Persona 3 (aka: Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3) — videogame review
I don’t usually do videogame reviews, but Persona 3 has prompted me to do so. Simply put, Persona 3 rocks. I’ve now lost three weekends to the game, and the outlooks for forthcoming weekends are looking similar for the foreseeable future. This hasn’t happened in years. It’s easily the best, quirkiest, most interesting, and most fun RPG I’ve played in years. If I’ve got your attention, read on for a quick and dirty review.
If ever there was a mashup game, Persona 3 is it. It’s one part RPG, one part social simulator, and one part monster rancher. The basic story concerns a group of high school kids who spend their nights fighting evil shadows in an immense labyrinth called Tartarus, which appears only during the Dark Hour, the hour between midnight and the start of the next calendar day. While this setup certainly allows for a lot of traditional RPG monster battles and related level building, days are spent with school and nurturing social relationships. You see, instead of traditional magic abilities, characters have powers through personas, supernatural entities whose strengths rely on the individual social connections between themselves and other characters in the game. Therefore, you grow your character by fighting monsters just as much as you do by chatting up and familiarizing yourself with people around school and the surrounding town.
And social interactions aren’t just an exhaustive list of dialog tree entries a la the ever-so-tedious Jade Empire. Instead, the game takes a stance similar to that of Japanese dating simulators. You have one shot through a dialog tree, and that’s it. Be nice, and you might find yourself with a new friend. Be mean, and you’ll find people don’t like you all that much. This is all an extension of the game’s core concept of living with consequences of your decisions. This is further extended by the ability to choose exactly what activities you do after school, how you act in the classroom, and how you spend your weekend time. And each activity is associated with a specific trait or persona class (known as Arcanum here). You can stay in doors and play MMORPGs to build up the Hermit Arcana. Hang out with your lovesick friend to increase skills in the Magician Arcanum. Attend Student Council meetings to strengthen the Emperor Arcanum. And, through a variety of other activities you can build up your academics, charm, or courage (through Karaoke, no less). After a while, you’ll find yourself looking forward to these activities just as much, if not more than the actual dungeon crawling.
But, some of you might be interested in battles, and the ones in Persona 3 are quite a bit of fun, managing a nice balance of challenge and ease to keep you interested but not frustrated. Probably the strangest thing about the battles, and one of the primary reasons for the M rating of the game, is that Personae are released through characters shooting themselves in the head. It’s flipping weird, but works in the context of the game. Battle music is initially odd, but grows on you after a while (it’s worth noting that Atlus has included the game’s soundtrack, as well as a hardbound book of character art along with the game).
The in game look and feel of Persona 3 is quite like vintage LucasArts (see: Maniac Mansion, or the most recent Monkey Island Game), while the cut sequences and character dialog models are completely anime style. It’s very smoothly integrated, and quite pleasing to the eye. There are no weird Final Fantasy XII transitions, or oddly aligned facial-skin-to-polygon mappings that take you out of the game. Very very cool.
If you’re like me, and have found that RPGs have increasingly become more like work than play (here’s looking at you, Final Fantasy XII), you’ll enjoy Persona 3’s return to basics with a twist. Persona 3 is truly an awesome game, and hands down my favorite game of the Year. Pick it up today.
Check out the official site here for some pretty cool wallpapers and buddy icons.
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