It's tough going back to the clunky, imprecise ambush system of Persona 4 after enjoying the zippy suspense of Persona 5's stealth system. There are so many similarities in the core gameplay, characters, and plot of both games, but Persona 5's mechanics and graphics are vastly superior. An imperfect portĪdmittedly the weaknesses in Persona 4 Golden are most glaring as someone who recently played Persona 5 Royal, which released in the U.S. Imagine the game as Pokémon if it was based on the philosophy of Jurgen Habermas. This means deciding when you can afford to take a day off of the quest at hand to improve your skills or build your relationships with other characters by hanging out and talking through their problems. You have to manage your resources while fighting but also keep track of your time.
Each person trapped in the TV world puts you on a timer until you can rescue them by exploring the procedurally generated dungeons. The Personas are your source of special skills ranging from healing powers to the elemental-aligned attacks that serve as the focal point of most of the turn-based battles. You can then fuse these Personas together into more powerful and customizable creatures, which are also strengthened based on the relationships you have with other characters in the game. You alone have the ability to harness multiple Personas by defeating monstrous Shadows who reward you with tarot cards. Persona 4 Golden cleverly draws upon the trope of the blank slate protagonist by making your character's amorphousness into a game mechanic. Those who lack the strength of will or friends to back them up die in the real world. For our plucky heroes, that provides a cathartic experience that gives them the power to use these Personas in battle. With the current lack of PS2/PS1 titles on PSNow, I am quietly hoping that means that that is something they are looking at doing eventually.It turns out that there's another realm that some people can access through their TV screens, and if you visit, you'll be confronted with the manifestation of the darkest aspects of your own personality.
If Sony could find a way to make a 'one-size-fits-all' emulator so that a PS3 or PS4 could just accept PS2/PS1 discs and play them, I bet they would just throw it in with a firmware update. The PS2/PS1 games you buy on the PSN store are emulated, and the limited selection is because right now they can only tweak each game for acceptable performance individually.
It's one of the reasons why the original PS3s were so expensive compared to the PS3s now to have the backwards compatibility with the PS2 they just decided to do emulation on the hardware side, meaning more manufacturing costs, meaning it's more expensive to produce units. I still remember reading that some emulator group got really excited when they finally got frames into the double digits on a computer system that far outclassed the original PS2 in terms of power.
Emulation on the software side is just really, really difficult to optimise. I'm fairly certain that's not the case, especially considering that some games that have direct ports from the PS2 to the Vita look better than they did on the PS2. Sony really fucked up here, but the primary reason is likely that the Vita is weaker then a PS2. The only PS2 games you can play are ports like Persona 4 Golden. Scroll it to the left or right and you'll eventually see a "now available: PSOne" icon that takes you to where you can browse for PSOne Classics available on the Vita. When you first open up the PS Store, there a bunch of icons at the top. You can also transfer PS1 games from the PS3 to the PS Vita if you need to (and have a PS3).ĮDIT: Oh. It seems like I could buy them if I wanted to as well.
However, the search function did let me see the Final Fantasy PS1 games that are available. I'm looking at my Vita and the ability to browse through a list of PS1 games is, indeed, gone (that fucking sucks).
You also can't play all PS1 games on the Vita, though it seems like you can play most of them. There are some PS2 classics on the PS3, yes, but you can't play those on the Vita.
Except for the handful of PS2 titles that have been ported to the Vita (Person 4 Golden, Final Fantasy X) and the handful of PS2 titles that were also available on the PSP (Disgaea 1 and 2, Persona 3 Portable, Grand Theft Auto LIberty/Vice City Stories), you can't just play PS2 games on the Vita.