Just beat story mode normal, impressions (long, spoilers naturally)

[Kurosu]

Beat the story mode on normal, but wait what?
I thought Infinity's story mode was supposed to be 50% longer than the original, but there are only 5 chapters?
Did SEGA give up on that, or was it a mistranslation/-information and they actually meant 50% of the original story?
I expected the game to have 10 chapters at least, this was pretty disappointing. I got around 11 hours out of the story mode without rushing, PSP2 was nearly 3 times that for me.

I managed to get the true ending in one go somehow without any guidance, although the boss was really hard to beat, because he is so large visibility is low and it's hard to get a good camera angle on him.
I didn't use anything from my PSP2 save and didn't grind. I was lvl 28 and used the :ice: Winning Apple from the client order and some B rank :ground: line shield, lol.
I hated that 2 phase attack he uses on the upper half where he stuns you and does some killer beam afterwards, I must have died like 5 times to that.

But please tell me that this isn't the end of the story, how can it be so short?
Unless getting the other endings and playing the side stories will give you significantly more scenes and dialogue, it seems to be very rushed and incomplete.
For example, I checked the movie theater thing, and it has a mere 7 scenes available, but PSP2 has like 25-30, that's a really big difference.
The final boss also didn't really change forms like Olga Spiritus/Anastasis did, etc.
I guess I'm just disappointed because I expected a much longer story mode from the preliminary information.

With that said, I did enjoy the story though. Although the "twist" (if you can even call it that) could've been seen coming from a mile away. Mostly because Wynarl keeps switching from his regular voice and his "villain" voice when talking to Nagisa, haha. :-P
It was obvious that he was playing the bad guy but still encouraging her.
It was amusing how she kept saying "私は演技がうまいだ" when no one thought so but she herself, but Wynarl basically did the same thing as she was planning to and made her believe it.
I did like the interaction between Nagisa and Wynarl, and also Emilia's dialogue was fun.
Also, I laughed out loud when I saw Nagisa was spamming Blade Destruction in 5.2. :-)

But back to complaining, because the story is so short, the side characters barely get to do anything. Like that new Tyler guy, he joins you for 1 mission and has a few lines, but besides that he's not used anymore?
Hyuga and the new Dewman race were barely part of the story, I was expecting that the new race would be a big part of the story.
I haven't done the side stories yet, though.


Some questions for those more fluent in Japanese or those who pay better attention to the story, I wonder if any of this was answered in the story;

What was the reason the mutated monsters started showing up?
Same with the Dewman race.

Why was Nagisa hunting for the fragments in the first place, IIRC she already had many of them when she met Wynarl in the red tablet for the first time.
But later he makes it seem like it was his plan all along.


Of course I do realize that the story mode is only a relatively small part of the game and you can spend hundreds of hours on it without "finishing" it.
And since episode 1 is also included, you get a lot for what you pay if you haven't played that yet.
But as someone who did, the story mode part feels rather cheap to me.

[Jakosifer]

Shorter story mode is better than a longer one, at least in this type of game. Especially because.you have to do it with all of your characters to unlock everything for them. Which was tortuous in PSP2, where Yuto got too much screentime.

Also, the gimmick missions in the story chapters were annoying.

That's just me though, I've never been a fan of Phantasy Star story modes post PSO.

[MESeele]

I understood a fair bit, but anything to do with reasoning/ tech stuff had the vocab fly quickly beyond my reach lol. Like that natsume shu (shizu's dad anyway), whenever he talks it's just one string of kanji with the occasional particle. I hate that guy. Never knew what the hell he was saying.

Ep2 was short, but had a lot more in terms of story. Some of the missions were a pain though. Reminds me of pso's escort missions. Playing as a force that wouldn't target the mines in the robot guiding mission meant that it hit every mine on the way :/ . It was only near the end I figured out you could just smack them with foverse or Gi-techs...


@Lakjo, haha I agree with you there. But then again, PSO's story was pretty optional (maybe that's why). You could do as few of the quests as you liked (where most of the story came from), and you could ignore the hologram projectors too if you wanted. Boiled down, it was just a run through the game while keeping a look out for pillars and the mandatory talk with the principal between levels.

That wouldn't work so well here though, when there is no original level to play through. If you had the opportunity, how would you have done psp2i's storymodes? I'm curious.

[darkante]

Short and sweet can be good at times.
Especially when you are aiming for True Ending and other goodies for all your figurines.

[Ami]

I believe Sakai had said that ep.1 is like a TV series while Ep.2 is like "The Movie". So when you think of it that way, the shortness isn't really a big deal. I did enjoy every moment of it...except for the part Hyuga lost. But seeing that it was Nagisa's introduction cutscene, it's excusable this time

I liked the shortness of ep.2. Though the red text during the mission was my pet peeve. A few of the missions are graded based on time. and those scenes add to the time, which is hassle when you start doing hard mode.

[Kurosu]

I liked the story, but I just wish there was more of it and I felt the ending was a bit inconclusive.
The ending of PSP2 was more satisfying to me, even though it was a lot sadder.
Of course neither storyline is very original or complex, but I like the way it was executed and the interaction between characters was nice also.
I just watched the mini dialogues of Yuuto on his quest for a bride, that was pretty funny.
And poor Lumia, didn't think he would be her type. :-P

But dunno if they had severe budget or time constraints, but it doesn't seem like it would've been too much trouble to make a bit more fleshed out story by revealing more background information, involving the new race in the story more, giving individual characters more screen time, etc.

The missions themselves weren't all that great either, too many annoying gimmicks that felt tiresome even at the first play through, let alone repeats, such as the weird camera angles in that one mission.
Plus I always felt the previous game was lacking in atmosphere and interactivity with the game environment, unfortunately PSP2i doesn't seem to have improved on that at all.
For example, after Wynarl stops talking before the last fight, the last boss just "walks in" out of the blue without any kind of real introduction of where he came from and the fight begins just like that.
I felt it would've been more interesting if they showed Wynarl struggling and Dark Falz bursting out of the red fragment he was contained in, growing in size and giving you a nice 360 view of what he looks like while Wynarl screams in pain or something.
Just relatively little things like that would make the missions and fights more engaging in my opinion.

Oh well, time to check out the infinity missions and get some levels I guess.

Edit: did the 4.2 "bad" ending as well. Wow, this is actually pretty sad if you think about it. Nagisa had been created as an experiment of some sort, and given her lack of common sense she had most likely been isolated from others for a large portion of her early life. That, coupled with the memory affecting side-effects of ingesting the red fragments makes it seem like she has no past at all.
Her whole life consists of one hardship after another, alternating between battles and becoming completely exhausted from taking in the fragments.

And then when she's nearing the end of her mission, she has to make the few friends she had finally made believe that she betrayed them, and ultimately get slain by the person who she had gotten to trust the most and who was supposed to be her bodyguard.
The only "reward" she gets out of all this is the peace of not having to fight anymore, which is lousy to say the least.
Of course Nagisa's level of altruism is bordering on ridiculousness, but she's the kind of person who really needs a big hug. :-P

Wynarl's sacrifice in the true ending is similar, but at least he's doing it for Nagisa.