UX Case Study: Persona 4 (Team Composition)

DAT YUKIKO

First, I haven't actually beaten Persona 4.  I've just beaten Heaven, which had probably one of the best boss battles in any JRPG.  It's quite possibly ATLUS's most prominent piece de resistance.  That said, I've got a few gripes about JRPGs in general, because if we're perfectly honest, they're just spreadsheets with pretty pictures.  Good design patterns explain to the user how the game is meant to be played, but Persona 4 fails to provide tools that facilitate workflow, instead sticking to traditional hierarchal menus.

I've got enough pictures to do a few of these posts, but let's pick one topic for now.  For the final boss of Heaven, Kuni no Sagiri, you need maximum awareness of your personae weaknesses.  (If you're curious, Kuni no Sagiri has 3 attack patterns--1st Quad Coverage will do a universal buff/debuff so only 1 primary element is given a 200% weight and to determine this element your team must guard to avoid knockdown, 2nd a party member is afflicted by confusion and previous pattern continues, 3rd he will spam physical attacks and you need a persona with Phys strong/null/repel/drain.)

Sorry about the quality, my video capture card is ripped out right now so I used a DSLR.

Task: Team Composition

Need Case

Infinitely better than Minecraft

This is the dungeon screen.  This is where you first have the ability to compose and adjust your team.  In fact, this is the only place where you can swap out members.  This creates an interesting gameplay mechanic that gives value to Certain Escape, Traesto, and Goho-M.  It places additional risk into the calculus you must perform to determine your bingo point and switch out members.  Let's get started and add Brosuke to your party.

Not-so-subtle nod to Metal Gear Solid 2

This design pattern requires that the player walk to the desired party member and add him to the party.  This vastly differs from the design pattern of recent Final Fantasy games of toggle and commit.  This is a minor annoyance that the player must experience every time he enters a new dungeon.  Let's say I've added my A-team, Brosuke, Chie, and Yukiko.

Pressing Triangle pulls up the root menu

Let's look up the weakness tables for my team, so let's go to their personas.

Yeah, my character is named Man Assface, of course.  It adds humor to all the wrong moments.

There's a lot of information packed in here, and the density is actually fairly nice.  To get here, I had to press Triangle, 3x Dpad down, X, at least 1x Dpad down, X. At least 7 inputs to access Chie's elemental affinities.  It's nice that the persona's arcana aren't presented here, since it's largely irrelevant outside of the fusion task.

Here's Brosuke. What is never explained is the question marks underneath the Next Level block.  These represent future skills that can be learned.  You'd have to go on Gamefaqs to find these, but these do affect the evolution of your party members.  In Final Fantasy 13 parlance, he starts as a Medic, Commando, and Ravager.  He becomes a better Ravager, and gains Jammer and Enhancer abilities; his Medic and Commando abilities become obsolete and you taper them off at your discretion.

This is Yukiko's.  What isn't explicitly explained is the rock-papers-scissors system of the primary elements.  Fire is weak to Ice is weak to Electricity is weak to Wind is weak to Fire.  If you see an enemy use a fire-element attack, countering with ice may be a reliable bet (though this is not always the case).  You can see that Yukiko is able to nullify all attacks of her fire affinity and is weak to ice attacks.

Let's hit Circle and select my character.

Disney Lawyers, attack!

Well we want to check elemental affinities, so let's hit Square.  Assigning your default persona is useful, but considering you can switch them within a turn so there's not a huge penalty.

Those sandals are FIERCE bro

First, Siegfried is great for turtling against enemies that have a preference for physical attacks.  He has great Synergist and Commando properties as well as great passive buffs.  But one thing the player learns throughout the course of gameplay is the difference between the resistance types of Strong (reduced damage), Null (take 0 damage), Repel (damage is reflected--essentially a guaranteed counter attack), and Drain (damage inflicted is converted into healing).  I have to hit L1/R1 to cycle through my personae to check that my team composition doesn't leave my character weak against any one element type with adequate warning.

To recap:

ಠ___ಠ Seriously?

From this I can tell that Yukiko is going to be a liability, and I should take steps to minimize her risks by equiping ice-reduction items, evasion items, increasing her social link rank, and blocking often.

Normal Case

I'm going to keep working on this and edit the post, but here's food for thought:  Warm colors for weakness, cool colors for strength?