Mind Zero

Picked it up to scratch the Persona itch before they were out on PC. The itch was not scratched

good game, but achievements not working

its Persona 4, if the gameplay; was WORSE and more convoluted than persona 1. furthermore, the story and characters are so close to persona 3&4, it is a wonder no one got sued. in short, it is the actual "persona without the heart" same ideas(and aesthetic), just barely changed to mascarade as a different game. with half the quality and twice the tedium.

Decent classic dungeon crawler with a couple cool combat mechanics that suffer from a lazy vita port and currently broken achievements.

The Good

• Nothing mind blowing but original combat system.
  
• Multiple available skills that constantly drop from battles to equip your characters how you want.
  
• Both English and Japanese voices.
  
• Not overly complex dungeon maps and not too simple either. ( at least in the first few hours I played. )
  

• You can either play in a very small window ( I would guess it's the vita 960x540 ) or ugly fullscreen,
  
• Controller support is so partial some vita touch-screen mechanics have no button for it, you need to use the mouse.
  
• It's a PS Vita game but you can't even choose the PS buttons if you use a Dualshock.
  
• The game load very slow, loading a dungeon level probably takes 10 seconds. Bad emulation.
  
• There is no way to return to main menu or load a game, you have to close the game and reopen it.
  
[*]Achievements have been broken for at least 2 years from what I can find in the discussions and they never patched it.

This game starts off extremely strong.
You have a wide range of characters that are extremely well written, and they play off one another in a very endearing way. I was completely engrossed in the interactions and loved what they presented.

The problem is the game never changes. Once you hit the Necronomicon dungeon and fight the oddly spiked difficulty in the boss fight, that's it. That's literally the rest of the game: You slog through a slow dungeon, fight enemies that are random bullet sponges, and then fight a boss that just spikes in difficulty due to it's ability to 1-shot your MIND defense and then you are busy trying to debuff the boss and heal. Buffing and Debuffing only last 3 turns, and really don't do anything.
I found most boss fights could be debuffed, my party buffed, and they could still 2-shot my character's MIND. This is an even bigger problem when they can move twice, and tend to end your character. Compound this with how your character is disabled for 2 rounds if their MIND breaks, it causes a significant boost in artificial difficulty.

The dungeons also never change. You are just blindly exploring hallways, only to find a switch that may or may not lead you to the right path. Half of the late game dungeons will open a door, and it's just to a dead end. You were actually needing to take the door that lets you skip floors. Other doors need you to go back up and down.
Combine this with the rediculously high encounter rate, and the bullet sponge enemies, it became a slog to get through. It got to the point where I loaded up a cheat device to make stats and levels just to power level through it, and even with 1-shotting MOST enemies (some enemies had that much HP that a cheated 1k+ damage attack didn't kill them), I still felt the pressure of how LONG the dungeon was. Over 10 floors of repeating hallways and zero variety. "Mind Zero" indeed.

And to top it all off? There's no payout.
There's not ending to this game. It leaves more questions, answers nothing, and sets it all up for a sequel that we won't get. It gives you a sense that you are about to go into the final dungeon, and then CREDITS.

I want to suggest this game, but don't. There's no reason to play it, and you don't even get the satisfaction of winning, as the game just gives you a star wars style sudden ending.

The last time I was this irritated by an ending, I found out the hard way how Asura's Wrath did their ending.

Don't expect achs to pop up or game to be understandable. Poor keymapping, unlikeable characters etc.

A really bad port of this game, as a fan of SMT/Persona or Falcom games, i'm really disappointed. My controller is not supported (8bitdo).

I played this on the PS Vita and I really loved it. The 2 things I like most about the game are the music and the fighting. When I first turned on the game and I watched the awesome intro, I knew I was going to love this game. All the music in the game is great, except maybe the optional dungeon at the end. The battles are fun and sometimes very challenging. There are a lot of things to think about when you are setting up your strategy, especially for boss fights. The voice acting (Japanese) is great too. A lot of the voice actors are people the I like from watching anime. The plot of the game is interesting enough and the characters are all very likable. The graphics are good and it has an anime-feel to it. It's nice to look at and very pretty. The colors are bright and vivid but I think the game is fairly dark overall, which I like. I was very impressed with the way the dungeons were designed. It's not like just walking around in an empty building with gray walls. The dungeons are very detailed and original. To sum up, I would say it's a fun game and it's very similar to the Persona games, which I also love. I am so happy that I can play the game again on a big screen.

Edit: I'm ammending my review slighlty. I was looking for a dungeon crawler to scratch and itch and this was the best unfinished one I came up with in my library. There is still a lot wrong with it and it's very grind heavy and exposition heavy (they took the concept of "show don't tell" and turned it around). However, if you fast forward through all the exposition, the dungeon crawling bits aren't bad. Still, do not buy at full price, not worth it.

Poor man's Persona (very poor man's). Only get if heavily discounted.

I am torn over whether I liked this game or not.

There were some moments where I genuinely enjoyed this game. Despite what people say, the plot is quite good. About 1/3 through the game, unexpected twists start popping up. The story was interesting enough to push through to the end. I even started getting a little attached to one or two of the characters. The art style is really good (except for that annoying little white bar across some of the character portraits.... like really people?) and some of the music is outstanding.

Gameplay-wise, this game is hard to recommend. I found the "MIND" system, or having your MIND as a sort of shield/attacker until the bar drains, to be interesting. You have to judge whether to attack and risk your MIND getting broken from enemies, defending, etc. However, I felt the way they executed this system leaves a lot to be desired. Enemies are just reskins of each other and there is nothing exciting about the dungeon crawling (everything looks the same too). I still believe that fans of the first-person dungeon crawling rpg should still pick this up, as the game can be very difficult at times.

Without going into too much detail, the main reason I can't recommend this is because of the final hours of the game. The plot is super rushed here and VERY unsatisfying. If you like difficult turn-based games like Etrian Odyssey or Shin Megami Tensei, at least play it, but if not, don't touch it.

Mind Zero is a curious game, it might be a bit unfairly compared to a persona game, but while it is not completly wrong, isn´t also correct. It have a bit slow start, but once you past the initial moments, things do start to improve. The port is ok, not amazing, kind limited, but ok. The dungeons do have some cleaver designs, but the art a few times could use some improvement.

Edit: in the end, I do not recommend this. Story gets boring after awhile, you cannot change weapons or upgrade, every enemy are almost the same thing. The grind. Request refund.
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I am not the type of person to write reviews... Espeically public ones but I just had to write my own opinion on this.

A game... Where you spam your keyboard just to find which key is what.... and.... To FINALLY find out how to acess the key config and set it to your preference(and spamming buttons and start button on the logitech controller just to find out that the controller doesn't work for this game...)

I started playing this game without going to the config first. So basically I was just clicking away until I got to the battle scene that asked me to press L on my controller.... now... which frickin' key on my keyboard is the L? *Spams keys and it does something* well... what key did I press? I don't know but it worked! *Another scene where I have to press L* *Second try and finally finds out its the number 1 on the keyboard* I got fed up and got to a save point and just had to go to the key config and boy that was fun also. So when it ask me to press L... I will literally press L on my keyboard.

So far I'm recommending it only the fact that I bought it for $8 on special, it is not worth $20. haven't fully played it yet. I am only recommending it if your controller works and able to change the key config and of course, on special. Though I'm on the verge to not recommend it but it might change after I play it a bit.


Pros:
The art is nice
Full screen works.... (For me that is... After playing around with the config first >.>)
Choice of Japanese and English audio


Cons:
The English voice acting... they all act... so bored... not surprised their situation they are in. -- Haven't tried Japanese yet.
Grinding.
Story.
The port in general.

I highly suggest to buy Persona series instead of this game if you have a vita.

~Sorry for bad English and grammar~

+ Dual Audio (English and Japanese audio)
+ Some Character designs are interesting

+/- Random Monster Encounting Dungeon

- Horrible Sound Effects
- Horrible PC port (You'll NEED a gamepad/controller and download a software called Xpadder)
- Boring Story
- Horrible and Confusing Story Telling
- Boring Gameplay
- Cheesy Dialogue
- Game HUD is so horrible, it looks like it was made in 1990
- English Voice Actors sound lazy or tired
- Some Character Images are poorly cropped in. You can see small fragments around them, Jesus.

You can tell the developers did not care about the quality of this game, and just wanted to quickly make something to cash grab. I wanted to play a game at least somewhat similar to Persona, but this is garbage. I've seen a lot of other negative reviews about the horrible pc port, which can quickly be resolved with xpadder, but what really makes this game so bad is how the story telling was designed.

There is no narration or 3D models to explain what the hell is going on. It's easy to get lost what is happening to the characters or what they're doing, and the out of sync sound effects doesn't help.

Also, the actual gameplay is horrible. The tutorial is a bunch of text. Some gameplay designs are pointless. And the dungeon crawler looks like it was made from 1990.

Overall: 3/10
F you lazy Japanese game developers. This is just another example of a dissappointing game that resulted from lazy and inconsiderate game design because they just wanted to quickly gain money. Go ahead and pick this game up if you're seriously desperate while waiting for the next Persona game, but don't say you were never warned.

Mind Zero is a game that revolves around a bunch of high school kids and their powers called MIND's. I decided to give the game a go as the idea looked interesting, but after 11 hours in I'm calling it quits. I made it to the end of dungeon 4 before I stopped, which will be reflected in this review.

Game World: The world of Mind Zero is interesting, minds are causing problems, police are investigating it, and you have been roped into things. Sadly, after the first hour or so introduction, you will get stuck in an endless grind that seems to never let you learn more about the game world. Still, what I got to see was interesting: 7/10

Character Creation and Development: The characters in the game seemed interesting from the beginning, but nothing had changed by dungeon 4 with them. They were still the same ol'. 1/10

NPC Interaction: Very limited. You get to interact with your party and have a few scenes with them outside of the dungeons, but that is about it. 4/10

Foes: Battles are against the same ol' foes, and by later dungeons its just a bunch of pallete swaps. Oh, look, this sheep is blue this time! Occasionally an interesting foe comes along, but it is too rare. Also, I felt foes were poorly balanced against the reward to fight them. For example, in dungeon 4 there is this @^&@ lion that takes forever to kill, and gives less experience than foes I found easier to kill later on. And this is a constant problem in the game, where the expereince reward is disproptionate to how hard it is to kill the foe: 2/10

Combat: Combat is poor in this game. You have TP/HP/MP, MP works as a shield as long as your MIND is up, but the only way to regenerate it is to drop your MIND and defend, or use an item (which also requires you to drop your MIND). Also, you never get any more TP than 10 in the entire game, which starts to seriously hinder your strategies as the game moves on, especially when the spells get more expensive. Plus, why do I have to spend HP to cast spells and the foes do not? That tactic of foes don't pay costs the players do was old back when FF8 was new in the 90's, and there is NO reason to still use it now: 1/10

Equpiment: Seemed promising, but I never found much to equip there and the stores never seemed to have much either. Can't upgrade your weapons: 1/10

Economy: Broken. By dungeon 3 I had all the stores carried, and there was nothing to spend my money on. That changed a little when I got to dungeon 4, but I was able to buy all of that with what I had been saving to this point. 1/10

Quests: Well. there's a main quest. But prepare to grind for hours to see anything. What little I saw seemed interesting, I just wish there had been more of it to see: 1/10

Graphics/sound/interface: This is a PS Vita port, no bells and whistles. Keys are mapped to 1/2/a/s/z/x and one other I forgot which is start (and good luck figuring it out). No attempt to explain the keys either, prepare to smash your keyboard to find it: 3/10

Gameplay: The game is nothing but a slog through a bunch of dungeons, nothing to keep it interesting. Eventually I got bored of it: 1/10

Total: 22/100. However, I have to apply some score penalies now. First, this port seems to have been abandoned by the publisher, which is a no/no in my book. Second, the game is just HORRIBLY balanced. Bosses will get 2 turns a round at random (and I mean at random. Sometimes they go once, sometimes twice). Also, the HP of the bosses is ridiculous! I finally gave up at boss 4 because I was at the point where I was winning regular fights in my sleep, but couldn't beat tha boss because it was cheating the system. Look developers, us game players are TIRED of games where the bosses do not follow the same rules the players do! The makers of this game need to go back to school and learn how to balance a game, or at least play and learn from the classics. Old school Wizardry games have better balance than this game does!

-10 for atrocious balance and abandoned support = 12/100 final score, which is in the stay far away category. Play anything else than this game.

Played the Vita version quite a bit, and am now 2 hours into this one. Outside of the resolution stuff that others have brought up, this is a fine port. The game itself is super underrated, unfortunately (and unfairly) being compared to Persona. If you're looking for a visual novel with DRPG gameplay, with a solid--albeit it somewhat formulaic--story and characters, a great soundtrack, and a really, REALLY excellent dub, then you'll probably really enjoy the game.

I havn't play this game much, but it is a ok game, so far the battle system is ok, the characters are kind of neat and interesting, the storyline is interesting, the game is good and i have no problem playing a ps vita game. Downfall is that I should of got this game for the ps vita since i own one.

The thing I have the most problem with this game is that it has no resolution settings, it has no xbox "one" controller support. I have to use my xbox 360 controller, and luckly I have one around.

all and all with the xbox 360 controller being around this game is actually quite enjoyable, but when in fullscreen you can not exit so hitting windows key to manual close the game is kind of a bit MEH to me, but other than that its a cool game to have on Steam.

I'm trying so hard to like this game...

On the positive side, it's a fun, fairly traditional turn-based JRPG dungeon crawl. Whilst the mechanics aren't staggeringly original, there's a nice balance in how much you're prepared to spend for the bigger skills, and each fight can reward you with bonuses depending on how you fought, which can encourage certain tactical choices you'd otherwise dismiss. The character art is good, in a Visual Novel style, and the splash CGs are well done. Voice acting is very good and there's a lot of it, and the story is intriguing even if you have to suspend your disbelief significantly.

However....

The negatives are too much. First and foremost, this is a dreadful, lazy port. I feel bad for giving money to something that shows such little evidence of any effort. Resolution is locked at the original PSVita resolution as far as I can tell (960x544) even in full screen, making it look like an PS2-era game, full of jagged edges and obvious pixels. Textures are blurred and low-res, especially in the dungeon corridors. Sound quality is a hit-and-miss affair, with odd stereo placement and volume issues abounding, and the title song sounds like it was recorded onto an old magnetic cassette tape by sticking a microphone next to a radio speaker. Load times are excessive and make *zero* use of the memory that PCs can provide over the Vita. Dungeon exploration involves significant and inexplicable lag and input-delay. Elements of the touch-screen interface of the original remain, such as slashing barriers or pushing levers, and are replaced - without informing you - with mouse interactions. However, no other aspect of the game will be controlled with the mouse... you have to use the awkward keyboard controls. They've replaced the Vita original button icons with Xbox Gamepad button icons, and then failed to implement a way to use the XBox Gamepad to actually play the game!

Honestly, it's just shocking.

I want to like it. I really do. There's a solid dungeon-crawl experience in there that's trying to claw it's way out. But as it stands, unless Zerodiv/Aksys are prepared to listen to people and make the necessary changes to this port, I cannot in good conscience recommend this game.

I'm going to see the game through to the end but in my personal opinion here are my pros and cons so far.
At the moment i do not recommend this escpecially with its current price tag but maybe that will change as i get further in.

Pros

Interesting story.
Decent character concepts.
Fully voiced.

Cons

Bland character design.
Dungeons look like walking around that old maze screensaver from the early windows days.
Combat can use some work. When you get hit, it is literally the enemy attacking you characters picture.
Skills seem wonky and explanations even more so.

In short I got this game in hopes of it being a sort of Persona for PC, however calling it a 'Persona clone' is thus far feeling like an insult to Persona and for the price tag, i must admit I am feeling somewhat jipped. I understand its a port but looking at P3 portable....this could have been better. WAY better. I use the SCP wrapper in order to use my ps3 controller with the game so it feels a little more fluent....until you get to dungeon 'navigation' if you want to call it that. That being said im not knocking the game, the story is very rich and it is whats so far driving me to play the game. If you dont care for graphics which i know alot of people dont and just want a persona like visual novel if give it a try. But eh....wait for a steam sale. It isnt worth 20 bucks. Or even 15 at the 20% off in my very personal opinion. I would like to hope there would be patches to make this PC worthy and not for it to remain a port but....it's more than likely a dream that will be forever embedded in my Sad little mind. If you want Persona.....just....Play persona.

So fat from what I can see, the game originally came out for the PSVita back in 2014. The game is so earily similar to the Persona series, that I would definitely believe it to be made by the same people if you told me that.
But from what I can say, the port of this game from Vita to PC seems to be a bit rushed, having a few minor issues graphically, and only one resolution. Also the game starts in windowed mode, which is extremely unexpected, and the whole game was made to be played with an xbox controller, so all of the prompts are for xbox controls, but of course, you CAN play with keyboard as I am.

From what I can see, this game may be interesting if you like the first person dungeon crawling of Persona, but so far I haven't seen that much of a unique reason to go for it. It takes about an hour to get finished with the tutorial of the game, so it's definitely a bit slow, and throws a lot of exposition at you through dialogue.

If you would like to hear more about how I feel for the game, please check out my lets play if you get the chance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buz7FxlcbCY

I might keep playing this to see if it gets better, but right now even for the on sale price I'm feeling a bit ripped off. It seems similar to Persona, and there seems to be some promise there, but there is so much getting in the way.

I had to randomly hit keys to figure out how to get to the settings menu (the Z key is your A button, btw) where I could find the rest of the keys. The fullscreen option did not apply right away, and only showed up after a restart.

The 'transitions' between scenes are just a fade out and fade in on the same bg way too often, there is way too little context for what is going on in the scenes so that it's really hard to picture what is going on.

On the plus side, it seems decently voice acted. Woo.

My no vote comes from the fact that once I was ready to quit, I couldn't. It was stuck in fullscreen mode, to the point that ctl-alt-del did just about nothing. More random key mashing led to steam eventually launching one of my other games that didn't have focus. So yeah, that's an issue. I don't want to have to hold down my power button every time I want to quit.

tl;dr Even $15 feels a bit much for this game. It's really bare bones.

The art style by KYO Kuroichigo looked gorgeous, and the setting appeared promising from the trailer, so I gave "Mind Zero" a shot. I'm a huge fan of visual novels and anime, and usually, I don't particularly mind if a port is a little rough around the edges. However, with "Mind Zero", Aksys Games don't even have the bare basics down. The game is locked at the internal PS Vita resolution, with no option to adjust it. You can run it in full screen, but that will just scale it, making it quite a blurry mess. Moreover, some people on the forums have been complaining about their controllers not being recognized -- meaning you will eventually have to resort to third-party tools (e.g. Xpadder) to fix that.

Also, if you're like me and prefer to play most games via -- God forbid -- KB + mouse setup, don't even bother, as Aksys have failed to implement even basic mouse functionality. By default, you need to control analog stick movement via some arbitrarily assigned keys. If that doesn't float your boat: Hey, no problem, you can, as I randomly found out, use the mouse to navigate the map and menus, you just need to hold down the left mouse button the entire time. Sounds like fun, right? Of course (this is a port 'classic'), the game will ALWAYS show controller button prompts, regardless of your input method. Which means you're in for fun times, when the game asks for "A", but means "Y", asks for "Y", but means "S", and so forth.

Overall, the game itself looks interesting enough, so if you own a PS Vita you may want to track down a copy for cheap. But stay away from this port -- especially if you plan to play via KB + mouse.

If you're looking for a visual novel boasting great art style and story, which is also competently ported, I wholeheartedly recommend "Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc"! "Xblaze Code: Embryo" is entertaining, too and a surprisingly solid port, considering that it's also published by Aksys.