The Answer is probably what most people who have beat Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 are looking forward to: a few more hours of new game material. Apparently, the end of P3 was not the end of it all and some sort of Groundhog Day-ish timewarp has taken over the dorm.
Instead of traveling down floors of Tartarus, The Answer has players exploring a strange area that opened up beneath the dorm that has something to do with the time warp. The area has several doors which get unlocked eventually and leads to well…The Answer.
Unlike the dungeon tower in Persona's main game which has stairs leading to higher and higher floors, the dungeon in the Answer has stairs leading to lower and lower floors. The Abyss of Time is divided into a handful dungeons which can be reached by mysterious doors.
Luckily, instead of an endurance run from the top floor to the last floor of a particular section, most sections have doors that let you skip the previous couple of floors once you've discovered the "skipping" doors. If that sounds confusing, just think of them as mechanism that lets you skip floors in the main dungeon.
While players may feel disadvantaged playing through the Answer without one of their main characters, don't worry because a new character will join your party. Without giving too much away, this new character is pretty awesome.
Before starting The Answer, I was warned by the game that the difficulty would be harder, but I didn't find it that much harder than the last half of the game on normal difficulty.
I might have jinxed myself when I said earlier that the dungeons weren't that much harder than the main game. The mechanics of the game, finding the enemy's weak spot while guarding your own, are still the same, the enemies are definitely harder. I had to grind for a couple of floors in the first part of the dungeon before I could use a high enough level Persona to beat the first boss.
Spoiler ALERT! New character revealed below.
Ready?
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0A3Sull6Lds[/youtube]
Metis, who happens to be Aigis's sister, is the newest member to my party and wow, she's pretty darn powerful. Even without her Orgia mode, which disables limiters for awhile, her Fatal End attack packs a heavy punch. Maybe it's just my imagination, but her Orgia mode seems to last longer than Aigis's. I've only had her overheat during a fight once and that was a pretty drawn-out fight.
One word of advice I can give about using Metis is that while her Orgia mode doesn't usually have time to run out during normal battles, it sucks to have it run out and have her overheat during a boss battle. Not having a functional teammate is the last thing you need. For bosses, if I can afford it, I use Metis on normal mode for the first couple of rounds, and then turn on her Orgia mode. That way, if it does end up running out, hopefully I'm only a few rounds away from beating the boss anyway.
Images courtesy of Atlus.
