The Crimson Diamond is AVAILABLE NOW!! (Launch trailer)
Play it on: Steam Current goal: Solve an old-fashioned mystery
A few weeks ago, I mentioned how I was captivated by Unavowed, a point-and-click adventure from the folks at Wadjet Eye. Well, I’ve finished that one (it was great) just in time for a brand-new entry in the genre to come along. And while Wadjet Eye’s output is most reminiscent of ‘90s adventure games that offered full voice acting and elegant drag-and-drop interfaces, this new game, The Crimson Diamondfrom designer Julia Minamata, is influenced by an earlier era of adventures, ones that ran in EGA and had you typing in what you wanted your character to do. I can’t wait to explore its mysteries.
The Crimson Diamond is perhaps most reminiscent of Sierra adventures, especially the Clara Bow games which saw their plucky heroine tossed into murder mysteries during the roaring ‘20s. Itcasts you as Nancy Maple, a young woman investigating the discovery of an unusually large and valuable diamond in a town in northern Ontario, Canada. It’s clear from the trailer that her investigations will find her encountering people with motives of their own, some of them sinister, and land her in no small amount of peril. Sign me up!
People often talk about the evolution of adventure games from text parsers to purely graphical interfaces as a net good, as if text parsers were just a crutch, a relic from the genre’s early days that we no longer needed, but I’ve always thought of them as two fundamentally different approaches, each with their own strengths. I think there are ways in which the presence of a text parser can encourage creative thinking that a purely graphics-based interface doesn’t always allow for, and in addition to digging into the plot of The Crimson Diamond, I’m eager to see how it uses this design element that so rarely gets employed in modern games. All in all, it sounds like a perfect fit for a cozy weekend. —Carolyn Petit
Austin Williams, Carolyn Petit, Moises Taveras, Kenneth Shepard, and Ethan Gach
Now that we’ve entered the final few days of 2023, the year’s bumper crop of new game releases has slowed to a trickle. With long, lazy days looming ahead, it’s a lovely time to cuddle up with one of the biggest, beefiest games in your backlog. And if you’re looking for beef, RPGs are the way to go. On December 15, Atlus announced that Persona 5 crossed a major sales landmark. The modern fantasy RPG and its spinoffs have now sold more than 10 million copies worldwide. Nowadays, the Persona series seems like a sure bet. But just a few years ago, itwas a niche fascination for a few devoted weebs. If you haven’t checked it out already, now’s your chance.
6 Things To Know Before Starting Persona 5 Tactica
Back in 2017, when Persona 5 first debuted outside Japan, critics and audiences had largely soured on turn-based role-playing games, waving them off as dated and passé. The previous year, Final Fantasy XV ditched menu-driven gameplay for rapid-fire action combat that was flashier and faster than the venerable Square Enix series had ever been. It seemed like turn-based RPGs were a thing of the past—until Persona 5 set the world on fire.
The game takes place in modern-day Tokyo, and follows a group of teen vigilantes known as the Phantom Thieves. By day, they’re just conspicuously attractive high school students. By night, they summon demonic Pokémon known as Personas to fight crime and corruption in supernatural dungeons known as Palaces. P5’s stylish, anime-inflected presentation stood out in the late PlayStation 4 era, which skewed heavily toward realism. Innovative combo mechanics kept enemy encounters feeling snappy and unique. The game drew sky-high review scores and currently sits at an enviable 93 on Metacritic. Not too bad for a genre past its prime, right?
Persona 5 Royal – Take Over Trailer – Nintendo Switch
An expanded and enhanced edition, Persona 5 Royal, was launched worldwide in March 2020. Royal came to Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, PC, and Xbox consoles in October 2022. And like any good video game phenomenon, Persona 5 spawned a heap of crossovers and spinoffs. In addition to a dedicated anime series, the cast appeared in a rhythm game (2018’s Persona 5: Dancing in Starlight), a Switch-exclusive action RPG (2021’s Persona 5 Strikers), and this year’s strategy RPG, Persona 5 Tactica. Oh, and protagonist Joker also joined the roster of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.
Persona 5 isn’t without flaws. Okumura’s palace, which you’ll encounter late in the game, is an absolute chore. And the game’s portrayal of same-sex relationships is about as subtle as a sack of hammers. Oh, and it easily takes more than 100 hours to beat. If you can forgive those shortcomings, it’s an excellent way to wile away the final hours of 2023—whether you play the vanilla version or Royal.
Persona 5 Royal is available on PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and Switch, and is often on sale for $30 or less. (Used copies of vanilla P5 on PlayStation 4 are even cheaper!)
Persona 3 Reload, a full-fledged remake of Atlus Games’ beloved 2006 role-playing game Persona 3, is set to release on February 2, 2024, for Xbox, PlayStation, and Windows. So take a deep breath and relax, you’ve still got a bit of time to play through October’s busy fall releases before hunkering down for an RPG-filled winter.
HD-2D, The Unique Retro-Inspired Art Style, Took Off In 2022
The remake is far from being the definitive version of Persona 3, given its lack of Persona 3 Portable and Persona 3 FES content, which means no appearance from fan-favorite female protagonist Kotone Shiomi. However, its various pre-order versions (and the bonus items that come with them) might soften the blow for longtime fans. Here’s a guide for what each pre-order version of Persona 3 Reload will get you.
What You Get: Pre-orders of any version of Persona 3 Reload will get you the base game, as well as six Persona 4 Golden background music tracks as bonus DLC. The bonus DLC will let you listen to “Reach Out to The Truth,” “Time to Make History,” “I’ll Face Myself,” “A New World Fool,” “Fog,” and “Period” in P3R. So if you just wanna jam to some P4G tunes and don’t wanna pay a little extra for something extra, this is the version of P3R for you.
Persona 3 Reload Digital Deluxe Edition
Atlus
Price: $80
What You Get:P3R’s digital deluxe edition will get you the base game, six bonus P4G tracks, the game’s 64-page digital artbook, and its 60-song soundtrack of newly arranged and all-new songs by the Atlus sound team.
Persona 3 Reload Digital Premium Edition
Atlus
Price: $100
What You Get:P3R’s Digital Premium Edition includes the base game, P4G’s bonus tracks, the digital artbook and soundtrack, as well as all of Reload’s DLC on launch.Here’s a description of P3R’s DLC pack:
Persona 5 Reload Phantom Thieves Costume Set
P5R Shujin Academy Costume Set
P5R Persona Set 1
P5R Persona Set 2
P4G Yasogami High Costume Set
P4G Persona Set
Persona 3 Reload Aigis Edition
Screenshot: Atlus / Walmart / Kotaku
Price: $200
What You Get: Last is the big kahuna: Persona 3 Reload’s Aigis Edition. Pre-ordering this eye-wateringly expensive version will get you the base game, a physical art book, a two-disc P3R soundtrack, a P3R DLC pack voucher, and an Aigis figure. There’s no clear information on the size of that Aigis just yet, although it looks like a standard 6-inch prize figure.
The increasing popularity of the Persona series in the West has been a wonderful if slow-burning thing to behold, ramping up over the last decade to the point where Persona 5 was a Very Big Video Game Release, and re-releases of older games are now headline news.
So it’s easy finding people to talk to about Persona 5 , and to watch videos about it, and read articles about it. Same goes for Persona 4, which has now been ported enough times (I first played it on Vita!) that it’s in much the same space. Basically, when people talk about modern Persona games, they’re usually talking about those two games.
Persona 3, a little less so, so in honour of its re-release this week I want to talk about it tonight, and see if I can get it added to your list of Games You Really Should Play.
Being the first “modern” Persona game, though—it broke from its predecessors and laid down the basic template the series has followed ever since—does mean Persona 3 has its rough edges. Its single enormous dungeon, for example, is hell, and for those who have only experienced Persona 5’s exquisitely dovetailed social links and subplots, you might find Persona 3 a bit creakier and more sparse when it comes to after-school activities. It’s also lacking some of the vibrancy and exuberance of the more recent games when it comes to its cast.
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Not that this last point is a bad thing! There’s a lot to love about this more earnest tale, which has a nice tight focus to it, and it also has a dog, which is awesome.
Now that we’ve established how much I love Persona 3, I will now tell you that when it comes to deciding which version of the game to play, I love Persona 3’s handheld port—which just happens to be the version re-released this week—even more. Persona 3 Portable was first released in 2009 on the PSP, and I think it’s a modern marvel of game (re)design. It takes the heart of the Persona experience and re-crafts it for a portable platform in a way that Persona 4 Golden couldn’t come close to matching.
P3P’s isometric redesign gives it an almost timeless look, one I wish we got to see with later games in the series as well. Screenshot: Persona 3 Portable
Because the PSP couldn’t handle the fully 3D overworld of Persona 3, or fit its lavish animated cutscenes into its limited storage space, both of those pillars of the Persona 3 experience on PS2 are gone. While the loss of the anime-style sequences was a bummer, and 3D gameplay was preserved for the dungeon and combat, what Atlus did to replace the 3D exploration was a stroke of genius. Instead of stripping back the 3D sections with low-res textures and simpler models, they threw it out and replaced it entirely with a static, isometric version of Persona 3’s world.
This was, and remains, the superior way to play Persona. The series’ overworlds may have started to look busier in recent entries, but they’re still incredibly sparse in terms of what you can actually interact with. Trudging around them looking for a conversation or story sequence can be a drag. Persona 3 Portable’s system is a faster, cleaner way to spend your downtime, and has the added benefit of looking amazing. I held out hope for years that Persona 4 could get a mobile port that looked like this, and a small part of me is wishing for the same thing from Persona 5.
And we haven’t even got to the best part about it! No, the best part of Persona 3Portable was that in addition to the perspective change and some other bits of administrative tidying (like new difficulty options), the handheld port added a whole second protagonist, meaning that if you’d played through the main game already, well surprise, you could play it all over again and get a completely different experience.
“When I had the opportunity to play a favorite game all over again with Persona 3 Portable, I was happy to do so. I didn’t realize a virtual sex change would make the experience anything but the same as before.”
Having been very difficult to get hold of for years—at least in an official capacity—Persona 3 Portable is out now on PC, Switch, Xbox and PlayStation.
