Sony
Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3
By Tim McGowan
Aug 22, 2007, 7 :58 am

Persona 3 opens with one of the hippest intros I've ever seen. A catchy pop song plays over sleek and colorful animation, filled with surreal images of teenagers, blue skies, guns, literary allusions, and full moons. It's probably the best intro movie I've ever seen. Upon starting a new game, the player is greeted with many more movies, all in quick succession and each extremely stylish. The player is introduced to his dorm mates and his high school, and, within the hour, thrust into a battle. Jazzy and poppy music accompanies these events, all of it with full lyrics and edited to be friendly for looping. It's an extremely charming and refreshing experience.

Shortly after, the main mechanics are revealed. During the day, you go to school. Occasionally you will be asked to answer a question during the lecture, or given the option to sleep through class, but for the most part the game glosses over the school time segments. After school, you can choose to partake in one event. You can spend time with a friend of your choice, which builds valuable social link points, or you can choose an activity that raises Academics, Charm, or Courage, all of which do little but make more friends available. Social link points allow your character to create more powerful personas. After you complete your single daily activity, you are sent back to the dorm at night, during which you can do a handful of other activities, go back to your room and sleep, or go to the game's multi-story, randomly generated dungeon, Tartarus.

Dungeon crawling in Tartarus is thankfully streamlined. All enemies are visible, both on screen and on the mini-map the game provides. However, if they see you, they will charge at you; you must strike them with your weapon if you want to gain an extra turn in battle or prevent them from getting one. There are also random chests on each floor. However, if your characters fight too many battles during one night at Tartarus, they will become tired, making them deal less damage and take more, so the player needs to balance between exploring and getting to the top as quickly as possible. By reaching a boss floor, you can activate a portal which gives instant two-way access to the dungeon's entrance. After a certain point, you will reach a blocked floor, at which point you simply have to wait for the next major storyline event until you can move on. They usually occur once a month.

A persona acts as equipment that determines all of your stats except for HP and SP. They also allow you to cast spells. You gain new personas two ways: by collecting them after battle in a simple card shuffle game or by fusing two or more together to create a (hopefully) more powerful one. The card shuffle is a nice break from previous Persona games, which required often frustrating conversations with demons to convince them to give you items.

The battle system is structured such that you can freely change your persona once at the beginning of every turn. You can also change the AI tactics of your allies, who are computer-controlled, and issue a request to discover enemies' weaknesses. After you choose an attack, the rest of the battle plays automatically until your next turn. However, if you strike an enemy's weakness, you will get an extra turn and the enemy will be knocked down. If you manage to knock all enemies down, your party can execute a powerful attack that hits all enemies and usually beats normal battles. Moreover, if an enemy is knocked down, it will lose its next turn, but if it is hit again while down, it will get back up. It's a simple system, but it is effective and encourages careful strategy, something many RPGs are sorely missing.

Unfortunately, almost every single one of these stimulating aspects of the game are plagued with little annoyances and imbalances that are insignificant in the beginning but downright infuriating over the 80-hour period the game asks for completion.

For instance, the daytime high school sim simply has too many characters to befriend. If you decide to adopt a strategy to spread your social links thin, you'll waste a lot of days because you often need to spend more than one day with someone to raise the link's level. If you don't talk to someone for a long period of time, he or she will get mad at you and you'll have to waste another day getting back in good graces. However, if you get to be very good friends with a female, she'll consider the two of you as dating and will get mad if you spend time with any other girl. This can mean a lot of wasted days, depending on your strategy. Some actions take an abnormally long time: playing the online game or studying on a holiday, for instance, forces the game immediately to the next day, entirely skipping evening and midnight, making it needlessly more costly than other activities. Meanwhile, during the evening, there are only three events you can partake in: getting some coffee, which is useless after your Charm is maxed out; singing karaoke, which is useless after your Courage is maxed out; and talking to an old monk, which is impossible after his social link is maxed out. Afterwards, you are sent back to your room where you can study or rest as if you had not done anything at all.

In other words, since the game has a limited number of days, there are large costs for participating in any daytime activity and almost no costs for doing something at night. It couldn't have hurt to spread a few more social links into the night, or to make raising links slightly less difficult. Limiting your ability follow all the social links presents a challenge, certainly, but following the stories you get from befriending people is one of the game's most interesting features. They supplement and pace the main storyline, but without extra-careful planning and foreknowledge it's impossible to witness them all.

Fusing personas is a great tool, but the game never tells you what the skills on the new persona actually mean and you can't check until it's already fused. This is less of a problem later on: once you know that "zio" is a lightning spell and "maragi" is a fire spell that hits all enemies, you can reason that "maziodyne" is a powerful lightning spell that hits all enemies. However, some spell types actually change name late in the game. The strongest "mudo" spell, for instance, is called "Die for Me." This adds an unnecessary risk to giving up your personas for fusion or for getting rid of old skills to accomodate new ones. Thankfully, the game allows you to catalogue every persona you collect and buy them back at any time, but it is still costly, and to keep up you may have to undergo a lot of boring grinding.

Without a doubt, the most irritating aspect of Persona 3 is your allies' horrible, horrible AI, which is exacerbated by a particularly annoying design decision: if your main character dies, the game is instantly over. Never mind that you can easily revive your allies when they are knocked out; apparently they are just too stupid to figure out how to return the same favor. Since you must, at all costs, keep your leader from dying, the best thing to do in every battle is to knock as many enemies down as possible. Even if you can't knock them all down and get the powerful attack, you can at least steal their turns. However, if you are in the middle of doing this and one of your spells misses, your allies' default AI tells them to attack enemies with the lowest HP. This means they go for the downed enemies you've already hit, which means the enemies regain their turns and get more opportunities to kill the hero. Even early in the game, some enemies will have instant-death spells that can affect your whole party, making an immediate and cheap "Game Over" fairly common unless you get used to running away. It's not until about 20 hours into the game that you gain the AI technique "Knock Down," which instructs your allies to knock down enemies. However, there is no way to make this the default tactic (Note: You can. - ED), so you must tell your party to follow it at the beginning of every single battle, which gets quite old.

Even the simplest of tactics can be horribly executed. For instance, if you set a character to "Heal/Support," he or she will give priority to healing HP over status ailments, which doesn't do a lot of good when three party members are charmed and ruthlessly slaughtering each other. To finally top it off, accessories and skills that protect against instant-death and status effects are almost impossible to come by until it's very late in the game and you've already suffered innumerable tortures at the hands of your stupid, incompetent allies. Something like Final Fantasy XII's gambit system, in which you can program your teammates' priorities, would have done well here. Even a few other general tactics, such as "Heal Status," would have sufficed. And there was absolutely no reason not to give all tactics to the player immediately rather than in one-month intervals.

I have yet to mention the story, but there's not much to say. It is silly, but almost all JRPG stories are silly. It's a tale of a team of high-schoolers battling evil during a special hour that appears between each day. Characters spend entire months talking about new recruits who may join the group. However, when an elementary school student, a robot, and a dog all join in very short order, it seems downright ridiculous. That's forgivable, though—the Persona games were always a little ridiculous, and fighting evil with a spear-wielding boy and a magic-casting dog may be up your alley. Unfortunately, the day-by-day structure of the game doesn't suit the pacing well. Since most major story events come in intervals of one month, the time in between is often spent repeating the same plot points over and over.


Overall: 6/10
Persona 3 is not a bad game, and the first 30 to 35 hours are absolutely delightful. If they had only made it shorter, this would easily be one of the best RPGs on the PS2. But all of its glaring problems and annoyances grate over time. It's certainly worth playing, but it's not worth completing. I'd recommend it if you're the type of gamer who can put something down once you've had your fill and it starts to annoy you, or if you're someone who has a lot of patience. Otherwise, just watch the intro movie on YouTube.