Persona Complex - I am Back.

Well, well, well. Welcome to my first blog post in a few weeks. I must apologize for the leave of absence that i had, but it was due to a mixture of pain and work that overwhelmed me for a long time. But I am finally back in the swing of things, and I want to start this with what I have been doing in my free time, and it is all thanks to having a Playstation for the first time in a long time.

I have been playing the Persona series the entire time of my absence, ranging from 3 all the way to 5. I have a problem. I played 3 a long time ago and I had bought 4 when it came out in the classics collection on PS3, but I never got around to finishing either of them due to one main thing: My PS3 that I had at the time died. I went a few years without having one, but thanks to my wife wanting to play the Kingdom Hearts series, I have gained access to this amazing game series again, and all I can say is wow, just wow.

I have not gone back to 3 yet, as I want to get back in the swing of things, but I have pretty much beaten 4, and I am grinding away at 5 in my free time. These two, my god, have gotten me into playing the series again and I cannot wait to get my hands onto the rest of the SMT series. But that is now what I am talking about, this is an admission to me about my addiction and why this game series is taking over my life and is worth all of the praise it has gotten, even 4 if you let me have a say to explain why I am saying that. 

I love the JRPG genre. I love everything from the grinding to the worlds they are set in, but everything lacked one things that made it personal for me. None of them were set in the real world for the most part, or when it does is such a heavily distorted version that real elements are not included in it. That is something that Persona gets right on so many levels, and my god, I love it so much. Where a lot of games just have a very shallow world for the player to mess around in, the Persona games actually make activities something that actually benefit the player. I cannot tell you how much time that I have spent outside of the dungeons in the Persona series on stuff that is real, like studying to going out and spending time with other people. It nails that stuff to such a large degree that I cannot find real faults in spending a large amount of time just doing stuff outside of the dungeons up until you have to spend three in game days grinding out a dungeon so you can beat that boss. (I have done this a lot of times actually)

Outside of that, you have a battle system that will punish you for not being used to it, but not in a way that seemed to make me want to just quit. It has a lot of little quirks that you learn, from buffing your party to debuffing the enemy to charging attacks before unleashing to try and wipe out the enemy in as few of turns as possible. My god, it made my brain hurt at first but once you learn the system in one of them, you can kind of use the experience in all of the later three games. It is how I played 5. I had learned some lessons in 4 and carried them over. It was amazing, and with that, I get to my last point.

I would suggest everyone start with Persona 4. I know that this game is kind of really hated by the main community behind the persona and other atlus games, but hear me out before blowing me off. It is the best to teach time management, persona fusing, and other techniques in a system that was heavily stripped back for some dumb reason. I am talking about the PS2 version. I know that the Vita version added a lot more to do, but I am talking about the play it on PS3 on your TV in the living room. With only two playable times in the day (after school/afternoon and evening) it teaches you to properly manage time to level yourself up and also level up your abilities which effect everything you do outside of the game to some degree. I don't know. I loved 3, but it was a learning experience, and I kind of wished that I had started with 4 to learn the game play before jumping into 3 or 5. So, if you have a PS3 and 10$, get 4 and learn that shit if you have not played a game like this. 

Thank you for reading, and I will be back later this week with some more other ones. Thank you so much for your time and I will see you in the next one.