What Are You Playing, Part 3: The Assassination of my Wallet by the Cowardly Sale

[Eldan]

Yeah... that game is something. I had to stop playing, wait a few weeks and then watch a let's play of the second half. It actually gets worse.

[Cespenar]

I decided to get a single game during this summer sale, due to my revelation a couple years back that I shouldn't buy more games until I've finished the ones I already own. (I'll get caught up sometime this century.)

The game I decided on was Night in the Woods, and I made an unexpected discovery: The characters and their situation were so relatable the game was kind of stressful for me. I could easily picture my old circle of friends, with our crumbling lives, having most of the conversations that came up in the early game. Then there was the big reveal about why Mae moved back in with her parents...

That was so easy for me to identify with that I had to stop playing for a while. A game hasn't gotten to me like that in a long time, but it's not like there are many other games about ordinary weird people trying to live our lives...

I mean, I didn't have much to associate with the main character myself, but it was still pretty impactful and sympathetic. I think the writing is just that good.

[Cygnia]

I got it with the same bundle The Hex was in...given what I've read about what happened behind the scenes, I don't think I can play it in good conscience. :(

[NeoVid]

Yeah... after I completed NitW the first time (honestly, the World of Darkness-ish parts of the finale were easier for me to take than the everyday life stuff), I got addicted to its amazing soundtrack. Then I got hit with a real-world emotional gutpunch when I found out the game's composer killed himself last year. It's enough to make me legitimately wonder if NitW's creators made the game due to a monkey's-paw wish.

[Man_Over_Game]

Actually bought Breath of the Wild.

I'm actually really friggin' surprised how big this game is. The first zone is probably the most intense tutorial level I've ever played. Then there was the realization that the second zone, 4x larger than the first, was just the second tutorial. Seriously, I'm not sure how exactly I'm supposed to get gear needed to fight some of the higher level badguys, as playing almost perfectly got me a 50 damage sword, and I just stealthed around a random centaur enemy that had 2000 HP, and his solo minion killed me in a single hit (was an armored Lizalfos).

For reference, I've got 6 hearts. It takes 4 shrines to gain a single heart container, and it takes about 60 minutes to find and solve a shrine without a guide. By my estimations, it'll take me 24 hours of gameplay to afford a second hit against the centaur's MINIONS.

I have discovered that stamina meals = cheating. Need to climb somewhere you're not supposed to reach? Stamina meal. Need to capture a horse that you'd normally need a bunch of upgrades to catch? Stamina meal.

My biggest, most frustrating gripe in this entire stinkin' game is the lack of arrows. How the hell am I supposed to run out of bows when I don't actually have any arrows to break them with? It bugs me that I can gather up wood by throwing my infinite bombs at trees, flint, a dozen types of ores, go through 3 melee weapons in an hour...and might get 5 arrows in that time, 4 of which I spent on a shrine that had a switch that I couldn't hit without them.

Ranged weapon? Oh, you mean the unlimited bombs I can spawn, or the swords I can throw, right?

[warty goblin]

Been playing around in World of Warships again, which I mostly quite like. Somebody actually spent an enormous sack of money on a game about early 20th century warships, and clearly made a solid, good-faith effort to produce something that was, if not realistic in a simulationist sort of way, at least broadly authentic. The fact that this happened is at least slightly astonishing to me. Most of the mechanics are either obvious concessions to this being an action game (gun ranges are substantially shortened, aircraft ranges are hilariously shortened), or sensible, simplified and understandable rules to broadly represent naval warfare of the period. Something like 90% of matches are quite fun, even when I inevitably explode, and I'm getting better at figuring out why I'm inevitably exploding.

I do wish they'd nerfed armor penetration values in line with their range restrictions. But they seem to have pretty faithfully reproduced actual penetration values for various calibers and ranges. Which, since you're usually at knife fight in a phone booth ranges for battleships, means that against other battleships your armor is nearly irrelevant, and the most important thing is whether you're facing them directly enough to make their shells auto-bounce off you. This is annoying, and pretty much always means you're better off having your T crossed than crossing the enemy's T, at least if said enemy is shooting at you.

[tonberrian]

Actually bought Breath of the Wild.

I'm actually really friggin' surprised how big this game is. The first zone is probably the most intense tutorial level I've ever played. Then there was the realization that the second zone, 4x larger than the first, was just the second tutorial. Seriously, I'm not sure how exactly I'm supposed to get gear needed to fight some of the higher level badguys, as playing almost perfectly got me a 50 damage sword, and I just stealthed around a random centaur enemy that had 2000 HP, and his solo minion killed me in a single hit (was an armored Lizalfos).

For reference, I've got 6 hearts. It takes 4 shrines to gain a single heart container, and it takes about 60 minutes to find and solve a shrine without a guide. By my estimations, it'll take me 24 hours of gameplay to afford a second hit against the centaur's MINIONS.

I have discovered that stamina meals also cheating. Need to climb somewhere you're not supposed to reach? Stamina meal. Need to capture a horse that you'd normally need a bunch of upgrades to catch? Stamina meal.

My biggest, most frustrating gripe in this entire stinkin' game is the lack of arrows. How the hell am I supposed to run out of bows when I don't actually have any arrows to break them with? It bugs me that I can gather up wood, flint, a dozen types of ores, go through 3 melee weapons in an hour...and might get 5 arrows in that time, 4 of which I spent on a shrine that had a switch that I couldn't hit without them.

Ranged weapon? Oh, you mean the unlimited bombs I can spawn, or the swords I can throw, right?

Damage is a little inflated for you currently, because there is a defense stat in this game and you get it from armor, and the tutorial zone has... very little. But eventually the armor scales down the damage to reasonable numbers of hearts.

[Man_Over_Game]

Damage is a little inflated for you currently, because there is a defense stat in this game and you get it from armor, and the tutorial zone has... very little. But eventually the armor scales down the damage to reasonable numbers of hearts.

I thought I was doing fairly well, had about 17 armor (3 + 5 + 3, upgraded all for +2 each) but I clearly need to find some better stuff. Impa's village, and the eastern village with the Professor lady don't really have anything worth buying. Do you have any suggestions?

[tonberrian]

I thought I was doing fairly well, had about 17 armor (3 + 5 + 3, upgraded all for +2 each) but I clearly need to find some better stuff. Impa's village, and the eastern village with the Professor lady don't really have anything worth buying. Do you have any suggestions?

Unfortunately you can't buy better armor, you have to upgrade it more - gotta find those great fairies and let them... do whatever it is that they do to poor Link.

(Technically you can buy more armor, just it all scales at the same rate with upgrades, the other sets just have different bonuses you can unlock.)

[Erloas]

It sounds like, unsurprisingly, that it shares a lot of the design cues, and problems with, World of Tanks. Which I quite liked for quite a while, but the premium shells indirectly affects some tanks and styles a lot more than others. It seemed like a good thing that they made the premium rounds available for non-paying players, but that just meant that a lot of people had them all the time. The issue was that you had to devote a lot more time to playing if you wanted to afford to use said rounds, and effectively had to have a mid-high end premium tank to afford that (usually $30-50 worth of tank)

For me though it effectively fills the exact same niche as Mechwarrior Online, and I'm much more invested in the Battletech universe and they don't have the pay-to-win or heavy grinding requirements of WoT.

[warty goblin]

It sounds like, unsurprisingly, that it shares a lot of the design cues, and problems with, World of Tanks. Which I quite liked for quite a while, but the premium shells indirectly affects some tanks and styles a lot more than others. It seemed like a good thing that they made the premium rounds available for non-paying players, but that just meant that a lot of people had them all the time. The issue was that you had to devote a lot more time to playing if you wanted to afford to use said rounds, and effectively had to have a mid-high end premium tank to afford that (usually $30-50 worth of tank)

For me though it effectively fills the exact same niche as Mechwarrior Online, and I'm much more invested in the Battletech universe and they don't have the pay-to-win or heavy grinding requirements of WoT.

There isn't anything nearly as egregiously pay-to-win as premium ammo in WoWs. There's some premium ships you can buy for real money (or rather fake game money you only get for real money) but I don't think they're really any stronger than the standard ships at that tier. One certainly progresses faster if you hack up and give them some cash, but because the matchmaking only puts you with ships within a couple tiers of yours, and you can unlock all a ship's upgrades without paying real money, you aren't disadvantaged if you don't pay. I guess there's also camouflage patterns and flags you can get with real money, but they offer such minuscule bonuses that short of really serious competitive play I can't see being bothered. Honestly for a FtP game, it's seemed remarkably reasonable to me so far.

[Erloas]

WoT also does tiers for match-making. The premium ammo used to be gold only but they changed it to regular in-game currency. It just happens to be really expensive to run. Premium tanks at one point got preferred matchmaking, but I don't know if that changed or not, but the big thing is that they make a lot more credits per mission. So you'll most likely be loosing credits each match (at least tier 5 and above) if you're running premium rounds and/or extra consumables unless you get the bonus for a premium tank and/or premium time.

[Cespenar]

Yeah... after I completed NitW the first time (honestly, the World of Darkness-ish parts of the finale were easier for me to take than the everyday life stuff), I got addicted to its amazing soundtrack. Then I got hit with a real-world emotional gutpunch when I found out the game's composer killed himself last year. It's enough to make me legitimately wonder if NitW's creators made the game due to a monkey's-paw wish.

Wow, that's a story alright.

[HiddenTrack]

I'm replaying Pathologic 2. I honestly think it's the best written game ever made. (Maybe behind Mother 3, but that's a very different kettle of fish.)

A lot has been made of it's difficulty, but I've actually found it really compelling, and I'm not a huge fan of crazy difficulty in general. (I have played/completed difficult games, I adore Cuphead for example, but the Dark Souls series and the like I've just found really frustrating to get into, and I'm really not a fan of having to redo stuff over and over again.)

It's definitely oppressive and stressful, but I've always found it sort of... fair in its difficulty, or when it suddenly becomes SERIOUSLY UNFAIR it feels like it just pulls it off really effectively, so I feel like I'm fighting against the game in a battle of wills in order to save the characters in it...

I've never found I've ragequit while playing Pathologic 2. Just played transfixed while going ARGRHGR WHY GOD WHY!?

[Man_Over_Game]

Unfortunately you can't buy better armor, you have to upgrade it more - gotta find those great fairies and let them... do whatever it is that they do to poor Link.

(Technically you can buy more armor, just it all scales at the same rate with upgrades, the other sets just have different bonuses you can unlock.)

Got like two hints there was a great fairy at the top of Mt. Lanaryu (a memory and a random sidequest from a villager), used a bunch of anti-cold stuff (potions, warm clothing, even had to wield my fire sword for warmth), climbed to the top while fighting off dang ice lizalfos, freed the corrupted dragon after chasing it across the entire mountain range on a kite with 1 arrow left, solved the shrine, and...got an ice spear? Where the hell is the great fairy?

I worked my ass off for this, WHERE IS MY FAIRY?

[factotum]

Wow. I've been playing video games for nigh on 40 years now, and yet it took until now for me to discover the single most irritatingly designed boss fight ever included in a game. It's the Okumura fight in Persona 5 Royal, and the rest of this is in spoilers--no story spoilers, you understand, but there might be some people who want to encounter this fight without foreknowledge of its awfulness:

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1. I believed the most annoying thing you can possibly do in a turn based game is to have a fixed number of turns to complete a fight, but it turns out I just didn't have enough imagination to conceive of the true horror--an actual timer. Counting down seconds and minutes. In a turn-based game, where every attack animation and the like is now taking up precious seconds that you can't do anything about. Bring up a menu to look through for the right healing item? Hope you're quick on the controls for that!
2. The enemies in this fight come in waves, four at a time, getting tougher as you defeat each one. Unfortunately, you have just two turns to defeat each wave--if you fail to do so then any enemies left in the wave run away and four brand new ones appear.
3. The way you get through Persona 5 Royal battles generally is to try and attack the weaknesses of all your enemies to knock them down--once they're all down, you get a Hold Up scene where you can choose to do an All In attack for massive damage. This makes a fight normally something of a puzzle--what order do I use my skills to maximise the knock-down chance and minimise my SP usage? Naturally, this doesn't actually work during this boss fight--even if all the enemies go down, they just get up again on their turn and keep going.
4. The boss can give a Sacrifice Order at the beginning of his turn to a minion, who will explode and do massive damage to all your party members when his turn comes. Since he does this almost every turn you can pretty much guarantee one of your party members will be unable to deal damage to the opponents because they'll have to be healing everyone after the explosion.

This is without doubt the most soul-destroying and annoying boss fight I've encountered. I guess I have the option of dropping it to Easy if I'm really struggling, but I don't think that will make the fight any less perfectly designed to irritate the heck out of me.

[Zevox]

Wow. I've been playing video games for nigh on 40 years now, and yet it took until now for me to discover the single most irritatingly designed boss fight ever included in a game. It's the Okumura fight in Persona 5 Royal, and the rest of this is in spoilers--no story spoilers, you understand, but there might be some people who want to encounter this fight without foreknowledge of its awfulness:

Spoiler

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1. I believed the most annoying thing you can possibly do in a turn based game is to have a fixed number of turns to complete a fight, but it turns out I just didn't have enough imagination to conceive of the true horror--an actual timer. Counting down seconds and minutes. In a turn-based game, where every attack animation and the like is now taking up precious seconds that you can't do anything about. Bring up a menu to look through for the right healing item? Hope you're quick on the controls for that!
2. The enemies in this fight come in waves, four at a time, getting tougher as you defeat each one. Unfortunately, you have just two turns to defeat each wave--if you fail to do so then any enemies left in the wave run away and four brand new ones appear.
3. The way you get through Persona 5 Royal battles generally is to try and attack the weaknesses of all your enemies to knock them down--once they're all down, you get a Hold Up scene where you can choose to do an All In attack for massive damage. This makes a fight normally something of a puzzle--what order do I use my skills to maximise the knock-down chance and minimise my SP usage? Naturally, this doesn't actually work during this boss fight--even if all the enemies go down, they just get up again on their turn and keep going.
4. The boss can give a Sacrifice Order at the beginning of his turn to a minion, who will explode and do massive damage to all your party members when his turn comes. Since he does this almost every turn you can pretty much guarantee one of your party members will be unable to deal damage to the opponents because they'll have to be healing everyone after the explosion.

This is without doubt the most soul-destroying and annoying boss fight I've encountered. I guess I have the option of dropping it to Easy if I'm really struggling, but I don't think that will make the fight any less perfectly designed to irritate the heck out of me.

Yeah, Shadow Okumura is a case of a good thematic boss fight idea, with not so good execution.

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I mean, Okumura is a corrupt corporate president who exploits his workers for his own profit, so his boss fight having him send wave after wave of his underlings at you, and then prove to be a complete pushover once he runs out of them makes sense. But all of the conditions they stacked on it does make it extremely annoying.

In particular, I'm pretty sure you're mistaken that what you need to do is destroy all of the minions in a wave within a two-turn time limit - rather, what you need to do is destroy all of them in the same turn as each other. That's what I recall it seeming to be when I played a couple of months ago, anyway. If it gets around to Okumura's turn and any of his minions are missing, he'll send the rest away and spawn a new wave. Since all-out attack isn't allowed for some reason (yeah, I don't get that either, and it's certainly annoying...) the best way to handle this is to take advantage of the Baton Pass power-up: you want to use single-target effects that the enemies are weak against in order to only knock down one at a time (use items that duplicate low-level spells if your character doesn't have the right spell, odds are you've built up some of those over time, unless you were actually using them already), allowing you to pass the baton the full three times to fully power up your final party member. That member should then hit them with your most damaging AoE, either of their elemental weakness or a physical one (assuming the enemies of that wave aren't resistant to physical attacks, I think one or two might be).

The big problem IIRC comes in the last couple of waves, when the enemies have no weakness to exploit. At that point you need to get Technicals on them to do baton pass - the best way being to inflict shock and then hit the shocked enemy with a gun shot (normal melee attacks will cause your character to get shocked too), but any other Technical combo works too (most mental status effects get Technical with Psi magic, burn gets it off Wind or Nuke, and Freeze gets it off anything but immediately wears off when you do). The problem of course being that landing status effects is never 100% reliable. Physical special attacks tend to be the fastest way to build damage on those enemies, especially multi-hit ones, if you have any.

Also, the very last minion he has comes at you solo, and is tough enough that I wasn't able to kill it before he had it self-destruct, but fortunately blocking that with my health full was enough to let some of my party survive, and you're home free at that point.

[factotum]

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Pretty sure it's the two turn thing, because otherwise you'd get situations where the robot that was tagged to self-destruct on the first turn does so, leaving only three remaining--who then all run away immediately.

Also, have looked up spoilers and all waves of robots have two weaknesses apart from the single big lad at the end, because I'm darned if I'm going into this one unprepared second time around.

I wrote the original post immediately after having stewed on this for a couple of hours, but I had independently thought overnight about the triple baton pass--it's just a matter of trying to pull that off round after round, really.

[PoeticallyPsyco]

Just had another crazy run in Slay the Spire, running a deck as The Silent that was part power spamming (thank you Enchiridion, Mummified Hand, and Frozen Egg), part poison spamming, part discard spamming, and part Snecko Eye (which I got right off the bat by trading in my starting relic to Neow). Despite having an absurd number of powers in the deck, I managed to completely stomp The Awakened One due to hilariously hitting a 1 cost Mayhem with a low cost Nightmares... and then auto-playing another Nightmares the next turn and giving myself another three copies of Mayhem. 8 cards being auto-played per round got absurd, especially since I kept hitting Calculated Gamble. Fortunately I had Tough Bandages to get 3 block from every discard (and Prepared and Concentration also kept auto-playing), so between that, two Afterimages, and Footwork I got to over a hundred block most turns in that fight without ever using anything to carry it over to the next turn. Wacky nonsense, and tons of fun.

[Rodin]

Just had another crazy run in Slay the Spire, running a deck as The Silent that was part power spamming (thank you Enchiridion, Mummified Hand, and Frozen Egg), part poison spamming, part discard spamming, and part Snecko Eye (which I got right off the bat by trading in my starting relic to Neow). Despite having an absurd number of powers in the deck, I managed to completely stomp The Awakened One due to hilariously hitting a 1 cost Mayhem with a low cost Nightmares... and then auto-playing another Nightmares the next turn and giving myself another three copies of Mayhem. 8 cards being auto-played per round got absurd, especially since I kept hitting Calculated Gamble. Fortunately I had Tough Bandages to get 3 block from every discard (and Prepared and Concentration also kept auto-playing), so between that, two Afterimages, and Footwork I got to over a hundred block most turns in that fight without ever using anything to carry it over to the next turn. Wacky nonsense, and tons of fun.

Snecko-from-Neow decks are some of my favorites. Being able to build your deck without worry about AP costs lets you do some truly absurd things.

[factotum]

OK, turns out that having an actual gameplan rather than winging it and panicking because you have one eye on the countdown works wonders--beat that boss fight I was having trouble with easily today. I still think it's incredibly annoyingly designed, but I don't need to worry about it again unless I decide to play New Game Plus! Oh, and Zevox:

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I can 100% guarantee it's the "two turns" thing, because on one of the waves I somehow ended up with three robots dead and one just barely alive, and he stayed on the field while the boss had his turn.

[Spacewolf]

Just had another crazy run in Slay the Spire, running a deck as The Silent that was part power spamming (thank you Enchiridion, Mummified Hand, and Frozen Egg), part poison spamming, part discard spamming, and part Snecko Eye (which I got right off the bat by trading in my starting relic to Neow). Despite having an absurd number of powers in the deck, I managed to completely stomp The Awakened One due to hilariously hitting a 1 cost Mayhem with a low cost Nightmares... and then auto-playing another Nightmares the next turn and giving myself another three copies of Mayhem. 8 cards being auto-played per round got absurd, especially since I kept hitting Calculated Gamble. Fortunately I had Tough Bandages to get 3 block from every discard (and Prepared and Concentration also kept auto-playing), so between that, two Afterimages, and Footwork I got to over a hundred block most turns in that fight without ever using anything to carry it over to the next turn. Wacky nonsense, and tons of fun.

I've never really gotten good at slay the spire. Not sure why to be honest something just never clicked right for me to pick the correct moves from my intuition.

[Zevox]

OK, turns out that having an actual gameplan rather than winging it and panicking because you have one eye on the countdown works wonders--beat that boss fight I was having trouble with easily today. I still think it's incredibly annoyingly designed, but I don't need to worry about it again unless I decide to play New Game Plus! Oh, and Zevox:

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I can 100% guarantee it's the "two turns" thing, because on one of the waves I somehow ended up with three robots dead and one just barely alive, and he stayed on the field while the boss had his turn.

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Huh. Guess I must have just never killed a bot in one turn except when I was wiping out the whole wave, and misinterpreted the condition the game was putting on things, in that case.

[Anonymouswizard]

So after a break caused by two freezes wiping out my investigation progress and the first threeish floors of the third dungeon I'm back to P4G and best the dungeon.

And wow, moving the 'X will die for you ability' to so late in the social link makes some of these encounters boil down to 'begin battle, Souji gets hit with Bufudyne, which he happens to be weak to because you couldn't predict this, dies, game over screen'. Like, seriously, why are there enemies with third tier spells in the third dungeon, they can deal upwards of three hundred damage.

On they other hand the dungeon boss felt strangely easy. I'm sure I had more trouble than this last time.

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Shadow Rise was a pushover, I think she hit a character's weakness once, whereas I remember her putting up more of a fight in the original game. -atk, -def, and just whaling on her with the strongest Skills I had dealt with her.

Shadow Teddie was harder, and actually came close to wiping me out once, but as he tended to use Mabufula only after a Mind Charge he got a One More maybe once, meaning the only difference between him and Shadow Rise was 'block when he uses Nihil Hand'.

You know, playing this makes me hope that Atlus will upload Persona 3 Portable to Steam, because I remember the half of the FemMC's route I played being better then the MaleMC's and that game just had a lot more style. There's a reason the Persona summoning from that game still sticks in my mind*, and as a plus there were even more battles against rival Persona users (the fact that there was only one in P4 was a letdown).

* Sure, I get the problems with miming suicide, but it was evocative and thematic.

[factotum]

And wow, moving the 'X will die for you ability' to so late in the social link makes some of these encounters boil down to 'begin battle, Souji gets hit with Bufudyne, which he happens to be weak to because you couldn't predict this, dies, game over screen'. Like, seriously, why are there enemies with third tier spells in the third dungeon, they can deal upwards of three hundred damage.

On they other hand the dungeon boss felt strangely easy. I'm sure I had more trouble than this last time.

I don't remember having that problem in the third P4G dungeon, but that's maybe because I always spent quite a bit of time grinding for XP in the early game and was thus probably overlevelled for the content I was encountering. Mind you, I was also on Normal difficulty, are you playing on a higher one?

[Zevox]

And wow, moving the 'X will die for you ability' to so late in the social link makes some of these encounters boil down to 'begin battle, Souji gets hit with Bufudyne, which he happens to be weak to because you couldn't predict this, dies, game over screen'. Like, seriously, why are there enemies with third tier spells in the third dungeon, they can deal upwards of three hundred damage.

I don't recall -dyne spells getting thrown at you so early in that game, but I will say that's a good example of why I wish the "main character death = instant game over" mechanic in that series would be ditched (it's perhaps the only mechanical change I was wishing for that didn't happen in Persona 5, in fact). It's awfully easy to have your characters get KOed in that series, since damage is so high - which is a strength I feel, making the combat very high-risk, high-reward with the knock-down/All-Out Attack system letting you wipe enemies easily, but making combat rough when you're not doing that. But it means you can have frustrating random Game Overs like that at times if you're not very careful.

Plus, you know, never makes any sense from a meta perspective, since there's no reason your main character's teammates shouldn't just be able to revive him with a Recarm, Revival Bead, etc the same way he can them if they drop.

[Gnoman]

WoT also does tiers for match-making. The premium ammo used to be gold only but they changed it to regular in-game currency. It just happens to be really expensive to run. Premium tanks at one point got preferred matchmaking, but I don't know if that changed or not, but the big thing is that they make a lot more credits per mission. So you'll most likely be loosing credits each match (at least tier 5 and above) if you're running premium rounds and/or extra consumables unless you get the bonus for a premium tank and/or premium time.

Premium matchmaking is independent from premium tank status. Some (mostly older ones) have it, some don't.

Got like two hints there was a great fairy at the top of Mt. Lanaryu (a memory and a random sidequest from a villager), used a bunch of anti-cold stuff (potions, warm clothing, even had to wield my fire sword for warmth), climbed to the top while fighting off dang ice lizalfos, freed the corrupted dragon after chasing it across the entire mountain range on a kite with 1 arrow left, solved the shrine, and...got an ice spear? Where the hell is the great fairy?

I worked my ass off for this, WHERE IS MY FAIRY?

You must have misinterpreted the clues significantly. There's no fairy on Lanaryu, and I don't think there's any clues pointing to the corrupted dragon, but the game practically guides you directly to the first Great Fairy.

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The easiest Great Fairy to get to is directly outside Kakariko village, just a little behind the shrine.

[tyckspoon]

Plus, you know, never makes any sense from a meta perspective, since there's no reason your main character's teammates shouldn't just be able to revive him with a Recarm, Revival Bead, etc the same way he can them if they drop.

Well, for Persona 3 at least..

Spoiler: yes it's a P3 spoiler

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The lead character contains Death, and having him fall in battle could cause all sorts of negative effects because of that - Thanatos goes on a rampage, Pharos/Ryoji gets activated and triggers the harvest of humanity, Main Character gets sent to Nyx long before he's strong enough to fight her..

The other Persona games don't have any story reason I know of to have the main character being temporarily down to cause Critical Existence Failure, tho.

[factotum]

Thing that annoys me most about Persona games is that it's practically impossible to max out all the social links/confidants on a first playthrough (unless you spoiler the heck out of yourself), and since all of those have a nice story attached to them, you miss a lot. Wouldn't be so bad if they were short games, but I'm 90-odd hours into Persona 5 Royal and I've only just got to the original final boss, much less the additional Royal content (although I've made *darned* sure that I've got the prerequisites for that content to happen).

[Zevox]

Thing that annoys me most about Persona games is that it's practically impossible to max out all the social links/confidants on a first playthrough (unless you spoiler the heck out of yourself), and since all of those have a nice story attached to them, you miss a lot. Wouldn't be so bad if they were short games, but I'm 90-odd hours into Persona 5 Royal and I've only just got to the original final boss, much less the additional Royal content (although I've made *darned* sure that I've got the prerequisites for that content to happen).

Eh, it can be difficult for sure, but honestly other than my first time through Persona 3 (which was my first time playing any Persona game) I don't think I've ever missed more than one or two on my first time through. In P4 I'm pretty sure the only one I didn't max the first time through was the woman from the day care center job (Temperance, I think); and in P5 I know I didn't finish Chihaya (Fortune), and can't recall whether I finished Shinya (Tower), but definitely got the rest.

P5 in particular makes it a lot easier if you use certain social link benefits - Kawakami's bonuses get you a lot of extra time, especially for night links if you max out her link as early as you can, and Chihaya's relationship fortunes make it so that, as long as you have money to throw around, you never need to spend time with someone just to gain points again once you've gotten her to rank 5. And Royal of course adds several extra weeks of time to the game if you qualify for the Third Semester events.