It took me like a month and a half, but I finally finished both parts of Persona 3: FES - the main story ended up clocking in at just under 100 hours of gameplay, and The Answer/Episode Aegis - the part that I just finished - ended at 30 hours. Now I understand why this game got nominated for some “most bang for your buck” award, considering it retails for $30 brand new. I think it also won “best RPG of the year” from a few magazines or something, too, but I may be hallucinating that.
Anyhow, point being, I’m finally done. So yeah, on the off chance that anyone cares to see some of what’s ate up a huge chunk of my life these past two months (and gave me something to do while my sites were being moved), here you go:
This was the opening that would pop up if you reloaded after you died in-game, you know, just to rub it in a bit. Memento mori, indeed.
The normal opening sequence, showing some actual gameplay interspersed with the cutscenes.
Opening sequence of the second portion of the game, “The Answer” (also called Episode Aegis/Aigis, as you control her character instead of Minato during this part). If you have any plans to play this game at all, you probably shouldn’t watch past 2:30 or so. You’ll still get to see the opening cutscene that features Aigis - my favorite of the playable characters and the girl featured in this current layout - and Akihiko (the strangely gray-haired boxer guy), probably the only character that never left my battle party throughout both portions of the game (I rotated the other two spots between Mitsuru, Junpei, Shinjiro, and Aigis). He ruled.
And lastly, one of the “secret recordings” of the different S.E.E.S. members that you can access in the FES version. This one features my overall favorite character of the game, Shinjiro Aragaki. And those of you who have played this game, before you ask, yes, I did end up holding a grudge against Ken for the entire rest of the game. Stupid kid.
…But yeah, even though this was my first foray into not only the Persona games, but ANY of the Shin Megami Tensei games, I’m totally ready for December, when Persona 4 is supposed to be released in North America. It looks like it might manage to be even stranger than the one I just finished, heh.
On a more personal level, I know that I’ve mentioned a few times in this blog that I have been having increasing problems with my memory and ability to focus long enough to do, well, anything - even fall asleep, if that makes sense. I was put on Adderall a little over a year ago, and when I take it, it helps tremendously: it’s akin to that fuzzy, out-of-range channel at the top of the dial suddenly becoming clear and coherent.
Unfortunately, I have two reservations about my Adderall prescription, both of which I have mentioned before: the fact that I hate the idea of being reliant on amphetamines to be able to think properly, and the fact that it costs upwards of $100 per month to fill my prescription - even when getting generics. This train of thought led me to getting a sort of “trial” prescription for Wellbutrin, which supposedly can help with Adult ADD.
Worst idea of my life. I don’t think that I have ever reacted so violently to any pill; even the time that I tried Lexapro to stabilize my blood pressure and instead just developed an omnipresent pain-to-the-touch in my skin. No, this was much worse. Within about a week and a half, I was not only thrust into crushing depression (I remember my mother carting me around to therapists when I was younger, convinced that I was depressed; I didn’t think I was then, now I know that I wasn’t, because what I have been feeling in the past few weeks was just hopeless and awful and strangling and… completely something that I had never before experienced), but I couldn’t move without excruciating pain shooting through every part of my body. I quickly figured out that somehow my body was so incredibly sensitive to the drug that even being - and I am not exaggerating - 10-15 minutes off of 24 hours between pills would, in essence, leave me crippled: I could only sit in a strange, L-like hunch (as a quick side note, to cure my boredom while my sites were being moved, I took a strange Death Note/Jung combination personality test that labeled me as sharing the INTP personality type with none other than L; although that varies slightly from the other test I took recently that categorized me as INTJ, which this test associated with Near. Since Near - in my opinion - comes off as an arrogant, insufferable jerk, I’m going to just decide to go with INTP instead, ha) with one side of my abdomen constantly curved. And other movement - or taking too deep of a breath - would make me want to scream, it hurt so fucking bad.
Within about three days of this, I made the obvious decision to begin weaning myself off of the Wellbutrin. This ended up taking so much longer than it should have - like, three times longer than I’d even been taking the pills in the first place; sure, I was cutting the pills smaller and smaller each day, then every other day, but still: even a slight difference in the timing of my pill consumption and I would be a physical wreck.
I am on my fourth day without ingesting any of that stupid, stupid pill and while the physical pain is gone, I am still feeling a bit listless and depressed, though much less so than I had been.
What a fucking nightmare.
In other words:
Adderall, I will never, ever cheat on you again =(
Hey look everyone, I’m back again! I finally found a new webhost & got everything switched over, since I couldn’t deal with the random outages that Webair kept giving me - it was seriously up to 3-4x each week that I’d notice my sites were just not loading (it was actually getting so bad that my surfers were emailing me about the constant downtime). It was really affecting my traffic - and thusly, my sales. So I’m now with Naked Hosting; the hosting costs more per month, but hopefully it’ll make up for it by… well, you know, WORKING! Reliability and peace of mind is worth an extra $79/month to me.
But yeah, while my sites & databases were getting moved, I didn’t want to update in case anything went wrong and such, so… I had a lot of forced time off, essentially. I spent my days playing an absolutely insane amount of Persona 3: FES (which lends itself well to killing time… the main story is around 100 hours of gameplay, and the bonus story - which I’m now almost finished with - is supposed to clock in at around 30 hours), getting hooked beyond belief on Death Note, rooting for my… well, not childhood friend, but I’ve known him since I was 15 or so… so, longtime friend Justin on I Survived A Japanese Game Show, and watching the new season of Project Runway - after the premiere last week, Kenley, Korto, and Kelli round out my favorites (got something for the K names this season, apparently… also, up until very recently, I lived within a block of Kelli’s store, Black Market!). Really hating on the tanorexic Blayne and and third-person Suede.
I need to get some real work done, so for now I’ll leave you with three things: this new layout (featuring Aigis of Persona 3; a link to the new paranormal forums for creepypasta.com; and lastly, the announcement that Jamiee has re-opened gerl.org as her personal blog again! Go!
Interesting. I remember taking those Meyers-Briggs/Jung personality tests constantly in high school (it seemed like every time you had a Health or Psychology class, you had to take it) and I always consistently scored as an ENFP (Extroverted Intuitive Feeling Perceiving) - even as recently as a few years after high school, I remember taking one of these tests online and getting the same score.
It seems that I’ve changed. I took it once again, and I’m almost completely the opposite now - INTJ (though my Introvert score is very close to the middle - as I’ve always been right in the middle of those two, I just used to score more on the Extrovert side). Apparently I’m now a “Mastermind”, as explained by Marina Margaret Heiss: