I have to think about this one carefully... (Radiant Historia)

YES PLEASE JOIN ME IN DYSFUNCTIONAL ROYALTY HELL

and yes poor Raynie. I don't think the writers even realized what a raw deal they gave her with their poorly-written shoehorned-in sidequest thing.

 

(I ship it both in spite of and because of canon, but I really only ship things that are kind of a mess anyway. And I also ship Obvious OT3, which is frankly more canon than canon.)

(But my heart lies less with shipping and more with the absolute mess of abuse and pain and death and codependency that is the Granorg royal family. As I have probably made clear.)

(If you really want to suffer, find a LP or start a new game and reevaluate all of Heiss's dialogue in the early game in light of endgame plot revelations. It's amazing.)

 

I vouch for the amazingness of this. The story is a whole new experience after the first playthrough.

 

Other fun points include: the first scene with Eruca, where you can newly evaluate both a) just how much of a complete douchebag Protea is and b) just how completely clueless Protea is; the entire context around Stocke being Heiss's ~favorite~ ("Why should you be the one who gets all the special treatment?" Nepotism. It's nepotism.); the random rebel guy you fight at the start of the game who's 100% right about everything; Raynie and Marco's attitudes toward Heiss; Aht's behavior toward Stocke and Eruca; a lot of Stocke and Eruca's conversations; Isla almost saying something like "You do know you're dead, right?" before thinking better of it; a lot of Lippti and Teo's vague comments; and this line:

 

I'm resurrecting this thread because we got confirmation of an English release for the remake! No solid date yet, but the website says "Early 2018." As godawful as the art direction is, I'm cautiously hopeful for gameplay improvements, voice acting, and more people in my tiny lonely special-interest fandom thank you LORD.

 

LadyNighteyes was doing a liveblog of a playthrough with the new content and... yeah, it's pretty awful (as in 'undermining the characterization and major themes of the game' awful). It's definitely for the best to do a first playthrough without the new stuff.

 

I highly highly recommend the old version, if just because the character art and translation are both much better. As in, one of the main party members has a personality in the first English release. And they didn't remove most of the jokes.

There are some mechanical improvements in the 3DS version, but there are also some new mechanical flaws introduced, so while the convenience features is does add are nice, it's not a strict improvement on the original in that regard either.</extremely biased>

 

Spoiler: Game mechanics sperg

The big points I grant PC are as follows:

• Difficulty levels. Minus some points because once you set it to easy, it will never let you turn it back up, even though this isn't the case for switching between normal and hard. (I'm 99% sure this is to make it harder to farm to try to get more people to buy the selling-power DLCs.)
  
• Lets you pick the node to return to from a bad end, which saves some very annoying backtracking.
• Lets you pgup/pgdn lists with the L/R arrows like a civilized person; I've never understood why the original didn't have that functionality.
• Fixed Strike so instead of having to juggle the monster 4 or 5 times before it gets knocked out and then having a guaranteed preemptive attack, you knock it out the first time and then there's like a 50% chance of getting a preemptive hit. Makes it both less annoying and less game-breaking.
  
• Displaying enemy types and location on turn panels. (The interface looks really bad, but it's a significant convenience feature.)
• Has a display for what status conditions/buffs/debuffs are on a character/enemy and what they do.
  
• Has a somewhat better idea of how much base damage skills should do, and has made phys-based characters and the equivalent of Limit Breaks a lot more useful.
• Music/SFX/voice volume sliders.

Some things that might have gotten credit from me if the features weren't obviously only half finished:

• A minimap... which is literally just rectangles with your location and the x,z coordinates of exits marked. It doesn't look anything like the area you're in, doesn't have quest/objective markers, nothing.
  
• Expanded weaknesses and resistances to elements and status effects... except you still have no efficient way to inflict those status effects, and despite the fact that there's space on the status screen for party member elemental resistances, there's nothing that affects them. They're literally always blank.
  
• Buffed the magic defense stat, making it harder to murder absolutely everything with Eruca and Aht... and rendering the original game's super-bonus-boss, which was already a horrible defense-oriented battle of attrition, even more indestructible. As in, you're wearing down 4 enemies with 3000 health each down with one character's physical attacks that do double-digit damage. (And all the bosses you could basically remove from existence with Volt Star Trap... are still basically removed from existence with Volt Star Trap.)
  
• Reprogramming the cutscene skip function (press start) so that you can't skip a cutscene you haven't already seen... except it sometimes does skip things you haven't seen, and sometimes never lets you skip things you've seen a million times.

Some mechanical issues PC introduced or worsened:

• RH has some serious XP balance issues that I won't get into because there's a lot of pieces to it and I doubt anyone cares, but the most visible of these is that party members who aren't currently available to use do not receive any XP. Since you have different characters available in each timeline and they drop in and out of your party throughout the story, this means that characters who haven't been available for a while end up severely underleveled. In the original game, this was partially mitigated by scaling XP rewards so lower-level party members, so when someone (Rosch. It's always Rosch.) ends up 20 levels below the rest of the group, they get more than double the XP rewards.
  The 3DS version removed this scaling.
  Unless the programming was unimaginably hinky behind the scenes or it's a convoluted effort to sell the free XP DLC, I can think of absolutely no reason for this.
• There are persistent minor graphical issues that I assume come from differences in the 3D engine between the DS and the 3DS. I didn't notice it at first beyond a vague sense that every cutscene looked like all the characters were huddled up together in the middle of a huge, empty void, until I loaded up the same scene in the original and compared them side-by-side. It was not my imagination: there's some sort of issue with sprite scaling or the definition of tile size that moves everything closer together and toward the center of the screen. Probably the best example I have of this:
  Original:
  
  3DS:
  
  (Forgive the lower quality; it was screenshotted from a video walkthrough.)
  This glitch also results in a fair bit of clipping- there are a lot of NPCs who are supposed to be on benches who instead appear to be kneeling on the floor under the table.
  
• There are similar porting issues with cutscene blocking and timing, where the larger screen plus all the action happening in a huddle in the center results in weird pauses in the action when a character enters or exits, because they have to go two or three times as far but the dialogue doesn't start until they stop moving. Like the last one, this is only really noticeable as an issue with the remake because I've played the original to death, but it's a subtle and persistent flaw.
• You can no longer press B to walk instead of run, which was very handy in a couple of areas.

There is also no way to get the true end of the original game without being subjected to some of their stupid new content (hi, genocide apologia and creepy fanservice).

 

It's historically been pretty cheap on Amazon (~$20-25), though it's been a while since I looked.

 

i’d have to second ladynighteyes and recommend the original over the remake. i’m less biased than her, and i still think the remake is pretty garbage. the original is also pretty easy to find, or at least it was in my case.

 

also did they REALLY remove walking? i was so pleased with myself over mastering the art of using walk to perfectly time preemptive attacks

 

Yep. I'm pretty sure it's because for some reason they decided it was imperative to add diagonal movement animations, but they didn't want to make two sets.

 

yuck

 

It's one reason I have a sneaking suspicion they had like 20% of a much better remake in the works and then an exec said "the company is bankrupt and we spent what money we did have on Persona 5 and the 3DS is dying and we'd have to spend more to move this to Switch and the original version didn't sell well anyway, so we're going to ship whatever you have done a year from now, have fun."

 

Whining aside though, @seebs , I hope you enjoy my favorite spoilery trainwreck of a family. :::PPP

 

^Some of the reasons why RH is My Favorite.

I kinda wonder if the general state of Development Hell on Persona 5 pushed the schedules on all their other projects around. Like, maybe they started it a few years back and then poached most of the staff off it to work on Persona 5, or something.