Snacko
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Registered: 06-08-2006
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Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 FES Review (+3)
I recently picked up Persona 3 FES and I realized two things after playing for 4 hours straight:
1) This massive a game means I can not prepare a review at this time nor will I be likely to for a few months (or days, feel free to look at the bottom of the topic for the conclusion).
2) The game is incredible enough to deserve a write-up anyway.
The Megami Tensei series has been lauded in both Japan and in the United States for its dark, mature themes, fascinating stories, unique settings and deep, expansive gameplay functions.
The Persona series may be the most interesting Megaten spin off. Though the idea of high school students fighting demons may seem an overly anime inspired idea, the series has always managed to transform the concept into interesting, relevant stories, and Persona 3 does the absolute best job of this I've ever seen.
The problem with the idea of injecting strong story elements into an old-fashioned dungeon crawl is that at some point or another the story will come to a grinding halt and the way Persona 3 gets around this is one of the most interesting aspects of the game and the way it is integrated into the story is fascinating.
The story revolves around a character (named by you) who has been newly transferred into a new high school in Japan. The story is completely separate from 1 and the two installments of 2. He rides the subway to the school in what is quite possibly the most memorable opening cutscene in gaming history, quickly alternating between surprisingly lucid views of city life and what appears to be a girl, very scared, attempting to work up the nerve to shoot herself in the head.
When the main character arrives everything is a bit...off. The streets are empty, the lights aren't working and, upon his arrival, he is asked to sign a contract saying that he is liable for the choices he makes and the impacts they have on the world. When he wanders further into the dorm, he encounters two young girls, one of which is the girl seen earlier, still with the gun in her hand. Oh, and there are weird glowing coffins everywhere in the city.
It takes a long time until you have any degree of control of your character or the world around him after this, about an hour and a half simply involves the character getting settled into school. The game picks up and kicks into high gear when it is revealed that there is a hidden hour between 11:59 and midnight and that the average person spends this time in a coffin completely oblivious to the hour and that strange monsters called Shadows roam the Earth searching for souls to feast on who have failed to do this. Somehow the game reveals this without making it sound completely idiotic.
Your dorm room turns out to be the center for an extracurricular group of people who have the "potential". This potential not only occurs in people who cannot enter the coffins (and thus experience the hour, known as the "Dark Hour"), but also refers to the ability to use their personality to construct a Persona to fight the Shadows. The group, who has finally gotten a good amount of Persona users now believes it is time to explore Tartarus, a gigantic tower that the school transforms into during the Dark Hour and the group believes to hold the purpose of the Dark Hour and how to stop the Shadow.
The meat of the gameplay can be divided into two parts, in Tartarus and out. While you're in Tartarus you explore randomly generated dungeons in search of stairs up to the next floor fighting Shadow and finding loot. Every floor has a warp back to the entrance and every five floors is a boss and a checkpoint. The battles sidestep the downfalls of the generally flawed jRPG battle system (if you aren't familiar with it, think a turn based strategy game without movement or strategy) by making you use enemy weaknesses and your various Personas carefully and strategically.
Every time you get a critical hit or hit an enemy with a type of attack it is weak against, it will be stunned and the attacker is allowed another move. Enemies remain stunned until it is their turn, so if you manage your Personas very carefully (you can change your Persona once in the course of battle) and use exactly the right attacks, you can stun every enemy on the field (note that you cannot stun a stunned enemy). This allows you to use an All-Out Attack where your party dashes in to the center of the battlefield and attacks all the enemies at once in a knock-down, drag-out brawl.
After a battle, you can choose one from a number of cards. This card can represent many things such as money, weapons or even new Personas. If you have multiple Persona cards, you can head through a door apparently only you can see to a place called the velvet room. In the velvet room there is a man named Igor (and his assistant who becomes more important later) who can fuse together different Personas to create new ones. Occasionally he'll screw up and you'll end up with a completely different Persona than intended which can be a positive or a negative. You can only have one of each type of Persona card meaning that if you're a completionist, you may gladly spend 100s of hours just getting everything and leveling it to the max.
Progress so far seems to have an interesting element: at least near the beginning of the game it doesn't revolve around Tartarus. It seems that you fight a boss once a month during the full moon that releases the next barrier in Tartarus, but if you grind enough you can defeat the boss without actually getting to the barrier. The main motivation for completing the so called "Block" (the area between barriers) on time is that bringing the hidden documents to Elizabeth (a human-like woman who resides in the Velvet Room and hands out Side Quests through a bulletin-board like request system) completes a quest for a very lucrative reward. During the "Full Moon" phase at least, the story seems fairly independent of the actual dungeon (though the plot revolves so thoroughly around Tartarus, I'm sure this will change).
You can't go to Tartarus every day; people become fatigued far more quickly during the Dark Hour and if you're spending that time saving the world, you'll become exhausted in a hurry. This leads to the other, equally important facet of the game.
Outside of Tartarus, during the other 24 hours of the day, you will experience life at the boarding school. You will attend classes, participate in extracurricular activities and hang out with friends. As you make social bonds with your classmates/participate in out of school activities you will increase the power of that Social Link. Because your Persona is a direct extension of your personality, your social life will obviously affect the power of your various Personas. Each Social Link powers up a specific Persona. Social Links can power up by completing Side Quests but are only put into affect when you fuse new Personas, Links do not affect Personas you already have. I'm not 100% sure how expansive this is, but it seems that there is one for every activity and every friend.
This is also how the story keeps moving along even when you are periodically grinding your way through Tartarus, the school lets the story come through as it is on a calendar basis. There are plenty of holidays, pop quizzes, stat-building activities (similar to a dating sim) and scripted events to make this less confrontational part of the game just as exciting as Tartarus.
I haven't delved into the new content in the FES "director's cut" (Persona 3 FEStival) edition, but from what I've gathered it is clearly the superior version.
$30 retail price
The original Persona 3 game (The Journey mode)
Hard Mode
New Personas
New Links
New Fusion Spells
An additional epilogue with a new main character reported to be over 30 hours long (The Answer mode)
Connectivity with original Persona 3 data allowing you to carry over things such as old Fusion Spells.
It is also worth noting that to draw players who completed the original to buy this update, The Answer mode is available from the start.
I generally dislike jRPGs. I believe the stories are generally either overly convoluted or incredibly shallow and uninteresting, the battles are boring and too frequent, the pacing is too often far too slow and they generally sacrifice gameplay for story or vice-versa, but then again, Shin Megami Tensei has never been about doing things like everyone else.
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Director of the Department of Orderly Disruptions
[Last edited by Snacko at 02-24-2009 09:52 PM]
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