Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE Encore

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Gameplay & Systems

  • It’s interesting that they chose to not have a separate “persona xp” of some kind. Normally when you have a separate thing that can level up (like a job level), most games opt to have that grow separately, but this one just gives the same xp to the persona as it does to the character

  • It’s kind of interesting how they give you melmarks for all yen expenditures, but the only place to redeem them is at Hee Ho mart. It drives you there, which makes you more likely to buy items. Items are very powerful, and pretty plentiful in this game, but you might not ever realize that without having a reason to go to Hee Ho Mart so often

  • It’s interesting how closely your progression in the Session system matches your progression in the game as a whole. You start the game with 0 ability to do sessions, and it just never stops growing. You get new and cool things you can do with sessions at a pretty good pace, and the system is pretty cool even after the first one or two mechanics

  • Like the Persona games, you get new equipment by harvesting the newest dungeon’s enemies for crafting materials. The difference here though, is that weapons drive your entire ability set, and so it REALLY behooves you to start using new ones as soon as possible. Combined with Tiki telling you literally every time you gain access to a new Unity, it creates this weird scenario where you’re pushed pretty hard to leave dungeons. It feels like they intend for you to leave at least once, as dungeons seem to mostly be structured with a midpoint miniboss

  • This game is really good at throwing battles at you that there’s just no chance you are ready for yet. Sometimes it’s just you trying to do a side quest too early, but In particular, a lot of times Savage Encounters just surpass you. A lot of times they are perfectly doable, but at certain breakpoints they just aren’t

  • I wonder how much of the decision to put a ton more costumes in this game is driven by the fact that money is pretty useless mid-late game, so they wanted another sink

  • I like how new party members don’t immediately have access to Open Audition, so they can’t contribute to sessions unless they are actually in your party for the first little bit. It forces you to get a sense of what enemies they are good against (which the game so graciously throws at you en masse)

  • It’s cool how, once you unlock the ability to upgrade weapons, the progression system kind of opens up in that, you now have the ability to focus on whatever you want, since adding +s to abilities becomes an actionable form of progression. It unlocks around the time you start getting Master Seals and can start choosing class paths as well, so both really drive home the idea of building a custom character

  • I always kind of felt like the actual weapon that you have equipped has a weirdly small impact on your performance in battle, but given how much the weapon your wielding impacts your progression, it kind of makes sense. The game is kind of telling you that it’s ok to choose what weapon you want to learn abilities from instead of feeling like you’re forced to use whatever weapon is the strongest on hand

  • As fun as it is to micromanage your ability growth and what weapons your training, it gets super old to be customizing your abilities after basically every battle.

Battle

  • I’ve always loved the session system so much, because it rewards planning and understanding your team as a whole unit, even the characters who are not currently in your party, everyone has a role, everyone matters

  • It’s interesting how this game handles weaknesses vs the Persona or SMT games. Hitting weaknesses are kind of the point now, so bosses are less likely to have no weakness. Sessions probably do MORE damage than an all-out-attack, or extra turn would. But hitting an All-out-attack feels more like you’re really opening up on the boss, whereas hitting sessions feels more like, this is just what you do in this game, it’s the norm

  • Sessions seem to be pretty intelligent when it comes to choosing which target they jump to. It seems to intuitively know who the high value targets are that players are going to want to target (it seems to consider turn order, which enemies are most likely to die, probably also status effects, etc)

  • I’m a really big fan of having what is effectively a steal, that just works automatically when you’re playing the game right. You never have to worry about killing the enemy too soon, or choosing to steal instead of learning or using a specific ability

  • It really sucks that you have no ability to swap out Itsuki. It seems like they know that, so they usually give you something that’s weak to sword or lightning, but sometimes he just can’t do much, and it REALLY sucks when there are lance enemies on screen (but at least it’s not a game over when he dies)

  • I like how as your sessions get longer, the value of special attacks changes from “the attack is really strong” more towards “I can initiate a perfect session on any enemy I want, even if I don’t have a way to actually hit their weakness”, and using it strategically in that way, rather than saving it for strong enemies, is fun

  • I think there’s definitely a criticism to be made that, once you have a full team and Open Audition for everyone, sessions don’t really count for that much, because you basically just get max hits like 90% of the time, and so sessions kind of end up just wasting time. But in the end, I think with quick session mode, it’s not so bad still

  • It’s interesting how much speed matters on hard mode. Getting hit by anything is so devastating, that you NEED to be fast enough to get the battle under control before all the enemies can move.

UI/UX

  • The screen they use for the SMS conversations is just silly looking in this version of the game. In the original it was shown on the Wii U tablet, so obviously they wanted to just render it at the same size, but putting it in the middle of a 1080p screen makes it look so small and unreadable

  • All the transitions in this game are so magical, for lack of a better word. They are pretty, but they also have this dreamlike feel that really invokes the idol aesthetic

  • It’s interesting that this game has a separate set of ability slots specifically for passive skills. Normally in SMT games passives take up a possible ability slot, so you have to choose between wider options, or going super deep with a specific option. Here you are more free to go wide, it’s more a question of which options are you going go slightly deeper on

  • It feels really weird having the classic JRPG conversations with the headshot of the person your talking to, but then also having your protagonist talk. I get that it’s supposed to be like, you’re seeing it in first person, but it’s awkward not having the person talking on screen. Just one of those things that wouldn’t have been a problem in other SMT games, who all had silent protagonists

  • There doesn’t seem to be an indicator anywhere how much progress to the next stage rank a character currently has

  • You get a bunch of “new performa”, but I’m not sure what that actually means yet, they don’t seem to be skills I can use, I can’t find the name anywhere in the inventory menu

  • This game spams you with way too many SMS messages, some of it makes sense as a “btw this is what you’re supposed to be doing right now”, but most of the messages just feel like a distracting waste of time

  • It’s kind of annoying how little of the minimap you discover at a time, if unvealing the map is something you care about, it results in you spending a lot of time ducking into corners that you wouldn’t naturally do

  • The perspective on the minimap is pretty disorienting, it often feels like the angle is deceiving me, based on what angle the game camera is. Especially in places like Shibuya, it feels like the shape of the map geometry does not match the shape of the world geometry

  • It feels pretty antiquated to have a game where, getting wiped out brings you directly back to the title screen, while also being a game that can only be hard saved. Even Persona 4 lets you start the floor over again. These days it’s pretty easy to go a long time without saving, because games have trained us that you won’t lose much progress

  • The shorter load times really are a big deal. I remember in the Wii U version, the number of loading screens was something I considered when I was doing anything, especially going back to bloom palace (which I still think should have it’s own fast travel icon from the map, but it’s not as big a deal now, by far)

  • A lof of the menus in this game have fancy animations (some of which I suspect were originally hiding loading), and they look cool, but in a lot of places it makes the menus feel pretty sluggish

  • The game gives you a lot of weird sounding items (performa especially), and no good way of finding out what they are for. You don’t even have a highlight on new items, or a sort by new function (which they even have for Play Records!)

  • It’s a little weird that they don’t show actual values for weapon exp anywhere, it’s always just a bar

  • Is there really no display anywhere of what Requests are currently underway?

  • I really wish characters would send you a “Thanks for helping me!” Text after you complete a side story, otherwise it can be hard to tell from their SMS history if they are still waiting for you to do their side quest. There’s a “New Side quest!” display in the history, why not “Side Quest Completed” or something

  • It’s kind of weird opening your phone because you got a new SMS, and NOT having it jump directly there. Same goes for opening the Radiant Unity menu when new ones are available

  • I always kind of hated the Unity menus. The list items are so big that it’s hard to really get a good sense of where you are in the menu, what item you have selected, etc. This is especially true for the Radiant Unity menu, which, has no good excuse to be as big as it is (other than, the item requirements being the same size as the Carnage Unity menu items)

  • It’s super lame that there are rewards attached to getting all of the chests in a dungeon (A Play Record, which technically doesn’t give you anything tangible), when you can open a chest, and if you already have max of the item in the chest, you just can’t pick it up. Having to go sell stuff and come back is so annoying

Narrative & Misc

  • I forgot how cute this game is, the models are so expressive, and the performances are too

  • Did they really go through the effort of replacing every reference to Marth with a reference to Chrom? I guess they’re trying to appeal to a wider audience, but it feels like so much work when, Marth feels like he fits the role better anyways

  • I wonder what it was that caused them to decide the protagonist shouldn’t be silent in this specific game. At a guess, I would say it’s because this time around, the characters have actual relationships and conversations with their “persona”s, and so they need an actual character for Chrom to play off of

  • I really like how the posters plastered all over the game change as you progress through the story, makes the world feel more alive

  • I also wish the posters were a lot higher resolution though, they didn’t make the transition to Switch very well at all

  • I really wish you got SOMETHING out of earning Play Records. It would be great if that was the currency that drove cosmetics, for example (although money is already a bit undervalued because you don’t need it to get new weapons)

  • It feels a bit weird needing to go back to the Bloom Palace every time you finish a Side Story, just because you need to use the new Performa. You would think that unlocking the Performa is enough to get the benefit, since the whole narrative is about unlocking your inner strength, but in practice you don’t actually get anything out of it until Tiki says it’s ok

  • All of the walking animations in this game are so weird, and I can’t quite tell why. It’s like, some combination of, their legs being ⅔ of their body, and their feet having no flex at all

  • There’s just something about the way the ad lib performances feel in this game that, they’re so much more fun and exciting to see than any of the character abilities in the persona games. They’re narratively not really attacks, so much as just a light hearted performance that happens to be hella powerful, so it feels almost like a break from the tension, along with a “hell yeah!” moment. They are unpredictable, but it’s so great when they show up

  • I really like Barry’s story. He’s a side character, but he’s actually very directly involved in the story, and he has a very real past that matters, and not just as a one-off, which I don’t think is even true for say, Maiko. I think it lends a lot of credence to the game world. It makes things feel like this world has been around for a while, and it’s not just here to serve you

  • I never really understood who thought it was a good idea to have 3 locations named Daiba, Daitou, and Daitama. Maybe these are easier to keep straight in Japanese, but in English it’s just slightly annoying

  • I really like how willing to take a breather this game is. The whole structure is built around the idea of giving you a dedicated time to do side quests, so that you can focus on the main scenario the rest of the time. The side quests are also decidedly different pace, they are entirely character building, and have a lot more of a light hearted feel, where you’re basically watching cute cutscenes and celebrating your relationships