This Old Neon Forum

Welcome to the #BGE2020 Elimination Round Lower Bracket!

Each game in the lower bracket is still seeded based on its performance in the two opening rounds of pools! Every game in the lower bracket has already been defeated by another game in a 1-on-1 poll to get to this point. This is their chance to claw their way back into the main event... but the stakes are high. The games that lose in these polls are out of the tournament for good! The games that survive will face the next crop of upper bracket losers in the next round.

Polls are updated weekly, typically on Saturday... or Sunday or Monday. Check back throughout the week to make sure you don't miss a vote!

HOW TO VOTE

This is easy. You only get one vote per poll. The game with the most votes wins. In the event of a tie, the higher seed advances, so don't get complacent!

Persona 3 came at just the right time for me (although, to be fair, I had played and liked the first Persona also).

It's disappointing how stagnant the formula has become since - it's still largely the same template from more than 15 years ago, though it's obviously been polished since then. Persona 3's pacing isn't great, but it doesn't indulge in many of the anime stereotypes its successors do (although Kenji's social link is memorable, it's mostly about just how bad a decision he is making) and the core of the Press Turn variant the series has used since is already there. In retrospect its AI-controlled companions made it stand out in that you have to rely on your teammates to make good decisions (although you can guide them). It was notorious enough to spawn several popular memes, but honestly nothing that bad ever happened to me in my two playthroughs (base then FES Journey) - and the ability to ask your team to split up was an interesting innovation. You can kind of see where a different sequel could've gone with "one of a team" instead of "the star of the show", but they seem to veer more into power fantasy territory with each entry.

Persona 3 also has a subtler cast relative to its sequels, which I think is one of its strengths - it takes a long time for them to trust you beyond fighting shadows together, and by the time they do it feels earned.

Although I liked P4 at the time, and P5 was okay, Persona 3 started it all and IMO has the strongest core plot - which isn't that surprising to me, because in addition to copying core mechanics, the core concept of

Spoiler

Society's ills causing problems through collective unconsciousness stuff

also recurs in the sequels, and it becomes more rote each time.

Oof - tough matchup. Both of these are games that, to me, have innovative gameplay relative to their forebears and are, imo, more polished examples of what each developer had been trying to do. They both also have lackluster story elements for me. PE3's principal conceit - the big mysterious phenomenon being investigated - is difficult for me to swallow compared to the relatively smaller scale/Twilight Zone-esque source of weirdness in PE4/Golden. And D:OS's story has some interesting concepts, and the side-plots and ancillary characters are often very interesting, but the overall big picture story is not as impactful as it feels like it should be.

In the end, I am going with D:OS because, for me, PE4/Golden is the pinnacle of that series, and because setting someone on fire and then teleporting them into the air to fall onto a big pile of poison, triggering a second explosion, followed by putting out the fire with steam-generating rain, which I then use to stun everyone with a bolt of lightning, is still one of the most fun things I've ever done in a video game.

Pretty sure Persona 3 Portable (the better version of this game) is still in the top bracket right?

SkyPikachu wrote: ↑26 Jul 2023 03:19 Pretty sure Persona 3 Portable (the better version of this game) is still in the top bracket right?

It is not, it is in fact fully eliminated as of this round.

(Whether it's better is also debatable.)

Kong Wen wrote: ↑26 Jul 2023 03:25

SkyPikachu wrote: ↑26 Jul 2023 03:19 Pretty sure Persona 3 Portable (the better version of this game) is still in the top bracket right?

It is not, it is in fact fully eliminated as of this round.

(Whether it's better is also debatable.)

So this is the only P3 left?

SkyPikachu wrote: ↑26 Jul 2023 03:29

Kong Wen wrote: ↑26 Jul 2023 03:25

SkyPikachu wrote: ↑26 Jul 2023 03:19 Pretty sure Persona 3 Portable (the better version of this game) is still in the top bracket right?

It is not, it is in fact fully eliminated as of this round.

(Whether it's better is also debatable.)

So this is the only P3 left?

Indeed.