Hi everyone, I'm Dr. X.
In the past, the biggest drawback of big IP adaptation of mobile games was that mobile games "self-righteously" added a lot of things that they thought were cool, but in fact they did not really get the essence of the original work, which ran counter to the "inner taste" that players really wanted, resulting in a rush to the street.
But this convention seems to have been skewed when encountering the mobile game adapted from the "world's first game".
Developed by Perfect World Black Feather Studio and deeply involved and produced by Atlus, the first spin-off mobile game in the P series, "Persona 5: Phantom of the Night (hereinafter referred to as P5X)", began its first test at the end of last month. The game has been full of "like, too much like... It's almost like a remake of the P5 series" similar remarks.
The previous "insufficient reduction" has become today's "too hard", which can't help but trigger our thinking about "whether the same is good news or bad news", and today Dr. X will combine the experience of the first three days of testing to talk to you.
Point 1: The taste is right! Pixel-level restored P5 mobile game
The good impression of "original" can be conveyed visually and audibly in the first time and touch the player's DNA.
P5X is obviously very clever at this point, and directly invited the original character designer Naruki Vice Island and the lead singer Lyn, two teachers, to personally handle some of P5X's character standing, art design and theme song music.
I have to say that the P series' thick and exaggerated shadow color and tough line style are unique in the two-dimensional field, and coming to the two-dimensional mobile game field is a big killer move, which can grab the attention of players in seconds.
Atlus' deep involvement and supervision also improved Perfect World's production team's grasp of the overall unified style of the P5X. The part that continues to use P5 materials is not sloppy, and the original UI and vertical drawing have also reached a sufficiently eye-catching level.
The first time I saw Merope, the female receptionist, I couldn't help but think "can this game 'jump ten ships'"? After dating Merlop for the first time, I felt that there was still a lot of potential in this area.
Like the scene design, the P5X also has a lot of overlap with the original. In the crowded Shibuya of Tokyo, the P5X loosens the fixed viewing angle restrictions of the original game, allowing players to enjoy the bustling neighborhood in 360 degrees, as well as a large number of architectural elements based on real scenes, as if they are in a local tour, and they need to wait for traffic lights with faceless passers-by to cross the street to the opposite block.
To the delight of the old fans of the original work, there are also a lot of Easter egg details of the original buried in these map scenes, and even the fierce weapon shop owner is exactly the same as the original, making people reasonably suspect that this is a parallel world.
Even the daily urban part-time job, gorgeous palace exploration, and impression space that produces cultivation materials have been copied to P5X, where the protagonist can freely travel back and forth between real and otherworldly spaces, challenging maze levels, special monsters and events. It's just that in order to fit the characteristics of mobile games, the time lapse mechanism of the original work was changed to a physical strength and action system.
All of the above are P5X's attempts to restore the authentic P5 style as much as possible under the premise of meeting the operation of mobile phone users, and I think as an adapted mobile game, its taste is basically very positive.
(The scene of the "cat" changing cars has also been restored)
Point 2: Restore something new! P5X tries to incorporate its own understanding and thinking
Of course, the content of the first three days of testing is not a pixel-level copy of the original work as presented in the PV, but still presented with the original content of P5X itself. Only by truly integrating one's own thinking and understanding in the game is the performance of a qualified derivative work.
For example, the new protagonist "Wonder", created by Perfect, Atlus, and Sega, has two sets of costumes with great contrast in reality and other worlds. In reality, the protagonist's "neutral" appearance and "yellow" uniform are deeply related to the theme of this work, "desire", while the retro cyber-style "goggles" and "leather clothes" in different worlds focus on expressing the protagonist's inner personality.
(Dual life in another world during the day on campus and at night)
The protagonist's personality mask is named "Yanosik", and the visual theme is white, which is different from the sense of kingliness brought by the early personality mask "Yasen" of the protagonist in the original work, and is also specially designed for the fresh experience of P5 veterans.
In terms of combat, P5X not only retains the iconic combat mechanisms of the original such as Unruly Power, Weak, Change of Hand, Onemore, and Total Attack, but also introduces new mechanisms such as "Highlight", which can deal high damage to individual units, and "Fall Value", which uses weakness attributes to knock monsters down, so as to reduce the difficulty and speed up the pace of battle, and the layout adjustment of the UI is more in line with the operation of the mobile terminal.
However, at present, players generally feedback that the animation move demonstration after the total attack is not "strong" enough, without the impact and explosion of the original, it doesn't feel like a confident POSE after beating the enemy violently, although the standing painting is still good-looking, but I hope it can be more crazy.
Key point three: Lie flat rich brother into another world to experience life as a strange thief? The theme of desirelessness should be dug deeper
Perhaps, telling an original new story on the mature gameplay framework of P5 is one of the biggest expectations of players who like to play this type of JRPG game for this big IP adaptation mobile game, but what is somewhat worrying is that the biggest problem revealed by the first test is precisely the hard wounds in the setting and plot.
A large part of the reason why P5 can be called "the first in the world" is because of its strong sense of substitution, the so-called "strange thief life", which fulfilled the heroic dream of many people when they were students.
The lightweight and fast pace of the mobile game makes it impossible for P5X to pave the plot for the first awakening of the protagonist for 3~5 hours like the original work, and P5X directly explains to you in less than an hour, and the result is that the bridge where the protagonist awakens is particularly abrupt.
The theme of P5X is "no desire", and the protagonist (including the protagonist himself) is surrounded by people who are at a loss and only have bad ideas, which is very consistent with the current situation of young people in society, and can be said to be a theme that is very close to the reality theme; But the protagonist himself is far from the identity of the protagonist of those accommodation lofts in P3/4/5, a rich man who has a double-storey house in Tokyo and a sofa TV game console in his room, awakened by a strange pinch, and has the desire to "live"?
This huge leap in identity also caused a small earthquake in the player's circle in the first test, just this character that can be easily obtained from anything, why do you want to work part-time to steal your heart and become a strange thief? It's almost the same to say that you are going to experience exciting life.
It can only be said that the theme of "no desire" is good and grand, but compared with the theme of "resisting social injustice" in previous works, it is too mild, and if you really want to talk about it well, the production team needs to think more.
In addition, although P5X is a brand new original story, it seems that the plot direction has not departed from the setting of the original script, and even some lines and characters can be found in the original work.
Take the plot of the first palace boss Yuyuki Kinouchi, the little girl's baseball explosion broke his baseball career and reduced him to an ordinary office worker, but his obsession with baseball distorted his desires, and he hit and hurt people everywhere in society, and knocked the girlfriend of the female character Suyu off the subway platform. The protagonist wants to enter his palace to steal the secret treasure and change his mind about his twisted desires.
Although the main purpose is clear, the whole plot experience gives people a rather middle and scratchy feeling, without much psychological foreshadowing and description, especially for players who have played the P5 series, the whole one is the design of the "hard set Kamodashi plot", the same characters with different characters but set the same story, giving people a bit of a divided look.
You know, Kamoda Shi, as one of the most successful villains in the P series, the original work spent N hours of shaping to make players hate him to the teeth, which is far from the current P5X's Kiuchi Yuyuki, and there is a very critical "teaser" link missing in the palace change process.
The lack of deeper character shaping also makes many players feel that Yuyuki Kiuchi is not worthy of being a palace boss.
The feeling I got from the first test was that the production team couldn't let go of the original story, and was deeply constrained by the framework of the original work. If you just want to perfectly copy the successful template and copy the exact same strange bandit group and story direction, I don't think it will work.
This is probably also the conflict between the pursuit of short and fast mobile games and the JRPG, which naturally advocates plot content.
However, if you really want to make quick money, I think Perfect World should not pick the difficult IP of P5 to adapt. Now that the two-dimensional mobile game is in charge, perhaps let Perfect see the real prospect of adapting P5 mobile games, and they themselves revealed in an interview, "The development idea of P5X is actually quite different from traditional mobile games." Our priority goals in development are to polish the worldview, setting, story, combat, and audiovisual experience."
Therefore, the originality of P5X should be one of their next research and development focuses.
After-class summary:
Kitagawa said, "Although the imitation is not genuine, the number of gatherings is spectacular."
Although the conservative play style of using many P5 materials and frameworks will not take a crooked path (that is, the "clam" saying that the teacher asked in class at the beginning of the first test), we also expect that the first mobile game of this "world's first game" can walk out of its own original characteristic path, and hope that the next test can see its reborn side.