Ben_H

Yup, you keep your level. They changed it in later games so that you only keep your compendium and social skill levels. For Persona 3 FES and P3R though, you do. It means you can easily do each section of Tartarus in one day then focus on the other parts of the game instead.

Here's the list of what P3R lists is carried over in NG+ when you go to load your cleared save (spoiler for people who don't want to know): Personas, Persona Compendium, Analysis information, Stats, Social Stats, Protagonist level, Protagonist HP/SP gains outside of levelling, Teammate stat boosts from incense, Teammate HP/SP gains from outside of levelling, Items, Equipment, Skill Cards, Materials, Twilight Fragments, all costumes besides SEES uniforms, some souvenirs received from characters, items received from characters for unlocking personas, play time, money

Finally rolled credits on this. What a game. I think of all the more modern Persona games from the original Persona 3 onward (I've played all of them from P3 FES through Persona 5 Royal), this might be the best one. Persona 3 was always a game that had a certain something that was missing in the other games, but the game itself was incredibly rough to go back to and had aged poorly in a bunch of aspects, some of which were almost game-ruining. This game fixed every single thing, big or small, I didn't like on my FES replay last year and they even added a bunch of small things I'd never even thought about that make the game a lot better to play. At the same time, it still feels like Persona 3. I was quite concerned they were going to Persona 5-ize the game, but outside of borrowing a couple smaller combat features from that game, they left the game completely faithful to the original Persona 3. My concerns they were going to change and more heavily script bits of the game were unfounded (Persona 3's intro few weeks is the opposite of Persona 5. In P3 they dump you into the game and slowly add in story rather than making you button through 4-5 hours of scripted story things before the game actually starts). This remake is much more like Persona 4 Golden than a remake of 3 intended for the P5 audience.

The people that did this remake understood what everyone loved about Persona 3 and were extremely careful to make sure all of those elements were present. They did an incredible job ensuring the game still feels like Persona 3. They nailed the atmosphere of the game, which is probably the most important thing. Had they messed that up it would have ruined the whole game since the atmosphere of the game, and how it changes as the game goes on, is a huge part of the game. All of the changes made to characters and events in the game make perfect sense. The added pseudo-social links for the male teammates and Koromaru are all excellent and are faithful to those characters. The changes to Elizabeth's requests also worked well while not requiring you to keep a meticulous calendar like the ones in FES did (A huge portion of the requests in FES were missable and could only be done on specific days. It sucked). The added night activities and ways of levelling up teammate abilities (the kitchen activities, garden, etc.) were also excellent. Overall, pretty much every change made to the game in this remake makes sense. They didn't add any fluff. It's still an extremely lean game but you just don't run out of things to do anymore.

Spoilers for the whole game within:

Anyhow, time to New Game Plus this so I can do a completionist run. It appears they've kept the silly broken version of NG+ from FES, which, if you've played that you know what I mean (You keep literally everything. Money, levels, stat boosts, personas, most of your items. It completely breaks the game)

Just stupid gamer rage garbage from outrage Youtubers that got out of control yet again. Sweet Baby Inc. is a diversity/inclusion/representation contractor that developers/publishers hire when making a game to ask "Hey, is there anything problematic in our portrayal of [insert thing here] in our game that we might have missed when making this" or "Hey, we want to do something involving [insert thing here], how can we do this in a way that is respectful to [thing]". What they do is extremely common in both current media and in other fields (I've heard of similar companies in academia for writing papers, for example). As an example, if a particular culture/ethnic group/etc. is included in the story of a game, the developer will consult these contractors to make sure that they aren't accidentally including something offensive/racist/bigoted in their portrayal of said group in the game. This prevents awkward things like the Banuk in Horizon: Zero Dawn, who were basically a group in the game whose whole aesthetic was culturally appropriated from the Inuit of northern Canada and criticism of this ended up on national news here in Canada (the Banuk were almost entirely absent from the second Horizon game as a result).

The Gamers(tm) are blaming this company for there being increased diversity and more women characters in the games they were hired to consult on. This has been generalized into this group being angry about diversity in games in general and claims of publishers preventing developers from including sexualized characters in games (despite there being multiple recent games released that provide evidence to the contrary). One example is that they were upset about Square adding more clothes/skin coverage to Tifa in FF7R in a flashback where she is underage. It's a whole thing.

If you want a more nuanced discussion of this with more detail, Remap Radio covered it for a couple weeks on their podcast.

I feel like the ultimate version of this bit would be the One in 1: You play one minute of Xbox One games. You would probably get quite good at describing main menus, splash screens, and load screens.

My knowledge of Grabbed By The Ghoulies is mostly that Rare themselves continually dunk on the game and even go as far as to fill dumpsters full of copies of the game in Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts. I've never played the game but having seen how Rare treat it, I can't say I've gone out of my way to actually try it.

Oh right April 1st. I was so confused. I just asked for the usual info they provide each day. A visual novel published by Sega in 2023 narrows things down a lot even without pictures it turns out hahaha

It's the Yuzu side of it that's the hot mess, not Nintendo. They were being flagrant with how much they were doing in plain sight, down to promoting a Patreon that offered perks including patches for current games. Their Discord server was filled with publicly available conversations detailing things about the emulator that were extremely shaky legally (I think I saw mention that they may have discussed using Nintendo IP while developing the emulator, which is extremely illegal). Emulation has existed for decades now by following general guidelines about how to talk about and publicly discuss a project (things like never explicitly talking about copyrighted material unless it's old and not legally available for purchase anymore, and primarily talking about the emulator in context to homebrew applications, not commercial products) and they basically broke every guideline you could think of. They tried to cash in on TOTK and, well, it ended how everyone who saw them doing this said it would. I remember Gerstmann specifically not being impressed with what Yuzu were doing around the release of TOTK, and he ended up getting pretty mad at his Twitch chat since people were yelling at him to emulate the game on Yuzu rather than play it on a Switch when he was streaming the game at launch.

Because of how brazen they were, now several prominent emulator projects are dead, which is an awful thing from a game preservation perspective. Had they kept quiet about their work and not tried to profit from it, those shuttered projects would still probably be being actively developed and publicly available.

*flexes business guns* "We only lost a cool 800 million on this deal. Could be worse I guess. Now about that bonus..."

So as the winner of last year's Hottest Mess Award, does Embracer not qualify for this year? Because I think having to sell off Gearbox, one of their biggest key acquisitions, for a massive (as in almost 2/3 of the value lost in the sale) loss just to stay afloat is pretty messy.

The Yuzu people flying too close to the sun is definitely up there as a self-own with big consequences. They didn't follow the cardinal rule of emulators: don't ask for money for work on them and don't explicitly talk about doing fixes for currently available commercial products (especially new games! Like that was extremely dumb! They were talking about TOTK fixes at the release of that game. Of course this was going to go badly). As a result of their stupidity, two major emulators are offline and others are becoming increasingly wary of having any public presence (which, they probably should have done that in the first place).

Using a bot to generate the body of an article then the bot hallucinating some of the content (in this case a tweet) is extremely on-brand for the current generation of LLM bots, so this isn't surprising. It would not shock me to find out that current management is forcing writers to write a paragraph or two then use the bot to finish the rest of the article.

These text generation bots becoming a thing at the same time as the current awful trends in business begin to dominate is really sad to see. The type of business person who thrives in this environment generally has no concept of actual product quality and only care about numbers, so when they see a tool that produces an absolutely awful product but that can help artificially boost their numbers, they flip out since they can use the tool and go to their superiors and say "NUMBER BIGGER. GIVE BONUS". I used to give them the benefit of the doubt that they understood that the product they wanted created using these tools was bad, but I'm at the point where I genuinely think they don't understand why this stuff is awful. These are people with literally no creativity and view inherently creative fields like journalism/writing as something that can be manufactured like a packaged good. They don't seem to understand why people think this stuff sucks or why it's a bad look for them to use these AI tools in place of people. Either that or they don't care. It's not great either way.

All of this "AI"/LLM garbage needs to have an Emperor's New Clothes moment. Badly.

It's on the front page now, but the audio from that panel is now available on both the Beastcast feed and on Nextlander's patreon podcast feed. With recorded proof, now Dan definitely is not going to be able to get out of this one.