Today, the crazy train has looped back around for more absolute insanity! Upon heading into the Eldan sanctum, we are met with the most important thing of all… The truth.
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This is a really neat twist on Atlus's classic "Blank slate protagonist". In the Persona games, we know little to nothing about the protagonists' personal lives. Their family, their friends back home, what they were like as kids… Their pasts are a mystery, I assume because they're meant to be like an avatar for the player. But with the protagonist in this game, his past is a mystery because he doesn't have one! The only times anyone talked about the protag's supposed past were when talking about the prince, which was some nice foreshadowing for the 2 of them being one and the same. Very well done, Metaphor!
Also, I love the irony of how the heroes were pretending that the protag was actually the prince, with nobody knowing how right they actually were (except possibly Rella; she could see into people's hearts, so it's possible she knew the truth before anyone else!)
18:26 HE TURNED INTO A TYPE OF SEPHIROTH!🤣
46:25 seriously if that's true, then practically the whole world would be littered with mages and I suppose "humans". Also your telling me the tribes that we know the bat people, the furries, third eyes, the wings, horns, ears, colorful eyes and silky hair, even the ones who are super dark and/or albino skin tones, are just mutations of the overwhelming magila born from the old humans and passed on?
Yeah, there was so much lore being revealed here, nearly everything about the game got turned on its head. One of my favorite moments in the whole story, if not only because now you have access to Royal Archetypes. This part kicked so much ass.
That's a really neat touch how this room is where all the party's Awakenings happened (best shown in Heismay and Basilio's Awakenings, where the camera pans all around the room)!
Just a little tip but your low physical stat doesn’t really matter in terms of damage that much since its more rather dependant on your weapon damage than your base stats, the prince also allows your team members to freely use more synthesis skills easily without having specific archetype allies to team up with so the prince is a pretty op archetype
As someone else has already said, you've basically been playing the entire game so far as the Prince's OC. 😂 It's a pretty funny plot twist, and is one of the many reasons why I love this game.
The royal sword synthesis increases in power based off the strength stat, so it's probably better to stick with wizard or something magic focused.
38:10 that makes Homo Jaluzo (the demon baby) even worse if you think about it
The prince's Final Fantasy.
This is something I just recently noticed, but the protagonist canon name in english is "Will" and here we find out we are the WILL of the prince to go on a journey, the WILL to live, the WILL to do better to the world, etc
I unfortunately had the humanity twist spoiled for me by the god forsaken wiki in the first few weeks y’all were playing this. I just wanted to know what the names of the tribes were! Why isn’t it hidden behind a spoiler tag?!?
Gallica was only supposed to meet Grius not actually join the military
We were a DnD character all along.
We were bound to learn about the true history eventually, and hoo boy is it something
Huh, I just realized that the reason the player character has an American accent despite being the prince’s creation is because Gallica was the first person to speak to him after he was born, and he just copied her.
gallica actually helps you in some bosses, that is if you give her time to do it and not kill the boss fast.
My only gripe with the Prince Archetype is all its best skills are Physical based. So as a primary magic build yeah it was rough to use til i pumped all my level ups and gear bonuses into Strength from that point forward lol.
You said in last episode that the protagonist is going to be revealed to be a secret blood relative of the prince.
As it turns out, magic can do some crazy shit beyond our bland, grounded imagination.
But, magic can't save us from being cancelled by the populace. At least we have some people on our side!
PS: Louis racefaking might just be the funniest of the plot twists. It's such a simple explanation after the massive twist of the protagonist's identity.
I have a lot to say about this part of the game, so I'll try to split it into bullet points and keep them relatively brief. I can elaborate on many of them if needed, but I'll just list the negatives and then the positives.
Negatives:
• The MC being part of the prince undermines some of the original premise that I liked, that anyone could be the king, even a nobody from a shunned tribe like the elda, and that said nobody would grow into the role of a leader over the course of the story. Now it's closer to a "rightful heir takes back what was supposed to be his all along" plot
• By extension, as much as they talk about bloodlines not mattering afterwards, everyone in the party is important or special in some way. You could argue stuff that balances it out for many of them, but you can't just say any of them are still commonfolk at this point
• Gallica's fake memories twist is cheap and despite being written in a consistent way, feels added at the last minute. I've seen other games work that twist into its story A LOT better (Final Fantasy VII being one of them)
• The prince is not a character, he's a plot device used for a powerup. Hard to care about him as much as the characters do when we didn't even get to know the guy before he died, it could have made his death and the subsequent fusion more impactful
• Anxiety and its relation to magic is an unique (if kinda stupid) concept, but ultimately forced to the point we could remove most of its mentions from the story and we wouldn't really lose much. It really feels like they wrote a complete story, realized it didn't have a "theme" like modern Persona games do, then found one and rewrote what they could to shoehorn it
• I wish the MC had longer hair after the fusion, so he looked a bit more like the "original" prince did. Just an eye and hair recolor feels a little underwhelming when he could be a little closer to Castlevania's Alucard (and look a lot cooler for it). At least the Archetype form definitely delivers on that
Positives:
• The presentation was on point. Despite everything I said above, I don't hate this story. This still feels like an awesome moment, it's easy to empathize with the characters I do know (like Hulkenberg's reaction to it) and the way they went about it made it easier to accept things for what they are
• Some of the things used by the twist are still good ideas, like the deconstruction of the protagonist's lack of a backstory
• Funnily enough, the main thing about this twist was sorta already done in the Persona series before… by Persona 1! I won't elaborate on that one because it would be spoilers for that game like it is here, but it was fun to see the (maybe unintentional) similarities
• The lore dump after the fusion was legitimately good, I liked it way more than the prince twist; despite post-apocalyptic stories feeling kinda overdone by Atlus, the way they worked all of it into this story was great
• I really like the elda's inversion of the "monster town"/"hidden elf village" tropes usually done by RPGs. They have everything these tropes usually go for, but what makes them different is they're just regular humans who happen to know more about the world's history than the rest, and the "non-human" tribes (I mean in the sense that in other RPGs they'd be elves, fairies, dwarves, etc) are actually the majority of the world
I had named the protagonist Orpheo, after Orpheus cuz of the Makoto similarity. I had no idea it would be so fitting…
Going to do a bit of a quick notes here on the Prince Archetype:
Despite the phrasing, the regular skill Royal Slash and the Synthesis skill Royal Sword will scale off whichever of your stat is highest between Magic or Strength. It will still do physical damage, so Charge is what you would be looking to do beforehand if you wanted to increase the damage.
Hero's Cry is basically the player version of Soul Scream, that move that enemies use that grants them 4 extra turn icons. Used appropriately, you'll be able to eliminate even the most challenging boss before they even fire off a single attack.
I also suggest visiting More when you next get the chance. Your maxed out party members will thank you. 😊
Design wise, i dont like our new look tbh he looks too pale now, washed out. There should be some spots of colors or contrast to balance it
You really did have a party member of each tribe. Sadly Grius, the Rhoag member, dies near the beginning. There's no replacement rhoag, and only maybe the igniter shopkeep as a link.
1:02:58 this is how that interaction goes
MC: stay beside me forever
Gallica (flustered): wow, if you put it like that… you're gomna make me blush
It's very cute
How often do we turn to fantasy and are inspired by the heroes. Be it games, movies, or books, fictional characters can give us strength in different ways.
So our protag is a tulpa of the prince. In a way.
If you gave up in the Elda sanctum, you would've got a bad ending
I can't believe that if magic was discovered, this is what would happen. It's like a line in Pandora's Tower, man is a foolish creature who never learns from his mistake.
58:00 The fruit pun was unnecessary but was a good one. P3's club advisor would be green with envy.
Made a strong bond with Gallica
I am thou, thou art I
Thou has helped shed light on one's path
That light shines brighter than any polished coin
Thou has awakened the full potential of the Priestess, granting victory against sinful feelings
1:09:06 This reminds me of Dr. Baconstrip's question on the second course of therapy in It takes two
49:38 its sad they didn't interact with the stones for more lore and the eldan forest is now locked out.
Also it sucks that like u i made a magic build only to find out the strongest archetype is phy based. 😅 something to take into account in ng+