opinion on Persona difficulty where it's more about the experience itself, I just want cool animations and abilities.
@@cocorico2-gm5vi My personal opinion was that difficulty doesn't matter because it's easier for newcomers to enjoy the game so I'm really not understanding this comment. I have played every Persona game but I don't know how that's entirely relevant because the only reason I mentioned negatives regarding the difficulty was to be fair and see it from both sides, which I followed up on by mentioning all the positives of it as well. Maybe I'm not understanding where you're coming from, so if that's the case, let me know.
My first persona game was Persona 5 and, in reality, if you're playing without knowing the bosses,it's quite difficult because, for example, i was stuck at Madarame's boss fight.
Then I played Persona 3 Reload and the hanged boss fight was very difficult for me.
Yeah I agree. When I first P5R, I had already played P3 and 4 on their hardest difficulties, along SMT 3 on hard mode. I had heard Merciless makes the game too easy (I tried it in NG+, it really does) so I went for hard mode and I got killed about 16-20 times in the first 2 palaces, after that I didn't die at all until Okumura, but after that nothing could touch me. I think with basically all of the persona and SMT games, the early game is the hardest, but when it opens up to you more, if you know how to build your character you can melt everything.
The begining of yukikos castle was brutal but after that the difficulty slowly nose dives 😂
Yeah like with most RPG's P4's main source of difficulty is in the early game where you have extremely limited resources so recovering SP isn't that easy making grinding quite challenging. After that though, it's honestly the easiest game in the series IMO.
@@Akechi_The_Phantom_Detectivep sure p5r and even p3r is easier than p4g lmao
This is true of all 3 Persona games, the most fun you can have with the dungeon crawling is completing all of Thebel, Yukiko's Castle and Kamoshida's Palace in one day
@@Akechi_The_Phantom_Detective I mean, the only two bosses that ever game me trouble were Shadow Teddie (defeated at first attempt regardless), Shadow Yukiko (took me far more then I'd like to admit), and the Contrarian King (that bitch!). But even after that I'm still struggling with SP management.
@@Akechi_The_Phantom_Detectivethere are also very specific tactics for shadow yukiko and kanji fights, like wanting chie either mabufu or having rakasha against kanji which even the anime showcased that funny enough, it’s just very linear for some reason which is strange how afterwards you can beat the rest with a vague strat that’s more or less the same
Literally every other Atlas game gives me the difficulty I need. Trust me I don't need it in f****** persona okay
totally agreed with what you said. I played my first persona game a year ago (Persona 5 royal) and it was my first turn based game. The fact that it wasn’t too hard made me a lot more engaged in the game. Now that i am good, i still find persona 5 royal fun to play for it’s mechanics, story and characters
Story and characters shouldn't be in the same sentence as p5 lmao
I wouldn’t say FES is easy
It’s… more like…. Sometimes they are challenging and the Tartarus bosses were actually fun to face.
I wouldn’t say FES is impossible to complete but it’s the hardest in the series besides Persona 1.
FES was the only game to block me off from progressing because I didn't do enough social links lol
Wait people think P1 is hard? I’m playing through SQQ rn and I don’t find it that hard, just kinda annoying (especially Thanatos tower). Bosses haven’t been hard so far.
@@pokestar9994honestly suprised by that, really the hardest persona game is roughly in the midpoint of the series eternal punishment, old versions of p3 (including portable) and p4 vanilla, p3 fes maybe the hardest
The answer was pain when I decided to play it and trust the AI so I went back to controllable party
Hmm, maybe a good middle ground is to keep the easy-medium-hard the average persona experience while making Merciless's difficulty more akin to SMTVV medium/hard ? (only smt game im playing through so far and basically thebonly comparison i can make)
I feel like then we'd have some sort of compromise for both players.
Damn, got the answer not only 5 seconds in. Thanks!
I meant not even 5 seconds in lol
To me persona games are just right at the beginning you're under leveled, as you grow stronger you start to unlock better gear, skills, and personas, so by the time you clear your first playthrough you beat the final boss no problem, then when you go to new game plus you're broke as a reward for clearing the game, and it give you more time to get all the strongest weapons, personas and complete social links you might of miss your first run, so yeah I think its perfectly balanced since persona games have always been about the story and getting all the persona unlock, not how hard is the game lol.
The story, vibes, and music are the reasons I love persona 5 royal.
For you, a Persona vet yes the game is easy. But for general groups or newbies it’s got a few difficulty spikes
if it was as easy as you say then i don't know what your eating... they are still Difficult to me..
I´d say playing persona for the first time and playing several entries to the series changes the difficulty a lot. Knowledge of the mechanics is such a game changer, without you might struggle, with knowledge you win in the first round of most fights. Part of it is that weaknesses/resistances are not allways obvious like in pokemon for example where you would clearly recognize a water or fire type. But already knowing this beforehand and adjusting your tactics is insane.
This.. When I first play P4 (I was in elementary, I guess that has a part in this) I died a lot on dungeon boss that was a baby (forgot the name)
Time management is crucial in Persona and honestly, the Life Sim side is what makes it "difficult" I recently beat NG+ Reload... I had an inoptomal use of the Hierophant/Hermit/Moon/Star/Sun and uh.... yeah, bit me in the butt. But that's like the sort of thing you need to know, for maxed out S. Links with the max number of them. If I'd used my time better, well, let's just say I wouldn't have missed Aeon and Lovers (romanced Mitsuru, so since I lost too many days, Yukari ended up taking the hit instead of Mitsuru), just a dumb NG+ mistake, but damn can optimal time usage really make the game far easier...
Thank you to @YandereGogeta for the heart!
Additionally, I would like to add, when the Persona 4 "Rerun" that we are kinda half expecting to come out in a few years... I'm just sayin' if they change around Naoto's kit to add in Kouha/Eiha (or rather, Kouga/Eiga minimum), just saying she's 72 Agility and 69Magic (nice), with 50 luck, only 3rd to Chie and Yukiko... (53/60 respectively), as long as no stats are changed for the cast... she's gonna be able to destroy anything Light or Dark weak, with instakills as backup, which is quite nice indeed with her current stat spread! Also the reason why I'm using Golden stats from the "Golden" Personas is I highly doubt that they'd use base P4 since a fair amount of people are now most familiar with P4G between the main release and the re-release of it. Thus, if the do a "Rerun" of it, I'd expect for the "Golden" content to likely be kept in. Would be weird if they didn't, imho.
I would say that later Person games are easier simply because it's less convoulted to IV breed, EV train the "pokemon" you want with the TM you want on them. You got skill cards and you can select when skills your new person will inherit, and you can buy back the personas you used.
I was never much of a turn based guy until like Baldurs Gate 3 dropped. Then I played Persona 3 Reload for the very first time and said “I’ll play on hard” but honestly forgot part way through. It was my first genuine JRPG experience and it whooped my ass until I sat down to really experiment with what I had and what I could do. I ended up beating the final boss pretty easily but every journey into Tartarus or full moon events were always filled with anxiety cause I was never fully confident that I wouldn’t get curveballed. Anyways after 100%ing the game I moved into P4G and honestly…I still got my ass kicked at times. I played on hard again and Shadow Mitsuo and Ameno Sagiri both completely cooked me and forced me to again go and revise my strategies and my set up. I eventually got through but other than those two bosses I think I had learned so much from Persona 3 that I was able to beat that game with a much easier time. These games are only hard to me when you’re learning them and you aren’t actively overpowering yourself whether by choice or by accident. And that’s perfect for me. I love the collectors side of the games, getting all the personas, best gear, costumes, and achievements especially. I’m 6 trophies away from the P4G platinum even. These games have really educated me on JRPG’s and similar genres that hell I even want to play shin megami tensei 3, the one that’s supposedly super hard but has fucking DANTE. So TLDR, yeah they’re easy but that’s never been a fault for me at least
Even if some people find the original versions (Not FES, Golden, or Royal) of Persona 3, 4, and 5 too easy that's not the same as the games actually being easy. A truly easy game would be something literally anyone could beat, and games that easy do exist. The Persona games aren't something everyone could finish getting to the end of, and that's why it's difficulty matters. No different than any how some people can't beat other hard games, while others find those games pretty easy themselves.
Persona 5 Royal had weird difficulty - Merciless boosted the damage on hitting weakness for both the player and enemies. You're theoretically more able to be one-shot by enemies. However, Madarame's Will Seed item allows you to eliminate Joker's weaknesses, and the extra damage you get from your half of the effect allows you to one-turn many more enemies and pass boss dps checks much easier - and dead enemies cant one-shot you. Then theres the Royal additions of Showtime attacks, Persona traits, Confidant changes and Baton Pass changes, all of which make Royal much easier than vanilla P5. It turns out Hard difficulty in Royal is much more likely to get you stuck at certain bosses, since its harder to get enough damage. Okumura in particular was a brutal DPS check that basially required abusing Baton Pass with Joker, Noir, and two teammates using Psi damage items (hope you brought enough!). Not knowing this, I did my P5R playthrough on Hard.
Anyway, I recently decided to replay base p5. I chose Normal difficulty. Despite proving myself capable of higher difficulties, I'd rather not force myself to optimise the fun out of the game. It will probably start feeling too easy regardless, but Im mainly here for the story.
I agree with what you said while Persona 5 Royal is to easy for me the gameplay of Persona 5 Royal is polished that it makes me love playing persona 5 despite it being easy.
At the end of the day, it boils down to preferences. Some people are more casual and want to play on an easier difficulty, while other people want to be challenged as much as possible
To put it simply, no and I kind of feel that's the case with most RPG's because it's a numbers game and once you figure out how to turn them to your advantage you can't really unlearn that information. In RPG's I always find the only true challenge on repeat visits are self-imposed challenge style runs. I do appreciate Episode Aegis coming back with Heartless Difficulty and I think Strikers and Q2 did a fantastic job with their Merciless and Risky Difficulties as well.
I think Persona can be easy overall, but I enjoy the combat mechanics too much for the devs to just get rid of them all.
Baton Pass, Theurgey, making unkillable Personas, etc. are all fun things to take advantage of. And they certainly COULD make challenging fights if they wanted. Just look at Elizabeth in P3R.
If I didn't look it up online, I'd have no idea how to defeat her, and even then it was a pain the ass!
And with SMT, I'm able to take out most enemies easily, yet I'm still having a rough time trying to beat Shiva right now. I've got all my party leveled to 99 with some great abilities, yet I still can't beat him.
I'm sure I'll get there eventually, but I'm trying to not look up easy strategies online. The point is it's not the tools Atlus gives you that's the problem, they COULD make more challenging fights, they just choose not to.
I think the reason they choose not to is because even though they can be pretty good at communicating to the player how to make yourself stronger, they try to idiot proof it to an extent. There's nothing wrong with making a game that just about anyone can get through from start to finish, but I'd rather that be saved for normal mode. But honestly I think P3R on the hardest mode is the best balance, you are able to die fast but they don't take any of your tools away, so you still have plenty of ways to counter it. A bit too many if you're well versed in fusion but overall I think P3R did the best job of it.
I like doing low level runs in Persona 4 Golden on very hard. Makes the game more fun and interesting.
I’ll have to disagree. If you have to mod the game to make it even slightly challenging, then it’s a flaw. I get wanting newcomers to become adjusted to the game’s overall mechanics but that’s what Normal Mode is for. Veterans should be able to enjoy a more difficult adventure. Persona only got easy when they started doing the remakes and tipped the balance in the players favor. Persona 4 OG on expert mode is extremely difficult but the challenge was still fair in my opinion. The Devs give you all these options but don’t adjust the enemy’s to respond to your added skills. Maybe in higher difficulties, they could implement more aggressive enemy formations and strategies or debuffs that limit your super moves or something. The 1st palace or month of P5R and P3R respectively were perfect in terms of difficulty in my opinion. Everything falls apart afterwards because they don’t take into account the confidant buffs or theurgies and passives. I really do hope that the Answer is a more difficult section of the game but it’s prolly not likely lmao
Yeah this pretty much hit the nail on what I was gonna say tbh. The problem is that in the case of P5R and P3R the games are barely designed around the 90 mechanics you can use to destroy enemies it seems like they're really only designed around the party before they unlock them. I think both (especially P5R.) are fun games but I just wished the games would bite back more often. I like your idea for increased difficulties having more aggressive enemy formations. Imagine a weird ass Tartarus boss in P3R that would just turn off theurgies on merciless.
@@spinballproduction9678 Yeah I still believe both games are tons of fun, I just agree with you wish they fought back against you. It’s frustrating talking about the topic of difficulty with someone and their first response is “if you want it to be more difficult, don’t use theurgies or showtimes”. If the game is going to introduce me to new mechanics, I would expect them to balance the game with those additions in mind, not to nerf myself on purpose.
Another problem with Persona 4 Golden is, Golden Hands gives you a lot of experience points. Making you level up too quickly.
@@LuisParson i’m kind of mixed on that because on one hand i agree but on the other I think P4’s combat is super dull compared to every other mainline game so a way to speed it up is nice.
@@spinballproduction9678 You can speed it up by turning the difficulty down. Persona 4 Golden even has infinite revive when you die. This feature is good for those that just want to play for the story.
I'm actually happy that games can have those super easy modes. I have a full time job and have to deal with other shit in my day to day life. So having easy games were I can experience the whole story in persona without having to grind an already stupidly long game is appreciated. I finished P3R and P5R and if it wasn't easy I wouldn't even finished them bc those are incredibly long as they are
One of the few not great parts of p3r in my opinion is the difficulty for sure. I'll admit though, I got bodied sometimes. Yet, for the most part, I never grinded and avoided leveling up as much as I could late game in fear of making the bosses too easy. Which still inevitably happened, but the fights were so hype and fun that it didn't really impact me in the end. Having episode aigis take it one step further though sounds fun for sure.
After playing reload, I actually had a minority opinion on it’s difficulty I didn’t pay for the day 1 dlc which let’s be frank makes it easier and why royal gets easier by the day as they kept intergrating the DLCs in the base game and no longer becomes a pay2win and my run of the reload I felt mostly fair not too easy or hard somewhat on par to p4g, i even died a couple times
@nightwish1453 your reminding me of how broken p5r could really be with ryuji's instakill passive perk and even myriad truths from izanagi-no-okami if someone wanted to just focus on the story. So honestly, p5r may be easier, but I would for sure say p4g is harder than both. That or I just suck at it, either one.
games don't need to be difficult, they need to be engaging and fun. When it comes to RPGs breaking the game IS the game, and it's fun. So it being easy or difficult boils down how well you understand the mechanics, which, you know, is like the point of RPGs. I'm someone who finds Dark Souls pretty easy, because I understand what the game is asking from me. And I don't even create crazy builds, I just know how to dodge well enough and not get greedy. Is Dark Souls easy? Well, for me, yes, but for others no. What I'm saying is, Difficulty is arbitrary, just make the damn game fun, fair and engaging.
I feel like giving the players more options does make the game significantly easier. Not Persona but the same thing happened with Octopath Traveler. The first game was pretty difficult (also my first real JRPG I ever played) but in the second you got latent powers which made every fight trivial, especially with characters like Hikari being able to Hienka and OHKO bosses in one turn. Though if you don’t use the latent powers, I hear the difficulty is more similar to the first game. My conclusion, when games give you these broken abilities, I think they should at least give bosses double the health they usually have.
It’s only hard until you unlock more mechanics for the gameplay loop in most cases
After finishing Metaphor Refantazio I honestly feel like it hit a pretty sweet spot in terms of difficulty on Hard. Feels like we might get some really solid difficulty options in future persona games!
Definitely agreed
Lol, sooo the point being is “I like creating broken personas, but it’s not fun that they break the game”?
No that wasn’t the point I was making
Anyone who just says "easy game bad game" just say you like smt more then persona
that doesn't make a difference, some people saying that have never even played smt. Kingdom Hearts 2 is a piece of piss on anything below critical mode, but on crit mode you can die really quickly, but you yourself are capable of dealing lots of damage, so if you play defensively and look for openings it is both hard and fair, making it fun. But that doesnt stop casual players from just smacking stuff and winning. It's the same with these games, if normal is a piece of piss, whatever, it's made so basically anyone can do it so who cares. But some of these games are just not hard even on their hard modes. What's the point of a hard mode that isn't hard? You're talking down to smt fans like they're the problem. While I agree with you that saying a game is bad if it's easy is just stupid, but that doesn't make you an smt fan.
I respect it but I think your perspective on the persona games may be coming from someone who is way too experienced with their base gameplay systems.
If you have been an atlus fan beforehand or played the persona games extensively, playing p5 or some of the modern titles is going to feel a bit too easy for you. That does not mean they are easy games. Heck if you’ve played the smt titles you have essentially been through an extended boot camp for the one more system. As someone who started with p5, it was relatively difficult when compared to other games in the jrpg genre. A lot of games have tools to help you break them. P5 royal has more but other players that aren’t atlus trained super soldiers aren’t going to catch those niche systems that would normally make the game too easy.
Love the Action Button style thumbnail
It’s a sad week to be a Lamar Jackson fan 😔 don’t ask your friend what happened. I did say something similar to this video on your hottest persona takes discussion post although I had a couple of different reasons but in general I really agree with this take. Great video man
4:37 izanagi no okami : am I a joke to you
Yoshitsune is better than Izanagi no Okami gameplay wise
I hear trails of cold steel music. Based.
Trails of Cold Steel mentioned 🔥🔥
The Heartless difficulty for Persona 3 Reload Episode Aegis is perfect if you want a real challenge that is fair but feels like the odds are stacked against you.
Me when the nyx boss fight exists
Armageddon:
That fight isn't hard, it's just long
@@cringekid3993 Yeah, that fight takes way too long and its very boring, it doesn't do anything till the last phase and even then the mechanic is "Don't hit bad guy if shield is up"
Since playing smt on a long time when i played persona i refused to play anything lower than merciless the normal mode made me feel boring, but that depends on the person i enjoy harder difficulties since it makes me engage with the system and how the game should be played and yeah knowing what to expect and how the turn based didnt change too much makes it easy to exploit it on my favor
You beat the super bosses in 1 attack??? I gotta step my game up. Took me at least 3 hours for each
I think that is the first i heard someone call Elizabeth fight easy. Or showed no real struggle with it.
i think reload vs vengeance is a good example, both have very fun game mehanics but i find myslef being sorta disappointed with reloads gameplay because the damage output of theurgies can be way too high sometimes and the enemies can barely do much to you, in vengeance your damage output is high and you can pull off some nasty shit, but you also have to work for that nasty shit and the enemies damage output is on the same level as you so you just get punished more
so i just kinda wish the balancing of reload was on the same level as vengeance or even FES, which was still easy but not as baby mode as p3re was, at least not until you get siegfried
i also just generally kinda like the mechanics of FES like its specific one more/knockdown system more but thats a different topic lol
Persona 3 FES keep in mind it’s like babies first shin megami Tensei but everything revolving Tartarus was harder or at least more stressful
It’s not exactly difficult but the fact you can be grinding for hours and then die abruptly due to critical hits or tiredness or the reaper. It was exciting and scary at the level of a horror game. So 3 was my favorite in the series I thought 4 was disappointing and I just hated 5. I’m talking mainly for combat.
You know I honestly miss The Reaper In persona 3 he comes out whenever he wants But persona 4 your actively looking for him and 5 and 3 Reload. You’re actively waiting 15 to 20 minutes The fear factor is dead. You know what that’s what I like about Persona 3 the most it had a fear factor
id argue that difficulty matters, especially with merciless' non required fight death thing, seeing as how i died to girimehkala in okumura's palace and then got sent back a month and a half to halfway through futaba's palace
It does matters. Otherwise Persona will just be a visual novel, with a little bit of dungeon crawling with no challenge. The fighting might as well be CGs with text. The reason I replayed Persona 4 many times was not because of the story. It was because of the gameplay and the challenge.
Difficulty does matter depending on what you want and your circumstances. Do you love the gameplay and crave for more of it? Play on the hardest difficulty, you'll spend plenty of time grinding and making builds. Do you dislike the gameplay or do you want to see if you like it while having a playthrough that doesn't stress you out? Play on easy difficulty depending on the game. If the game is too easy you can always figure out ways to end things quickly which can be fun as well. As long as you're having fun that's all that matters, there's a lot of things that stress you out that actually matter in life so when you game you should just relax and have fun.
Persona 5 Phantom X is a Japanese gacha game but it is from a popular franchise and from a really big company so the budget is a lot higher for this game. And it's confirmed to get a console and PC version so this is definitely a game worth checking out
Man i just like getting smacked over and over so when i do get over the hurtle it feels so good like whats the point of doing something if its not a challenge
Personally i like a challenge so id like the persona games to be harder however you can always put self imposed challenges on yourself to make it harder. Stuff like only using the protag or only the base persona make the game harder for you specifically but still lets casual players have a good time. (Although doing a solo minimum battle run of p3r was easier then my casual playthrough since i became so overleveled due to all the xp going to protag so you gotta be careful with every mechanic)
I think the way difficulty works in SMT in general is great. It’s only as easy you want to or can make it if you understand the mechanics of the game well enough, like most games. Know your elemental weaknesses, and you should do fine, more or less. Other than that, it’s down to how forgiving RNJesus wants to be.
We dont talk about the peace angel.
Definitely not easy... you can beat it.. but only if you're experienced and know what to do to get everything.
Currently playing P3P, P3R & P4G (already finished P5R& P5S), and I would just like to say some BS features exist REGARDLESS of the difficulty, like in P3P, enemies with Mamudo (which barely hits when u use it) somehow have extreme luck boost, making them guaranteed insta kills
these are the reason why i download mods to make game well balance and hard
More recently, I’ve been trying to challenge myself more with games playing it on hard and even with fighting games, but also just having fun. I just like challenging myself and having fun doing it. I guess you can say I’m like Goku, but I will say I’m more of a Sonic, but anyway. It doesn’t matter if a game is challenging hard or anything above it about having fun with a game, if you’re not having fun why are you even playing it? But that’s just me those.
Would love if you read this comment. So regarding difficulty I have some thoughts about P5R and P3R.
So for the first let’s say 1/3-1/2 of the games they have a good difficulty curve (assuming max difficulty on both hard and merciless for P5 & P3 respectfully). Boss fights you have to claw your way through and win on a hairs breath you have to use your items to the max and if you aren’t over leveled there is no telling if even that’ll help you (Think high priestess fight in P3 and the painting boss fight in P5) and the fights have tension.
But in almost every playthrough there is almost a guarantied massive drop in the difficulty at one point or another. This happens whenever the player has an overflow of Yen and their compendium reaches a Critical mass to where they can really start abusing the fusion mechanic, and calculators, to create diabolical creations and ANY build in the game halfway through the story. The ONLY limit in terms of balancing that persona has is the level cap from fusing personas above your MC level, which feels really bad and shit imo. Surprisingly enough P5R has a great solve for this with the spending more Yen for higher level Personas but consequently makes this drop in difficulty happen at a set point in time instead.
The main issue is unless you are going to overhaul the core functions of the Velvet room (compendium and fusing). The players power is always going to scale exponentially where it starts off SLOW and then goes to the moon within about a hour of gameplay, the gameplay being menus scrolling in the Velvet room.
Therefore the main thing i’d suggest to adjust is to stop scaling the game’s difficulty on a linear progression or a small exponential bias and instead makes the enemies scale almost as extremely as the protagonist by mid game. So for P5R I’d say start cranking the scales by the end of Kaneshiro and for P3R by time you get all the party members. Basically force the players to start using all of the Velvet room resources by those points or have NO chance to win. (max difficulty obviously).
To indicate this better you can also scale the party members in the same way where in the beginning their there and maybe cannon fodder but by the end the have kits that you’d be proud to have on one of your personas on your rooster. Like a party member learning all auto Ma buffs by max level where you don’t nescissarly need that on your rooster.
One way you could make the timing easier for when to crank the dial on the difficulty is to limit the function of the Velvet room in some way until the player is ready to go ham and create a eldric god. So like limit the amount of fusions per day until you level up Igor Bond to a certain point or lock the compendium until you get to a certain point in the story, or severely limit the compendium.
The main thing I’m trying to say overall is giving the player access to unlimited fusions (fuse) and unlimited personas for those fusions (compendium) will allow players to create endgame level threats within 10-15 hours or the first third of the game. I know the level cap is still a thing but in P3R it’s Lv55 for a broken Sieg build and I forget the level for P5 but you can make a persona in 5 minutes at lv 25 that’ll last you till the latter half of the game, so that’s a cop out.
FES is pretty similar though. You abuse Getsu-ei until you can fuse Thor and then the game is GG because you just max out Thor's stats and spam Thunder Call.
Could be fairly interesting to have difficulty scale differently as you get more access to broken Personas. I think it would be cool if lets say you have a level 99 Persona, that no matter where you are in the game, enemies could scale up to that level and have attacks and kits to match it. This would most likely be reserved to Merciless or something like that, but I think that would be pretty dope. I don't know if you've played Persona 5 Strikers, but that game on the hardest difficulty kinda does that where in the second playthrough, the enemies are all level 99 and you can even die in like one hit during the tutorial, which makes it a little bit hard even with NG+ Personas. Mainline games could do something like this and I think it would work
I think they did the right thing with new Persona Games. The key is the story, characters, music and fun gameplay. And you can chose how you want to play it. I played a big part of P4G on easy. I only have good memories with the game. The only thing i regret a bit was highering the money and exp (money feels not worth it anymore and with more exp you are way to broken). I played with the difficulty settings and think it is better with locked difficultys and % differences like they did with P3R, that the base game stays balanced. Maybe add optional check boxes on top (if you turn it off, you can´t turn it back on with highest difficulty). But we don´t need outdated mechanics as base imo. I played P3R on merciless and had fun as well. It was hard the first half and then getting more like normal. It depends on with what mindset you start into the game. I played SMT5 V on normal and find it even more difficult with bosses, while normal enemies can take you out, but don´t eat that much time like merciless in P3R.
P5 Royal was my first. I played on normal (find it challenging with some bosses and strong enemies, but overall balanced). After the first run i played it again with the hightest diff and hard (testing). I loved the game so much because of all small details you can miss, the different endings... so it was worth to higher the diff for that.
At the end of the day fun matters. Even if you would play them on easy to get a faster gameplay flow or because you are new, you would probably love the game. And to me it feels well balanced, if you have many options. They reach way more people which support the game developer and they can produce even better quality games. Frustrating gameplay is not a hard diffictulty imo. But as long they add some stuff optional for the core player, they wouldn´t take anything from casual player.
As long as the hard modes are hard
Been sayin this for years
In order of damage (bottom being weakest and top being strongest) it should be
Physical
Magic
Critical
Exploit weakness
It takes alot more investment to do a crit build and you should be rewarded for it but magic baseline should be stronger than physical since hp is so easily refillable compared to sp, and most bosses don’t even have a weakness anyways so it doesn’t negate magic being strong but having crits be better but require more investment makes magic builds ALOT more viable
Just look at smt 5 vengeance, the strongest move in that game is a magic attack and the second strongest is a physical BUT that physical move does more damage if you crit, it opens the way for magic to be more viable but if you wanted to invest into a more crit build you’d do more damage but take more investment
Surprisingly P3 Reload episode of Aigis is challenging in the hardest difficulty, in merciless on Royal and Reload I died 2 or 3 times only against certain bosses but in The Answer… Damn, trash shadows kill me 2 times in the early for being overconfident.
I hope in the future the hardest difficulty is somewhat like in this DLC, I really enjoying so much The Answer.
@@matheu6848 Agreed actually. I’m about 10 hours into the DLC and I think it actually fixed all the complaints I had in this video. I am pleasantly surprised
Have you played eternal punishment? that was super brutal and easily the hardest megaten game in the franchise, alot harder than every smt game but it really all comes down to experience.
I think the problem with smt and persona's difficulty is that the player just does way to much damage and has way to many tools at their disposal, people say p5r is the biggest example but i think nocturne is honestly way worse and way more exploitable because buffs and debuffs are broken and strength does way to much damage. Like you can get tornado after beating matador and that skill just breaks like 60% of the game. i hope hope they try to nerf the player more going forward in persona and smt.
Magic was actually good on P3 (PS2 and Portable), cause while it couldn't crit each element could be increase with Boost and Amp skill, for which their was no equivalent for physical skills at the time, and there was no OP skill like Hassou Tobi back then, so I think Physical and Magical were pretty well balance.
While True that Phys Skills dont have Boost or Amps in older versions they usually just had bigger base power numbers to compensate.
To show an example Junpei got Kill Rush at like Lv 25ish which was 110 power 1-2x while Mitsuru only has Bufula which is 100 power and wouldn’t get a Dps increase till level 45 with Ice Boost. Junpei five levels later though would get Blade of Fury which is 100 power 2-3x meaning it did more then Medium Magic with both Boost and Amp even at minimum hits.
@@helpihavebats6392 True the Magic Skill user team mate learn their skill a bit late (and they usually don't keep both Boost and Amp but replace the first one), Magic is more usefull on the MC since he can get the spells and Boost + Amp earlier, and he also can get the highest tier spells such as Ragnarok or Thunder Reign which have an higher base power of 650 on top of Boost and Amp.
@@nesoukkefka1741 by the time Mc gets Severe level Magic he should also have Vorpal Blade which if i recall will do more than Severe + Boost and Amp under Great Status while also being able to Crit.
@@helpihavebats6392 Vorpal Blade is 500 base power, x 1.5 on Great Condition so 750 Power when you are on Great Condition.
Severe spell are 650 Base Power x1.875 with both Boost and Amp so 1 218,75 Power.
@@nesoukkefka1741is that how the damage formula works? All i know is that they use the Sqrt of Base powers for calcs so i putted in a calculator sqrt of 500 which resulted in 22.36 and then multiplied by 2 for 44.72 and comparing that to Sqrt 650 (25.49) and multiplying by 1.75x which got me 44.61. Im guessing that not multiplying the base power is where i went wrong with Vorpal Blade then.
The P3FES fusion Calc says 2x under great for Vorpal Blade and that its Weary Thrust that only receives a 1.5x Boost under Tired so idk whats goin on there.
Sorry to bother but where did you get 1.875x from? The site says Boost and Amp are 1.25x and 1.5x so id imagine it’d end in 1.75x. is there another factor im missing?
i don't mind how easy persona games are usually when i'm playing it i'm not really looking for a pain in the ass difficulty i just want too have a good time. I think the only fight i ever struggled with is okumera in royal mainly because i can't function under time pressure it makes me make stupid mistakes. oh i guess i struggled at times in fes but that's mostly when the stupid no party control trowed some bullshit like giving me some stupid status condition so i couldn't use commands.
What P3R did to Nyx was a big joke. Every other full moon boss got their HP at least doubled because of Theurgy and it charging twice as fast against them. Nyx's phases have the same or less HP, and Death effectively had its HP cut in half by removing its 50% innate damage resistance. And, yeah, The Answer trying to put a focus on difficulty was really a terrible fit for P3 FES since its gameplay and the Tactics system weren't designed for that.
Yea Pereona games are balanced like PSO games just make the player so overpowered it doesn’t matter what the game can do.
Is so ironical that is common to people say that persona is the most easiest jrpg game AND the most unfair system (smt moments meme)
Well yes...the first SMT gane I played was Persona 1 in 2003...it was difficult.
Nowadays, I play Maximum difficulty since this is the only mode that is close to SMT Nornal.
Persona Normal difficulty is a joke
I would say that the biggest problem with difficulty in Royal which I'm playing currently is the DLC it made things comically easy I thought you had to wait to be the level of the Persona you wanted to summon but nope you can summon max level no weakness Personas with the best skills in the game for free with no limitation granted you can only summon them free once but with how easy mementos made running over enemies to grind money you can get them again relatively simply
Do not use the DLC. The game was not balanced for that, so you will destroy the whole experience. But i mean it should be obvious if you look at the level.
@@GokuTributeZ it was obvious when I was weighing my options being walled at the Okumura swarm and I realized I could summon a level 90 no weakness almighty unit for free and there was in fact nothing stopping you from abusing them like I thought
I'm a more casual player so the difficulty is just right for me
Youll prolly say no and yeah i agree the appeal survives whethet the games difficult or easy as pie. It being easy is just a good reason to put in eons of scenes 😂 which is fine by me
Make normal not so hard, but kee the harder modes like smt style of difficulty… there ya go
What was the song at the end?
Now I Know Yuu Miyake Remix
So my thinking is a bit different so I'll throw it in. I think difficulty should suit mechanics and story.
Reload? Too easy. In a story about stopping the end of the world where you simply don't know what's going on and people are dying, it should be difficult. And there's just literally no reason to really explore all the options in combat because basic boosts and Theurgy will kill everything.
Portable?(Since FES is a different system) Good balance. Yes it's easy if you know what you're doing but it has enough surprises that you still need to experiment and will die a few times on your first go, fitting.
P5R? Good, fine. The story is deep but it's more about society then "Oh shit, monsters might kill everyone, we already have several confirmed deaths we have to fight" P3 has, and has nothing like Theurgy to trivialize that last bit, you need some effort in making the Persona first.
To go to other series, just as an example. I think Pokemon and Dark Souls are both fine difficulty wise, because they fit the story and the baseline mechanics.
i guess im just that bad at jrpg if i thought that persona is moderately challenging
Soooo... I have mixed feelings about this. So I personally find that the gameplay loop is a bit easy. But getting Overpowered and nuking the enemy makes me feel like the OP Protagonist, which I like.
But I ALSO like it when Atlas takes that aspect of the game away and makes me vulnerable. The SMT games are a great example of this. And personally, I like the challenge of Persona 3 FES and not being able to control your party members. I know I'm in the minority when it comes to this because they took it away in the next game, kinda. You can still opt out of not controlling your party members, but 90% of people are going to take direct control of them.
That was me until recently. I did my first playthrough of Persona 3 Reload by playing it FES style. And yeah, the AI kinda stinks. But it was the challenge of overcoming the stupid AI and having to come up with new strategies that made it fun, although it was still a bit challenging.
TL/DR: If you think the game is too easy, try doing a challenge run of some sort to make it harder, otherwise, quit complaining and play something else that can challenge your 300 IQ brain and let the rest of us enjoy Social Life game with RPG elements.
The funniest part of this video is that you failed to mention that actually setting the game to its max difficulty actually makes the game easier for experienced players where a "feature" of the harder difficulty is attacks that hit weaknesses deal even more damage than they do in lower tier difficulties
Correct me if I’m wrong , I think they got rid of that in both royal and reload. Original persona 5 still had that though
@@SuperDJWB nope still a part of both games. I had to fact check myself just to be sure but "targeting weakness deals more damage" also applies to your party so i guess thats how they justify it as a difficulty setting. In my opinion hard mode provides the most challenge, though at that point the level of difficulty is based more off of what you know and dont know about certain enemies.
It because you over level too much. Its a classic mechanic for 90's JRPG. If spend time leveling too much the game technically gets easy.
Theses comments shows why atlus don’t make the persona game difficult we got ppl saying they didn’t even know you can debuff and buff the team like whattt 🤦♂️🤦♂️
The Answer was and is not easy, aside from the this i why games have difficulty lvls easy to hard or harder if its present.
Mods aren't and can't be a solution to any of the problems you've mentioned. It's understandable for someone to install a mod to make the combat of a Persona game be harder, but if that's what makes the game tolerable to them and they wouldn't play the game without it, then their problems lie deeper.
There's clearly an issue with the balance of Persona games, but I feel like it mostly stems from catering to people actually wanting to beat Tartarus sections/Palaces/what have you in one in-game day. Spells either don't cost enough SP, or SP items are too plentiful, or the overall balance simply makes it too simple to be cost-efficient about your exploration for you to feel like you absolutely have to return and come back later.
I feel like this is mostly a problem of people who already know and enjoy these games, know what to look out for when it comes to maxing out SP recover items and such.
Persona games might need a "I've already played a Persona game" difficulty, which makes SP less plentiful, but then it might be hard to max out all social links if you're playing in that difficulty and spending more nights going dungeon crawling instead of being cost-efficient with your social stats, in which case people would also be complaining.
I'm brand new to this series, and I don't play a lot of JRPGs. I'm so bored by how easy P5R is on Hard, I'm having a hard time continuing. I just am not motivated to use the advanced gameplay mechanics the game has. I've taken a break and am playing SMTV, and it's so much more fun. I really like the story and school aspects of Persona, so this is really a disappointment to me.
Idk, even smt 5 the system gets watered down at higher levels. I was surprised at all the piercing abilities in that game. Kind of invalidates their whole weakness system
The game and mechanics are very abusable, but even with the most broken builds, the super bosses of Vengeance are going to be fairly hard. Not Demi-fiend cause he’s free but bosses like Mastema are going to be tough, especially on higher difficulties, and even then during the main game there were times where I died because I didn’t have a proper build for a certain battle. It forces you to take advantage of fusing more so than Persona ever has
Persona now is made for casuals so they theyll have an easier time and wont stop playing, it about the money and retention. People say i dont wont a hard game cuz i dont have to much time thats what easy mode is for, no said olay the game of merciless. Even Merciless in 5R not hard for a specific reason.
Persona is just difficult on early game
Lets take og p4 for example, tha shadow yukiko and shadow kanji can DESTROY YOU ASS if you dont know what to do
Ive playing p3r on mercyless and oh boy, the early game was a hell, every atack was a potencial tpk but after like 2 or 3 bosses everything was back to normal and quite easy
I dont know about p5 but its strange how the game just become easy with time
Funny enough p5 did get easier at time as the dlc became easier to get and with the latest ports you can steamroll the entire experience with myriad truths if you wanted to, this was something you couldn’t do in og obviously but also in the ps4 royal unless you paid extra
The megaten games have been getting easier and easier as years go by. Nocturne was challenging, 4 got easier, then 5 got much easier with all the stuff they add in each game. Nocturne HD remaster got easier too because now you can add skills to demons. Letting the player add and customize demons and personas have made the games easier. In P4 Golden being able to just make null Yoshitune makes things a breeze, and also for some reason in Persona 5 Royal they made Merciless the “HARDEST” way to play actually easier than hard because criticals do much more damage (which you already abuse) and you get more money and XP! Royal also adds the showtimes combos which make things so easy and you also get party member changes that make things even easier. Also yes the PSP remasters for Persona 1 and both games of 2’s duology sooooo easy. The PS1 versions of Persona 2 are just much better and you should play those instead of the PSP versions
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Issue with the tactics was bad AI, it wouldnt be an issue in todays time. And people who say the stamina system in og3 are people who dont like difficultly.
The ai in 3 isn’t as bad as people remember it, you just need to mish and mash in the situation. In p4 that game might have the dumbest ai in jrpg history as they put it in last minute and only figured people would only use them for mobs at most but doing a full run has ai doing the most wack things ever like yukiko punching shadow naoto with normal physical attacks instead of healing or using her fire magic
persona needs to be fun not boring, example Devil may cr 5, it´s easy (u can always adapt the difficulty) but the gameplays it´s soooo good you dont care for the difiiculty you care for mastering the gameplay
personas needs to do something like that an entertaining gameplay
Yes. Of course I can only speak for myself, but the overabundance of "convenience features" in favour of the player made P5 and P3R super boring to play for me. I loved P3, but I ended up dropping my playthrough of P3R a couple of months in because of this.
I know for a fact I played P5 as my first persona game that is a jrpg (I played p5 strikers first) and it was hard to finish the first dungeon boss at difficulty hard that I had to lower it because I wasn't having fun losing but after playing P5R and P3R on the same hard mode the gameplay was much more easier and enjoyable since I learned how to play that now I feel like it's difficulty was just right for someone who isn't a beginner nor a pro at the game.
Also a game that's a simple repetive and easy game is pretty boring, it's probably why I hated P5T.
Persona on highest difficulty is so easy 🤓
Here's my opinion: Are the games easy? Yes. Do I care? Absolutely fucking not. If I wanted to play a game for it's difficulty, I'd go play literally any game made by FromSoft. Which I do and love for it.
I don't play Persona for it's difficult gameplay. I play it because I love the story and it's characters. I've played Persona 5/Royal, Persona 4 Golden, and Persona 3 Reload and I loved all of them because I was able to immerse myself into the world and feel attached to the characters. I sympathized with their struggles. I wanted to help them reach their goals. Persona 5 Royal is tied for being my favorite video game of all time, and it accomplished that by simply having great story and characters, fantastic music that I listen to all of the time, and a gameplay loop that's fun and makes me feel powerful. So to me, it wouldn't really make that much of a difference if they games were made harder. Because I simply don't care if it's challenging or not.
I wouldn´t say they are easy. They can be challenging on high and highest diff. And when it comes to SMT it is basically the "souls-like" in terms of RPG.
I prefer easy games because it easier to make games post launch more difficult with nuzloches an mods then to manually try an mod out cheap difficult in games like the answer
Dlc persona’s save me in merciless
yeah, thats the point of dlc persona’s, they’re there to give anyone with skill issue help. Not really any point in playing merciless if you can’t handle it, despite how easy persona is compared to smt.
Unpopular opinion incoming, the games aren't "easy" by a baseline, but they are just intuitive enough that if you paid even a fraction of attention to the stuff it teaches you then you will be fine. Beat SMT3, SMT4/4A, SMT5, P4G, P5R on the hardest difficulty available with SMT3, the only one I beat on normal. Did Reload on merciless and now Aegis on Heartless, and the only real difficulty was the fact you have to reload instead of immediately retrying.
There is a reason why "difficult" games like the Soul series are difficult because they expect the player to figure out everything versus turn based games like SMT/Persona where they have so many interacting mechanics that due to being a turn based that you need know how to manipulate.
I don't know where this opinion started or came from downplaying something you clearly put time into to figure out how to exploit. That would be like someone who has a PhD. saying that an HS curriculum is easy...like yeah, of course, it's easy because you got a dang PhD.
I will say that playing P5R instead of playing base P5 that giving players the ability to fuse demons higher than their level is broken and totally unnecessary but makes sense for someone wanting to just have fun. Before someone says "oh just don't use it" there is a difference between me fusing a demon 1-2 levels above because I'm working on a specific fusion chain for later and just fusing the highest level demon available at the time. While Heartless on "episode Aegis" is giving me an annoying time by running into battles a little to unprepared, it basically just feels like playing Nocturne again.
The thing about party AI in Persona 3 is that there are games that came out before Persona 3 that have WAY better Party AI and it's not even close. For example, in the Tales of games you can turn off moves you don't want your party members to use. You can also do quick command for attacks you do want them to use or tactics changes that you can do on the fly or you can even configure the priority for the AI to for example, actually use status cleansing items or prioritize AOE healing. Persona 3's party AI is THE most clunky system I've seen for non-player controlled party members in any game so I am still not sure where these people who gas up the party AI came from, but they should talk to their local dealer and get a refund. And no, FES is not a hard game. The main character is so broken that you can solo run the game and it's easier or at least less frustrating than bringing a party.
The other thing is an issue I have with SMT and the Press Turn system in general with Persona being a slight variation of the Press Turn system. It's a very static system that they haven't done much with at all. So the only thing they can do to have the games even be a bit different is that they just add more mechanics on top of it.
And finally, the other thing not brought up is actually Reload buffed all of the Twelve Shadows significantly. All of them have unique moves they didn't have before, harder hitting spells, and over double the HP. The difference is you're no longer ten years old and can hopefully read how fusion and damage modifiers work, so no shit the game is easier now than when you played it over a decade ago. From what I can tell the game was balanced with a few things in mind. 1. They wanted to remove the complaints about how grindy the game is. The EXP scaling in Reload is actually pretty hilarious since whether you grind or not, you'll actually end up at about the same level. 2. The Twelve Shadows were significantly easier than the Tartarus bosses, so all of the Twelve Shadows were buffed, but the Tartarus bosses weren't. 3. The MC was insanely busted compared to the party members, so they originally nerfed the MC, fusion spells, and weapon fusion in P3P to be more in line with the balance of P4. And then in Reload they significantly buffed all of the party members.
Yeah every Persona game is easy. Even if P5R is one of if not the easiest, at least it's fun. P4G, for example, is easy in the most simple, mind-numbing way possible. Normally, I have a video playing in the background while playing a game, but with P4G dungeons, that *was* the background
I think the difficulty is in the wrong places. Make combat more strategic and less braindead like how single player Pokemon is. Make the social side of the game and maxing social links less difficult/restrictive. There shouldn’t only be a couple of ways to max social links etc. Every play-through becomes the same otherwise. All in all, the difficulty is in the wrong places. Less restrictions in the social aspect = more freedom.
No, I suck either way
I like some of your points. But some of it boils down to QOL features. For example, Persona 4 Golden was easy. Af. Persona 4 Vanilla was absolutely not. No skill cards and super golden hands to abuse. Persona 3 FES is hard period. The Floor bosses (looking at you Sleeping Table)and the Answer are good challenges. And Elizabeth requires a damn calculator lol. Maniac mode on P3P is hard too. Persona 5 is the only outlier. I barely remember dying on vanilla or Royal so that’s fair