#my main is still in mirage and i only logged in since then to change my wizard name so. that should give u an estimate | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

abundantchewtoys · 6 years ago

Text

Homestuck Epilogues: Prologue, reaction post part 1

So me and Blaperile have decided to start reading it now. I kind of hope the format & art style stays true to form, but then again, change could be interesting. In any case, if this epilogue were to include the already posted snaps, that would be a break from format in image size (not including the credits, of course).

I guess if there is immediately an [S] page, it'll be the second one, not the first, to give use aheads up in the command.

Okay, so the first is a title page.

The link to the next page says... homestuck.com/epilogues/proglogue. Andrew, NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!

(Yeah okay, so it has begun. Again.)

I could see the snaps being the prologue, since they kind of set the stage for what's to come. Jane taking control over The Felt being a major development, for one. Also, the noted absence of Davepetasprite^2 & Arquiusprite on Earth C. Or, perhaps rather, the noted presence of all the other sprites, they didn't stop being spirit guides after the game ended. And in the credits of course, there was John's being aggravated by Caliborn to the point this all would lead presumably to the clay doll scene Caliborn showed us, taking place further into the future than any of us had business viewing at the time.

---

> Start

AAAAAAHHHHH, Homestuck's a fanfic now!!! Yes, this is the Archive of Our Own format, including tags and... Andrew is no longer sole author of this story!!!

We have achieved MAXIMUM FANDOM (or should I say FANON).

Characters: Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-h... Barack Obama?! :P I guess maybe John switched to a Baracktop in light of out-of-story events, plus of course Dave's idolization of the man. :P And Aranea returns!! And Davepeta too, cool! ... Wait, there's gonna be new OCs?? :P ... In before Joey & Jude & troll friends join the Homestuck madness. Well, if we can rely on this list of course. This IS Andrew Hussie we're talking about, of course.

Hmmm, Blaperile has a good point that Davepeta & Arquius are mentioned but not their component A2 trolls, since the "main" versions of them (post-retcon) are inside the sprites! And that all these characters except maybe for Caliborn (pre-LE, I mean) MIGHT just end up in the Furthest Ring together to do... whatever there needs to be done with the black hole aftermath of the standoff between Vriska & LE. And Calliope seems to be joining them, which is a nice thing to look forward too, main Calliope doing a plot thing. ... No mention of carapaces, but again, that doesn't have to mean anything.

Caliborn's entry seems to me to imply we might see the claydoll fight animated (or at least drawn) properly! :D

Barack is probably an Easter Egg just, nothing more. Which is funny because Easter is coming.

Content warnings: ... All these things (well not all of them, but) just refer to things mentioned in Homestuck proper. :P Quite the list we racked up, eh? Also, Gamzee hath invaded the list: clowns, honk... Hahah. Surprised "horses" didn't make it on here. And puppets. So I know I was saying I don't really believe these tags to truthfully warn about things to come in this epic, but I'm kind of scared by the mention of Trickster Mode. :P ... Oh yeah, hahah, that WAS something that happened at the wedding, didn't it, Calliope bringing the sucker & transforming John & the B2 kids? So that thing survived the end of the session we know.

Another thing making me uncomfortable is all the illicit subjects the warnings are about, but yeah, that's what a lot of fanfics contain.

Summary: ... Ooooh, so John DIDN'T immediately take off to fight Caliborn! That's... I actually had wagered the epilogue to start on April 13th, 2019 thinking about it over the weekend. It would just seem so fitting, but I thought it might have been so that the B2 kids would have aged a relative 2 years during the time the B1 kids were stuck in the house. So that they could go back to filling that big brother/sister relationship that was kind of always there, first & foremost shown in the Strider Bros, later when we didn't know yet that the kids would be the same age when they'd meet up, during Act 6 Act 1.

Blaperile has a good point, this means Terezi has been exploring the Furthest Ring for 7 years (or almost 4 sweeps).

Contents: This looks like it could grow into a list. Since, well, this is the prologue just yet for the epilogue hahah. Then again, maybe we 'return' to this page after the prologue is done, only for the list to have grown with the next... "act".

> Prologue

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH WALL OF TEXT AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH HOMESTUCK IS A FANFIC NOWWWWWWWWWWWWW for real. ... Oh dear god.

Well, it's definitely a medium Andrew didn't touch on yet, the "picture this for yourselves" type of fiction. Kind of incentive for people to draw this for themselves.

And then Homestuck became a serialized novel. :D

Okay that entire first sentence. I'm definitely on the same page here as everyone when I say this must be about the Furthest Ring cracking. ... I think Andrew's propensity for dragging out a story comes over quite well in fanfic prose form.

Hmm... So, "eternity" is being filled by the black hole, and continuity is buckling up? Seems like the entirety of Homestuck proper might be at risk of being undone in something more damaging than a mere retcon.

Wow, nice vivid description of the dreambubbles being shattered. "Hypothetical futures", does that suggest that the ghosts of alternate timelines were more like... mirages? That's a harsh thing to swallow, and not something any of them would have been happy hearing stated as fact. Well, except the Aradiabots, maybe. "Double-death" mention!

... So there's a symphony at the center of the black hole. Does that mean Alternate Calliope still lives (or well, "exists"), as the conductor of the havoc? It's super black at the center, apparently. Like, Vantablack?

Wait, "> Wake up"? Did John dream about the Furthest Ring? ... What DO the kids dream, after they won the game? Or rather, where do they dream?

"You've been dreaming in anime again." Ah yes, there's the first real meme of the evening. So, John rejects this dramatic dream and will rather substitute his own fantasies? :P

"> Look outside just to make absolutely sure the world is not ending." --> Why does it feel like we've started this adventure anew? Why are command prompts working out so well in this format?

'The only sound you can hear for miles is the wind skimming the hollows of your neighbors’ pipe homes.' Well, if that isn't a reference to his atmospheric page! And oh yeah, that was his new neighbourhood! Or, after 7 years, not 'new' anymore, I guess.

'It’s a normal day in the salamander village, which you refer to as Salamander Village because the damned salamanders never bothered to give this village a name, you guess.' Perfection. So, it appears the consort species remain the same, no matter how many millenia may pass. I wouldn't like to be a mail person in the Consort Kingdom, if all packages are to be delivered at Salamander Village. Then again, the Breeze might still be on mail duty on Earth C.

'Beside your pillow, your phone is vibrating. Rose is calling. The screen of your phone reads 9:30 a.m. April 13, and also the number forty-six, which is how many text messages your friend left you while you were sleeping. A bit excessive, even for her.' Ahahahah, so even in texts Rose is wordy!! Good to see they kept in contact, then. Not as much in-person contact, seeing the credits, but then again, the kids always used to live apart, didn't they? (I can still call them 'the kids', even if we're no longer a decade apart in age. Get of my lawn!)

"> Answer the phone." Yessssss, coloured text logs!! In the absence of drawings, it would've really sucked a little and be bland if we'd lacked this.

Aww, April 13th is still a solemn day for John. :/ Rose is calling it "April Thirteenth" as if it's a holiday, which it might just be. Blaperile has a good point that John has called Rose directly, and isn't texting. The immediate assumption for what Rose said, was that they don't talk a lot, but maybe they don't CALL each other a lot, just trade messages!

"You wander to the window and watch the salamanders go about their day. All over the neighborhood, the little dad-salamanders are putting on their little rumpled hats and picking up their little suitcases and kissing their little families goodbye for the day. You’ve always been confused about what, exactly, they contribute to the global economy. But it’s pretty cute how much they love playing at being suburban businessmen."

Pfff, the rumple hats are still a thing, guess the kids really did shape this universe in much the same way as the session! (Okay yeah, so, consorts came over from the session too, so the fact that the custom remains to the current day might just be another showcase for the status quo that consorts live under when not interacting with PCs...) Of course, this is going to sting for John, all this dadly business going around.

"The silence over the phone is growing awkward. You’ve stalled long enough. You decide to just come out and say it.

JOHN: i’ve been dreaming in anime again lately."

Aaaaaand meme number two is here. Blaperile mentioned Act 7, and yeah, John DID dream about the Furthest Ring & the blackhole, both centerpice in the Act 7 animated video. :P

"ROSE: i see." Therapist mode, engaged. Next, ask him how he feels about the dream, Rose.

"JOHN: whenever i have these dreams, everything’s breaking apart.

JOHN: millions of people are screaming and dying." Huh, is it that John didn't recognize the ghosts (being the oblivous bloke he is), or is there something more to the danger of the black hole? After all, after all of the Furthest Rings is swallowed, what's left is sessions and the universes they spawned...

"A couple yards over, a salamander blows an astounding spit bubble. Truly one for the books." Meanwhile...

"ROSE: I don’t have the slightest idea what it means that you’ve been dreaming in anime, John.

ROSE: To be honest, I...

You wait for Rose to finish her thought. She doesn’t, which is troubling because you have never known Rose to leave a thought unfinished in over ten years of acquaintance." ... Did she have a Light vision, or is someone pulling her sleeve about this or other with the troll grubs? It just hit me, we might be in for some new venues in the relationships between the humans & trolls, since yeah, they're all adults now.

"JOHN: rose... are you ok?

ROSE: Not exactly.

JOHN: what’s wrong?

ROSE: I think my condition’s been getting worse lately.

JOHN: condition?

ROSE: It’s why my message probably sounded urgent.

JOHN: you left 46 messages.

ROSE: Yes. They were all urgent.

JOHN: oh.

ROSE: I don’t think I can wait much longer before telling you."

So, Blaperile was theorizing Kanaya or Rose might be pregnant based on her trailing off. I dismissed it out of hand, but now... It would be just something for Rose to designate a pregnancy as a "condition". ... And to see contractions as a worsening of that condition. If John just talked about anime over Rose trying to tell him the baby is coming, I might just scream. And it's on HIS birthday, too!

"ROSE: I held out for as long as I could. I figured your birthday was as good a time as any to let you know.

JOHN: let me know what?

ROSE: It’s crept up on me, these last couple of years.

ROSE: Gradually enough to ignore as it was happening, but I can’t anymore." Okay, so this seems to dismiss that. I'm actually somewhere halfway between "Rose is suffering from some sort of aspect-driven migraine/dementia due to the black hole", or secondly "Rose is realizing she loves John (platonically)". I mean, the latter would be standard-issue Lalonde fuckery.

"ROSE: Lately the visions have been overwhelming.

JOHN: visions??

ROSE: John, I have terrible headaches these days. Talking on the phone doesn’t help at all.

ROSE: Would you mind flying to my apartment, so we can continue this in person?

JOHN: oh, yeah. you mean...

JOHN: now?

ROSE: Yes, now is the time.

ROSE: I’ve put it off long enough." ... Oh. So, I guess Rose was ignoring these visions because she was like "fuck you, multiverse, I earned my happy ending", which I get, but... What visions does she have, do they match what John was describing? (I don't think she wants to get him over for a surprise birthday party, in any case.)

Wow, okay, so whatever drove them to go fight Caliborn, it wasn't just John convincing the rest of them. Should've known, he was never that kind of leader.

"As you hang up the phone, a familiar feeling settles over you. A feeling of...standing? Standing, and being alone. In your bedroom. As a young man. On your birthday. You swear you’ve felt this feeling before. It’s almost like...

A young man stands alone in his bedroom. It just so happens that today, the 13th of April, is this young man’s birthday. Though it was twenty-three years ago when he was given life, and ten years ago when he was given a name, it feels like it is only today that he will begin to understand what all that means.

That young man is YOU, John Egbert.

What will you do?"

Oh HELL yes. That first shoutout was glorious, but the actual word for word callback? Priceless. And the fact that the narration gives John the initiative for what happens now? Glorious. Because it sure as hell ain't gonna be US giving him prompts, this time around. And what in the high hills is there for John to find out about what it all means! I mean, is he going to discover the nature of his existence as a fictional character? Because that might just crush his widdle brains.

Okay, this is as good a place as any to cut off this liveblog. Since I'm not sure how long this prologue might continue after this!

Cooooool though, we've started this journey anew. For however long it's going to last. Which, given the fact the epilogues get their own entry on the Homestuck site... Might be a very, very long time. It's three years since the ending of Homestuck, and I wonder how reading up is going to be. For now, everything kind of fell back into the old pattern between me and Blaperile. We'll see what we'll do next.

I'm equal parts exhilarated and anxious about getting on Mr. Hussie's wild rollercoaster again, so I'm going to try and quarantine the anxious part and cultivate the exhilarated part.

#homestuck #homestuck liveblog #homestuck epilogues #furthest ring #upd8 #reaction #spoiler alert

2 notes · View notes

kiederen · 6 years ago

Text

Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE review

I said I would give my impressions on #FE and I neglected to do so till now, but better late than never.

I’ll be talking about:

Story

Setting/Theme

Characters

Gameplay

1. Story

The story is nothing special - I enjoyed it, but it's a fairly typical jrpg "power of friendship and bonds" deal that is only made unique in any capacity by the idol culture that frames it. It's not bad, but it's not groundbreaking either. I wish the story were a bit longer to give more of a build up into the final confrontation. The earlier stages slowly start to set things up but even just one more dedicated chapter to ease into the final arc would have probably made the ending feel less rushed. That and I just enjoyed playing it overall and would liked more content.

The distinct chapters format to the flow may have been meant to simulate FE chapters while still also representing how persona stories often have noticeable breaks between dungeon arcs. In TMS though, it felt a bit more artificial, not damningly so, but I think the plot momentum was a bit worse for it.

The set up for each chapter break also revolves around Itsuki himself improving as an entertainer, even though he doesn’t know what direction he wants to focus on, and while it’s most emphasized early on, this aspect of Itsuki’s development himself feels almost abandoned or ignored through the mid and late game until the very end. The solution does make some sense, but some of the details that enable it to happen are a bit questionably contrived, and like the overall story, it felt a bit rushed in the final hour, based on what I remember.

Otherwise, the story did a good job of setting itself up, providing the characters with adequate motivation and means to seek the goals they set and each dungeon gave reasonable purpose for the main characters to tackle it.

The final chapter seemed to be trying to make up for the lack of build up by twisting and turning a bit more than usual, but most of its attempted twists were fairly standard fair for trying to draw out suspense and unfortunately were somewhat predictable for it. I was a little surprised at the host for the big bad, but mostly because I hadn’t been paying close enough attention so that was on me.

2. Setting/Theme

The Tokyo idol scene setting is the most interesting aspect of the story and while I can see it being polarizing, I found it novel myself. Mechanically, it does a good job of unifying the dungeons under a common theme of "things idols do" - such as posing for photo shoots or acting on TV.

Beyond dungeon design, the idol theme also naturally informed character designs and the multitude of costumes that appear throughout.

You can even see this thematic flair in the way that spell casting involves a character signing their autograph as a glyph!

If there’s one oddity that stands out to me about the aesthetics of the game, it’s that the monster designs seem to be unable to decide whether they should be FE inspired or SMT inspired or neither, but even in the latter case most don’t seem to fit in with the idol theme in any capacity.

Even when enemies are FE inspired, they seem to have gone through a similar (if not more extreme) filter that the Mirage characters went through - becoming dramatically stylized and the only real purpose I can conceive for it is to make enemy classes that were definitely human in FE appear non-human here. For instance, the middle and right monsters above are myrmidon class enemies - unpromoted swordmasters from the FE universe.

Not to mention: Why do their out-of-combat sprites look like Organization XIII members!?

3. Characters

Like the story, the characters are good if nothing particularly revolutionary. Most seem built around one or two tropes but then are fleshed out beyond that which is fine. You learn more about them as you do their individual side quests (social links) and these do a good job of giving the feeling of evolving your bond with that character. The pacing of the side stories is mostly okay, though the gameplay reward for those that are plot locked to be very late doesn't always feel equal to how long you had to wait to do them. There's a bit of persona syndrome wherein all the chars get plenty of opportunities to interact with the MC, but would benefit from more time interacting with each other as well.

I liked all the characters in the end. There's a good variety between both the girls and boys, though because of join times some chars got more focused screen time than others. Again, I think a longer late game with more story side quests (instead of fetch quests) would have helped balance things out.

If I had to be as base as to rank the girls in terms of waifu ratings: 1. Eleonora 2. Tsubasa 3. Kiria 4. Maiko 5. Mamori = Tiki Though it's worth noting that top four are all really close, and each slot only wins out over their competition by a small margin. I don’t dislike Mamori or Tiki, I just am not into the little sister appeal.

I suppose Barry Goodman is worth mentioning as well. Barry is a foreigner who settled in Japan and behaviorally embodies the most cringe-worthy aspects of otaku culture. He’s heavy-set, roughly groomed, and somewhat aggressive/abrasive about his passions. I’m not one to judge him for the subject of his passions, but the way he interacts with them would make me uncomfortable around him had he been a real person. Ultimately he is a good person at heart, but his poor people skills are unlikely to endear him to anyone on first impressions, and the fact that he doesn’t care only exacerbates his problems.

Finally, and predictably most disappointingly, the FE chars (heroes and villains) are barely developed and could be replaced with persona or persona like motifs without changing the overall plot. The FE aspect is little more than a coat of paint that gives secondary theme to the invading 'otherworld,' and it's a real shame and waste of potential.

Aside from the Mirage characters and Tiki themselves, there are however a few unmarked references that are at least self aware enough to be welcome Easter eggs for fire emblem fans:

Anna is your convenience store shopkeeper, and there’s even a ‘shadow anna’ who will sell you more dubious dungeon consumables that a normal convenience store wouldn’t stock.

Ilyana works at the cafe, keeping close to her beloved food.

Aimee runs the jewelry store as she was the item store merchant in FE9 and 10

And Cath runs the costume shop. She’s a thief in FE6 with a distinct affinity for money, not unlike Anna, though not as extreme either. Admittedly, it’s been a while since I’ve read over her supports though.

I saw an npc employee at one of the random background shops in Shibuya central street that could also be Brady from FE Awakening, but the camera never got close enough to see him clearly enough to make a positive ID.

Finally, I found it amusing that all the playable chars' names are class puns/references

蒼井樹 = Aoi Itsuki > Aoi means blue in reference to FE lords typically having blue hair

織部つばさ = Oribe Tsubasa > Tsubasa in reference to her peg knight class

赤城斗馬 = Akagi Touma > 赤 (Aka) gives us “red” while 馬(uma) is “horse.” Red cavalier (partnered with a green cavalier) is a reoccurring archetype in FE. The Red cav tends to be the hot-headed one.

I can break down the others if desired, but these will do for examples.

4. Gameplay

Going to break this into a few parts:

General

Combat

Dungeons

1. General

The real reason this game is compared to Persona; gameplay mirrors a lot of persona's elements and it's almost easier to describe how it deviates from the Persona format than spend time detailing how they're the same. That said, if you like the persona formula (as I do), you'd probably enjoy TMS's gameplay flow as well.

While the lack of daily life and day limits for dungeons removes a lot of the tension of time management for them, I think it's fine since a lot of persona players rush dungeons in 1-2 days anyway and in TMS, once the dungeon is done, you don't have to worry about doing busy work to tick off the days until the plot is allowed to move forward again. The lack of social stats is an element of depth removed, but without a time cost element to activities, it makes sense and is probably a good thing for it to be absent from TMS (even if story wise it could have actually be viable as Aoi and the others grow their skills as performers).

Using the WiiU game pad as a smartphone screen to facilitate off-screen character interactions as well as display more detailed enemy information was clever if perhaps unnecessary (as persona 5 showed). Having the only map on the game pad actually made it a little disorienting to reference for me since my eyes had to leave my tv entirely, leading to me either holding my game pad up or bobbing my head up and down to compare my map with my surroundings. On the DS, the two screens are at least close by. I’d like to say there may have been a better use for the game pad, I’m not thinking of anything off the top of my head, so it may have been wise to minimize its use as a gimmick anyway.

This is already in your phone history when you start the game, but it’s still probably my favorite moment from the text message logs:

#relatable.

Replacing persona fusion is a more straightforward crafting system that is the source for your weapons and passive skills, and in turn, much like Tales of Vesperia, your weapons are the source of your skills, both active and passive. The system sounds more grindy than it is in practice though. Simply advancing through the dungeons and fighting 70-80% of the monsters you encounter naturally will provide you with enough materials to forge most weapons as they become available. In fact there were a number of times when I ran out of new weapons to forge and had to push on with already mastered weapons equipped. I liked that bosses and some savage encounters would drop mats of a higher tier than what was readily available from current monsters, and you had to spend them wisely before advancing the plot to the point where those mats became common. It let you preview the next tier of weapons and abilities for select characters but who you gave those weapons to was never overly stressful since you could get the other weapons you passed on later anyway.

Rare monsters drop unique mats that can make weapons that give unusual or otherwise off-type skills to characters and it makes catching rare monsters that flee rather than engage the player rewarding. IIRC, I encountered fewer than ten rare monsters in my entire play through though, so I did not feel it worth the time to actively hunt them unless there was some trick to make them appear more reliably (and catching them was also a bit dependent on the surroundings). Like treasure monsters in P5, they usually had some kind of gimmick where they were only weak to one thing if they had any weakness and the latter ones also came with dodge [weakness] passive and had a chance of just up and running from battle.

2. Combat

The one-more mechanic is replaced by "Sessions" which are not unlike self contained one-more combos anyway. The tag in attacking animations were pretty fun and though late game sessions can get quite long, there’s no way to speed up or skip session animations, possibly in part because of the existence of duo arts which use the session animations as a timer. They could have prohibited skipping prior to deciding on a duo art and then allow skipping or speed up after, though. Long session animations didn’t bother me, personally though, as session attack animations were varied and interesting enough that I never got tired of even the early basic ones (most of which were replaced by late game).

Openly displayed turn order, plus some late game skills that can actually influence turn order were both welcome features as well.

Beyond sessions, specials, duo arts, and ad-lib performances were great at providing extra variety and changing the pace of what might otherwise be rote combat. While duo arts and ad-lib performances were rng bonuses that you mostly just take whatever you can get and be grateful, specials were more deliberate, needing a resource that builds slowly at first. Later on, with longer sessions and meter boosting passives, the sp gauge builds up much faster, but even then specials usually should be selected carefully, especially within boss battles where recovering lost sp is a bit trickier.

That said, special skills were not created equal. Even though buffs and debuffs are powerful, some of the later buffing and debuffing specials came late, at a point where I already had normal skills that could buff or debuff at almost if not the same potency without spending SP. Similarly, as my repertoire of skills grew, my ability to hit weaknesses improved and using specials to break through resistances became less necessary, even as monsters began appearing with more resistances.

Finally, Itsuki’s second special - “Strike A Pose,” was absurdly good and only got better as my session combos grew longer late game. The ability to give everyone twice the actions in a turn opens up so many other combos that often times, there was little reason to use offensive specials in favor of either two individual sessions or a concentrate/charge boosted session.

Inversely, I found myself using healing specials a lot less, and perhaps it was because I used Tsubasa a lot less late game - I made Chrom a great lord which gave Itsuki healing and support which was kinda Tsubasa’s niche previously, so with Touma able to out damage Tsubasa and Elly covering flying enemies, Tsubasa just wasn’t out in combat all that often, which meant Mamori was the only one with healing specials (which were helpful on occasion) but in the end using Strike A Pose allowed me to get normal heals out in extra abundance while still enabling attackers to make a play to help clear troublesome enemies.

The FE weapon triangle’s representation in strengths and weaknesses among weapon types (not extending to magic though) gave a welcome way to predict weaknesses for enemies I had not encountered yet. One of the frustrating things about persona had always been that weakness/strength attributes for new monsters were difficult to predict and late game could cause you to walk into a bad situation that was never really your fault. Not only did the weapon triangle help mitigate some of the arbitrary mystery, but weaknesses were frequently consistent across similar enemy types at different levels even outside of the sword/lance/axe trinity. For example mage type enemies were, with few exceptions, all weak to swords and fire. Skills that deal effective damage (i.e. horseslayer/armorslayer) were also a great addition that gave characters tools to start session combos on enemies that they might otherwise be powerless against. The player also gets other ways to work around pesky resistances, features that are both welcome and necessary because...

If I have one glaring critic of the battle system it’s that Itsuki, like persona protags is mandatory. However, unlike persona protags, Itsuki has static combat tools and extremely limited ability to influence his own strength and weakness attributes. He’s always weak to fire and lances and since you can’t remove him from the front line, you always have someone in combat weak to those elements. Fortunately this is less deal breaking for the fact that Itsuki dying in combat doesn’t immediately game over (hallelujah!). In addition, later in the game most chars get passive skills that greatly increase their avoid against elements they’re weak to, Itsuki included. Still, being able to remove Itsuki from the front line would greatly increase your party diversity and flexibility. For a while after recruiting a second sword character, I had difficulty justifying putting him in the active party because Itsuki already filled the sword role. Eventually, I promoted Itsuki to a more support role and let the other char handle offensive sword plays.

One more minor complaint I have is the inability to swap out fallen allies. Having only three party members means that even one of them dying can be crippling, especially later on and on harder difficulties. I’ve wasted turns reviving downed allies and trying to heal back only for enemies to just repeat what killed someone in the first place and put me exactly where I was last turn with less healing items or sometimes in an even worse situation. While the boss dichotomy of easy/impossible with little in between that some persona bosses suffer from is present here, the existence of specials, ad-lib performances and duo performances that heal or revive greatly alleviate some of the comeback struggle that has a tendency to snowball in this combat system. As the only active non-rng option, specials in particular are important to the system. The severity of boss gimmicks isn’t quite as punishing in TMS compared to persona, but TMS’s smaller party size, can still cause a bad situation to cascade into unsalvageable territory.

3. Dungeons

The dungeon design of TMS is interesting in that it departs from persona 3/4′s formula of randomly generated floors in favor of deliberately organized floor plans with usually only one correct path to the end. The linearity is sometimes broken up by treasures that you’ll have to backtrack for, but aside from that, there’s little mandatory backtracking within a dungeon. Dungeons stick around even after you clear them, allowing side stories to ask you to venture back over familiar ground for one task or another.

That said, the linear nature isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In TMS’s case, it allows the developers to give the player a learning curve for the dungeon’s mechanics and then challenge how well the player understood the earlier lessons, because the devs can guarantee that the player experienced the earlier sections before the later ones. It may sound obvious on paper, but it means that the developers can have a better awareness of the player’s competency at any given point in any dungeon, which is something that can’t be tracked when the player can go multiple routes at any given time. But I digress.

Another mechanical difference of note is how the player, Itsuki interacts with enemies pre-battle. In persona 3 and later, you could swing your weapon to hit an enemy in the field and that would start combat (at an advantage if they didn’t notice you), but in TMS, striking an opponent on the field knocks them back and stuns them, giving you the choice to then get closer and touch them to begin combat at an advantage or to avoid combat entirely. I like this greater degree of choice and it fits within the philosophy that TMS dungeons are made to be less stressful - less about meticulous resource management - than persona games. There’s still an incentive to engage in combat: you need to keep up a certain amount of level growth just to have the raw stats to beat bosses, but if you’re low on health and/or healing items or just plain short on available play time and you think or know there’s a checkpoint up ahead so you just want to make a push to reach it, you aren’t forced into battles you don’t want to engage in... with the exception of “Savage Encounters,” which are challenge monsters that seem to just exist to screw with you anyway. I think there was only one area prior to the last or second to last dungeons that had savage enemies I could actually beat albeit with great effort.

Playing TMS after Persona 5, it was also apparent that TMS’s idolaspheres were prototype palaces, from the set floor layouts and linear progression to the overarching themes of the dungeon informing its aesthetic and unique mechanics. In fact there are a number of things that TMS pinoeered for Atlus that then went on to feature in P5. You can read about some others here.

Puzzles were almost entirely navigation in nature - that is, how to use the dungeon mechanics and infrastructure to get from your start to your goal. It may be because it’s been a little over a month now, but none particularly stand out in my memory as being exceptionally good, while one or two I remember for being somewhat arduous or tiring. I’m still of the opinion that areas that the player is trying to solve puzzles in should have lower if not 0 encounter rate with random enemies, as battles, especially turn based ones that don’t tend to resolve in a single turn, can disrupt problem solving trains of thought.

Overall the dungeons are good though, and that’s important as they’re the meat of the gameplay. They are generally well paced with plenty to do and some minor stuff to find on your way to your target goal. Each dungeon’s unique mechanics fit with the dungeon theme and aside from a few exceptions the enemies are fairly distributed.

5. Conclusion

It has its flaws but I think, in the end, Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE gets more right than it gets wrong. Even though the story was standard fair for this genre, I thoroughly enjoyed it and wished it had more content to its core for me to experience. I know there’s dlc, but the nature of dlc means that it’s nothing integral to the story and I’m not sure it would scratch the itch the way I want.

The setting is unique and the game fully embraces the themes it sets up and the themes in turn inform and affect almost every aspect of the game, giving it a unified appeal.

The combat is arguably more interesting than persona. It takes the same core formula of targeting weak points for massive damage but allows players more tools and freedom to circumvent bad matchups, make carefully planned strategic plays, or simply style on enemies with flashy satisfying attacks.

#TMS #Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE #Sharpfe

2 notes · View notes