It's a Mons Game, after all
As much as I think I could create a persona/demon fusion system for this Two Halves Persona concept, the problem in the end is a matter of scope. Even after limiting the number of personas and tiers per arcana to manegable levels, I still had 100 personas to create — that’s art assets, coding their skills/builds, and then balancing them.
I bit the bullet and decided... we can’t do this. Between myself and Trask, we simply have to work smaller scale. So I thought about reducing things to like one persona per arcana, and came to the following thoughts.
- One persona per arcana. Maybe more sometimes, but generally one.
- Some could perhaps evolve like the party personas.
- Instead of fusion, you can customise their stats or skills through like, arcana fragments or something.
- Each persona has different affinities like SMTV, so certain fragments work better than others, or not at all. Having lower affinity would result in higher SP cost and/or reduced damage.
- You still have the compendium, but it’s instead used to save/load the build of a persona, or reset it to its initial levels.
I then went over my original plan list and reduced things down as much as I could, reducing the count to 60 personas. I have two personas per arcana — the initial and a maxed social link one, some have three instead, and this also includes party member or NPC personas.
That’s still a lot.
Scope is hard, lol.