Answer - finished
Overall an inferior experience to classic P3. Still decent.
I am divided on the change to the Persona system where you have traded in the ability to recall past personas in exchange for each persona learning their available skills at one level intervals (more-or-less). It was interesting to experience, but it's not something I would want to play classic P3 with. Especially since persona recall probably was what I spent the majority of my money on in classic P3 - money was consequently not an issue that often in Answer.
I think I forgot to complain about the skill inheritance system in classic P3 - my complaints there are mostly along the lines of that there are a number of requests for you to fuse a persona with a particular skill which forces you to keep cycling the fusion until the skill turns up, which is pointlessly annoying. In Answer the inability to save personas with particularly good skills to get them back later can lead to being disinclined to fuse particular personas. It doesn't help that the ones with particularly nice skills (Spell Master, etc) generally don't show up naturally, so you can't even easily refetch them from battling, you have to refuse them from a bunch of others.
What happened to the AI? Not sure whether it's FES in general, or just Answer, or just due to the locked higher difficulty level, but I remember being pleased about the competency of the AI in classic P3 while here I was all WHY THE HECK DO THEY REFUSE TO USE ANY HEALING MAGIC ONCE THEY GET TO A THIRD OF MAX SP UNLESS PEOPLE ARE ON DOUBLE-DIGIT HP EVEN WHEN SET TO HEAL/SUPPORT TACTIC
I get sick of Mitsuru knocking an enemy down and then knocking it back up with ice so I put her on Knock Down mode and she attacks it with a regular attack
Yukari once healed herself while she was on full hp somehow
In exchange for this they seemingly get a sixth sense of knowing when they're going to critical with a regular attack and will do so as opposed to the skills they have been using previously. This is not a worthwhile exchange.
Colloseum arc was highly annoying in that the enemies had a bunch of skills they should not have had, don't have any weaknesses which they should have had, are considerably more difficult than the previous boss despite there not being any new areas for training in-between (although this is also partially due to having a reduced team), and also the whole story around that point in addition to the gameplay. It is very contrived, and although the story makes out that that is exactly the case, that doesn't exactly excuse it. I like how there are 6 pillars despite the fact that 7 could theoretically be required.
All up, there were too many enemies in the game which had Dodge/Evade skills for their weaknesses.
SRWL - Up to episode 32
Things are going reasonably enough. I have been progressing fairly slowly due to being engrossed in Answer so maybe I will pick up the pace a bit now.
Jolly Rover - finished
Decent for a B-grade adventure which is overly inspired by Monkey Island at times.
Got all the crackers and pieces of eight. Annoyingly, there is at least one puzzle which is skippable with the pieces before you even have the capability to solve it normally, so I wasted some pieces on that thinking that that was what was necessary (this was also before finding out that pieces were a limited skip-puzzle option). Fortunately for the puzzle in question you can do it over normally once you get the capability and get the pieces back, but it still lists you as having used them in the stats.
Missed one piece of flag. Pretty sure I know where it was, but I expected that I didn't have what I needed to get it at the time and shortly afterwards passed a point of no return. Ah well. For reference, the game autosaves with no facility for extra manual saves.
Not enough was done with the voodoo system, especially once it was revealed that reversing voodoo had the reverse effect. One of the reversed options was only good for a bonus of some sort, at least two didn't appear to have any use.
Major showdown was a letdown as what was required was thoroughly telegraphed and you also had one of the villains gibbering in terror for no adequately explained reason, especially considering his blasé attitude towards you previously.
If they bring out any sequels I'll be happy to play them. No worse than I was expecting, but I wasn't expecting a whole lot.
