Benoit Busque figures he’ll write this now, seeing that the fourth Persona game is just a hop-skip away from doing it all over again (And he will love every minute of it).
I’ve stopped playing Persona 3. Don’t get me wrong, I love RPGs (which has led to a certain degree of shoulder chaffing with another author of this website. I do have to concede a point to the bastard, though, even if he suggested men of my tastes carry certain unmanly heirs); especially ones where I can live out my past high school fantasies of banging whoever I want and running around at night shooting myself.
In an effort to get my money’s worth out of essentially buying the same game twice (with that tacked on FES acronym, whatever the fuck that means), I decided I was going to challenge myself to complete the game's hard setting—you would figure that’s why the game has a hard mode. What I neglected though, is how a game that’s really about spreadsheet functions with massive assets (read: cartoon girls and their tits) actually calculates difficulty. About the same way as a calculator: Fucking scientific notation.
You see that motherfucker? His name is Sleeping Table. I don’t even know what the fuck that means, but his name should be “I’m a fucking table with a face and I’m here to kick your ass.” Given the context of the game he’s likely some sort of religious figure to a cult of insomniac furniture makers from 1000 years ago. And just why is he a motherfucker? Just why am I writing an article about RPGs kicking my sculpted, manly ass? In about 10 seconds that you can’t see because the picture is still, Table-face here is going to kill me with one move. Thanks, Atlus. Now I’ll never be able to save the world and continue screwing high school girls with big…eyes.
What pisses me off is that this is not what I wanted when I said hard mode. I wanted a challenge, not a game that pisses in my eyes and laughs at me in Japanese. This isn’t difficulty, this is numbers scaled up. This doesn’t demand I think, it demands I go back and plumb the depths of infinite enemies until I’m a high enough level that I don’t get my ass kicked in 10 seconds. The game has boiled every solution down to “play longer”. What the hell guys? I’ve already slaved enough time to your little day calendar from Hell, I don’t need this bullshit.
Don’t begin to cry foul with, “Oh, you can’t handle difficult games!” I eat fucking Contra for breakfast. This isn’t difficulty. This is just scaling up numbers: the most artificial way to increase the amount of time that I have to tolerate cartoon people telling me they levelled up (way to break the fourth wall). The enemies haven’t gotten notably smarter, nor have any of their generic and easily discovered weaknesses changed. Everything is just suddenly rape-tastic.
The largest reason this feeds my frustration is that, despite this being the “hard” mode, there is only one thing that differentiates it from the normal difficulty: Things hit you harder. It’s only harder in the way that a sledgehammer is harder than a rubber mallet. Playing a difficult setting in a RPG is really just an exercise in mashing your nuts with something bigger than you already were.
- Guest column written by Benoit Busque
The thing about RPGs (you know, real ones, not gimmick-laced, glorified CGI movies) is that they're honestly only as tough as the amount of a real outside life you choose to give yourself. In other words, no matter how inflated and jacked up they make the opposition, if you're ever at a point where you're pissed at the world and confining yourself to weeks of isolation, strong drink and Cinemax, you can exercise your ability to grind the fuck out of any RPG and come back months later to kill your old enemy with dozens of sword attacks at 9999 damage each per turn. Classic RPGs and super-analytical nerds are a match made in game heaven.
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