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Update 40

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Platinum 73 - Persona 3 Portable

 

It's hard to come up with an interesting anecdote or tagline for what got me into the Persona series as I'm not really sure that there is one.  I guess if I had to pick something, it would be that Persona 5 was on basically every single "best games of PS4" list available when I bought the console in 2018.  So I picked it up and obviously it remained still in the plastic wrap until 2020 when I broke out Persona 4.  Having loved both of those games, this one was an obvious play when it rereleased onto PS4 early this year. 

 

Persona 3 and Persona in general are a mixture of social sim and monster builder dungeon crawler.  You are given a certain amount of time and during that time you have to balance leveling up your Social Links / Confidants (depending on which game you're playing) leveling your social stats (i.e. charm, intelligence, courage, etc.), against the dungeon crawling aspects of the game.  Generally, once a month, you will have to complete some sort of combat that ties in the mainline story of this game.  The game sets up a "lost hour" where everyone in the world pauses except those who have awoken personas an internal rebellion against the status quo.  This was brought about by your pretty standard greedy scientists, which have accidentally? set off the end of the world.  Of course its up to you and your band of misfit friends to save the world and defeat death itself with the power of friendship.  Typical as far as JRPG plots go, but it is a typical plot told well.  The story kept me engaged for at least a first playthrough and I think tied everything together better than the other persona games. 

 

The gameplay, however, is dated.  As one might expect for a game that originally released on the PS2 in 2006.  Don't get me wrong its absolutely competent, but its clear that Atlas learned something with their later sequels.  For example, the personas pass on random moves and abilities when you fuse them, instead of letting you choose like in later generations.  This removes a lot of the reason to level up some of your persona's instead of the "always be fusing" mantra if you're going to play it heads up.  You can back out of the screen and reroll the moves but it gets obnoxious after awhile trying to get 1 or 2 particular moves passed on.  I suppose that could be the point, but if you're going to allow me to reroll, might as well just allow me to choose.  The main area for combat is also kinda poopy, but that may be something inherent in the series that I just don't care for.  Here its Tartarus, in P5 its Mementos, in P4 its the actual dungeons, but any time there is just a large section of randomly generated garbage with repeated textures, and way to many enemies and floors, I get disheartened. At least in P5 mementos only has 66 floors or some such.  Tartarus has a whopping 264 floors and if you're going to max all the social links you basically have to do it in 30-50 floor chunks at a time.  The social links here are solid as they always are, but I did run out of stuff to do at night somewhere around September in game (game runs from April until Jan 31 for context), eventually more stuff opened up, but it still meant that most nights was going to bed early or working to get a bit of money. 

 

The arcade is busted, both sides of it.  I probably single-handedly kept them in business with my 3 playthroughs. When you go to the arcade, the top option greatly increases one of your social stats, and the bottom option increases one of your persona's stats by 3.  That is a lot, when the max stat in this game is 99.   I think my Odin was 99 in magic, agility, and strength by somewhere around November, which meant the end game bosses were super easy.  That said the super bosses where not super easy.  They basically required you to get some of the busted magic items in order to beat them.  One of them gives you 8 turns to whip out their hp or they hit you with a 9999 attack.  You can block it with a super obscure item, but I'll be dang if that isn't the only way to win basically.  They also have this gimmick where if you absorb or reflect any of their element on an attack they instantly do the 9999 attack instead.  Its frustrating.  I can build a super cool monster to beat the game with and the devs are like nope not today.  The other superboss has one really tough phase but then its pretty free.  Same idea though, they will hit with a 9999 if you so much as think about trying to be creative.  Mostly I had to scramble to not have those kind of effects on my guys at this point. lol. All of that said, I still had fun though.  Its still persona and if you like persona, you will like this.  I wish this had been a full on remake instead of a rerelease though as maybe they could have fixed some of these issues by simply just updating the game for modern times. 

 

The trophies for this game are on the easier side as well.  It's basically the P4 and P5 (original) list without the RNG nonsense of "hard core risette fan" or "passionate listener".  You will likely have to follow a guide to get in all of the social links, as some of them are really crammed in at the end there.  Also to note, make sure your second playthrough for "a pair of wildcards" is on NG+.  I did my first run with the girl character on a separate NG file since NG+ in this particular game lets you trivialize everything even remotely combat related and didn't get the trophy, so I had to play through a third time.  Luckily, if you don't care about anything, on a NG+ playthrough its super free.  All you have to do is wait for the compendium to unlock on 5/10 (you have to beat temperance first but that's free) and then buy your OP persona from the superbosses from your first playthrough.  Then simply wait until dec 31, and take the bad ending.  You never have to even touch tartarus outside of the the 2 days you have to do so for tutorial. 

 

All said and done, I don't think I'm going to recommend P3 to anyone that isn't already a fan of the series.  The game is overall dated and if you wanted to try out a persona game, I think both of the other offerings in P4 or P5 are better choices. 

 

~TC

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Recently, I started on the highly anticipated Hogwarts Legacy.  As of now, I haven’t made it very far into the game, but I wanted to talk about that first charms class with Professor Ronen and how absolutely magical (pun very much intended) it was.  For anyone worried about spoilers, the charms class in question happens about an hour into the game and doesn’t really have an effect on the overall story of the game, at least not the portion that I’m going to nerd out about.  However, I guess it bears saying that there will be very minor spoilers for that quest in the game. 

 

As I am some anonymous entity on the internet, many of you may be surprised to know that I taught High School Chemistry in the United States for 3 or so years after I graduated from college.  During my time teaching one of the things that fascinated me the most (and one of the reasons I got into teaching to begin with) was the actual act of lesson planning.  How to accurately access your student’s current understanding of a topic, determine what needs to be taught based on the regulations and goals of the curriculum, delivering the material in a way that engages your students, then accurately access them.  I spent a lot of my professional development time with the subject, taking University classes, attending workshops, reading literature all on this topic. There are literal thousands of books, dissertations, youtube videos, and workshops dedicated to the topic, and Professor Ronen followed the playbook step-by-motherf***ing-step. 

 

A successful lesson plan is going to address three main components: 

 

1.  What is the object of the lesson – i.e. what are you trying to teach or convey.

2.  What are the teaching or learning strategies – i.e. how are you going to convey the object.

3.  How are you going to check for student understanding of the lesson. 

 

Beyond that, the best objectives are usually going to be action-oriented and focus on the most essential needs of your students and the learning needs of the overall class, they have to be measurable, and then flexible to cover varying needs of the class based on the dynamic of the class.  That means that Honor students are going to need to be taught differently than special needs students, who in turn, will need to be taught differently than average students.  While that may seem obvious, the most difficult dynamics are often when a mix of all of these students are combined and all need to be addressed without the lesson being to difficult or too easy for any one student.

 

Let’s look at the classroom dynamic of Professor Ronen’s class.   From what we can gather based on our introductions to the characters at this point, Ronen’s class is comprised of Natty Onai an honor student, several different students that we don’t get introduced too that I’m going to assume are on the average side, and you the main character who in this case would be classified as a special needs student, having missed the first 4 years of Hogwarts. 

 

Given this classroom dynamic, Ronen needs to access where his students are, including his new one.  Framing it as a review, he asks the class various questions to ascertain where they are.  No one able to answer, he determines a review is in order.  He then selects a spell that will presumably appear on O.W.L.s (an important government exam) the summoning charm, and pairs students off to practice the spell making sure to pair Natty, his strongest student, with the newcomer.  The new student is benefited by having the honor student there, and Natty’s understanding will need to be at its highest to help explain things to the new student.  It also avoids having an average student, who may be struggling with the spell themselves, from having an extra burden.  After seeing that everyone can at least perform the spell, Ronen escalates by taking the class outside to a constructed board to get some hands-on practice with control over the spell.  This is genius, on the fly, planning that he was able to do because he evaluated that his new student was sufficiently able to perform the objective at hand, so he could further engage his students.  Having conveyed the lesson, he then moves to assessment of learning, AND keeps his students engaged by making the assessment a game or competition.  Gamification of lessons as assessment is relatively new tech, but it has documentation and does work.  Most students are also naturally competitive so it allows you often to see their best effort, something they may get scared out of with traditional assessment (read as paper test).  Even beyond that, for his stronger students as the MC proves to be, he again adjusts the lesson and assigns you and Natty an even tougher complication.  Its honestly a beautiful example of how to execute a lesson plan. 

 

On top of that, Professor Ronen has the intangibles.  He has the energy, the disposition, and the personality that students often look for in teachers, even if they don’t realize that they do.  It makes it easier to engage and be liked by the students, which in turn makes them more likely to listen and engage in lessons.  

 

All of that to say, that this seemingly inconsequential mission definitely connected with me.  I don’t know if the Devs had actual teachers help in the design of these lessons or they just did their research, but they definitely nailed this one. 

 

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  • 3 weeks later...

Excellent write-up here!! As someone who has yet to play the game, but plans to soon, I appreciate the very spoiler-lite presentation ?

 

With that being said, I'm not a hardcore HP fan like you seem to be! I was probably in my early to mid teens when they started coming out... Needless to say I was more about skipping school to smoke weed and party at that point ? 

 

Anyway, I digress... Back on topic, I did read the first 2 books at least before I pretty much stopped reading books til the party phase was over! Lol but this game looks magical (:awesome: pun def intended!), just that beautiful world and vibrant looking school are what caught my eye!

 

Also, my buddy  @Infected Elite  was saying this was his GOTY so far! Which certainly caught my attention too. 

 

Glad to hear it sounds like they have a good system for finding collectibles, as that's usually my least favorite part of any game ? As long as they're clearly marked on a map, I don't mind so much!

 

Cheers TC, congrats on the shiny new plat!!

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3 hours ago, Together_Comic said:

Update 42.

Platinum #75: The Legend of Dragoon

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Awesome write-up!

 

I have super fond memories LoD's original run too, played this while impatiently waiting for FFIX to come out and was pleasantly surprised at how good it was? Oddly enough I don't remember too much of the story, though that makes me all the more excited to play it!

 

mmmm-mmmm-dave-chappelle.gif

 

3 hours ago, Together_Comic said:

In yet another 2023 release that isn't actually a 2023 release

 

Dude I feel that?

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