[PS2] Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 FES Review

Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 Fes (Henceforth known as Persona 3) is a Japanese role playing game developed and published by Atlus for the Playstation 2. It is very anime inspired in it’s art, and often showcases it in gorgeous animated cutscenes.

The game centers around a group of students at a boarding school who by day go to class like all of the other students, but come midnight, or The Dark Hour, they hunt demons by summoning their mental companions, or Personas, to aid them in the fight. How do they summon these you ask? By shooting yourself in the head, yes, you read that correctly, you shoot yourself in the head. This idea is what I think really piques peoples interest in Persona 3, for some dark and twisted reason. But not everyone in the school can do this, the concept is that during The Dark Hour, all of the people that don’t have whatever quality it takes to summon a persona, morph into coffins and never notice this change in the world around them.

On to the gameplay, during the day, Persona 3 is basically a dating sim. Wait! Come back! Its actually executed quite well! You build relationships, whether they be with your fellow Persona users, different clubs, or just assorted school mates, and you are rewarded with what are called “social links” that basically upgrade any persona that you create if it happens to be the same class as the social link. So say you create a level one Persona that is a Chariot type, and your social link is 4 with that social group, it will upgrade accordingly. This can be very important when you start needing either a wider variety of Personas or a really strong one later in the game. After you’re finished with school everyday, you can do a wide variety of things to build your social links, or you can just go back to your dormitory and either: Study, Sleep, or hunt monsters in The Dark Hour. Now this may seem as if you can just play the dating sim like game of the daytime for as long as you want, and never have to fight anything. But no, there is a countdown in the corner of the screen that at first, you really will not know what it is for, these are important story events that are essentially the end of a chapter. There is one of these every month, so you have to learn to balance building your social links, studying for your exams, and leveling up your characters. Now if you choose to go and fight demons, your school is transformed into a giant tower dubbed Tartarus. You will enter a lobby of sorts where you can arrange your party and modify their gear, save your game, or enter The Velvet Room and create Personas, among other things. The gameplay in Tartarus is essentially a dungeon crawler, your goal is to move up the tower, floor by floor, collecting loot and killing demons. But after a certain number of floors, you will fight a guardian, this can be one big powerful monster, or a group of semi powerful monsters. These prevent you from moving further up the tower section, or “block” as the game calls it. After a certain point, at the top of the block, you will not be able to proceed any further, and this is where the story even comes into play, after each of these events (Or a certain number as you get further) you may proceed higher into Tartarus. The actual fighting gameplay is quite simple on the surface, you have attack, skill, change persona, item, tactics, standby, and escape. I should also mention that you only have control of the main character in these fights, and you are the only character that is able to change their persona, so you have to be diligent in the planning of your tactics to properly control your party.

The graphics as I said earlier are very anime like, and there really is not a whole lot more to say about them, they’re good looking, but it looks like an above average Playstation 2 game. But when those in game cinemas come along, they look quite beautiful and they are much more frequent than many other of the Japanese Role Playing Games I’ve played.

The English voice acting is actually surprisingly good, it doesn’t make your brain hemorrhage, and it gets the job done. There isn’t voice acting throughout the entire game, but its quite frequent and execute well. The music is probably the worst thing about this game, its really awful, very generic techno and j-rock, and its really really bad. The lyrics are also really bad, and the bad thing is, you have to hear a lot of this when you’re fighting, so it can wear on you at times, but otherwise, the sound is quite good.

Is this a fantastic game? No. The dungeon crawling can wear on you after awhile, and there is a lot of this, the game boasts 70+ hours, and thats not including a completely new sort of expansion that is said to be 30+ hours. So this game is clearly not for a passive gamer, and the difficulty can ramp up quite a bit later on in the game. So I would know what you are getting into before you purchase Persona 3, because the game can get quite daunting as you get deeper and deeper into the story and higher in Tartarus.

So the rundown:

Graphics: 8 – Very anime like and hyper realistic, gorgeous animated cutscenes that appear quite frequently are very well produced.

Sound: 6.5 – The voice acting is very well done, and is used very often, but that is not good enough to save the awful awful soundtrack.

Presentation: 9.5 – The presentation is where I think Persona 3 really succeeds, it has a very unique idea, and puts a nice twist on the dating sim and turn based role playing game genre.

Gameplay: 8.0 – There are really two games here, the daytime and nighttime gameplay are very different from each other, but compliment each other in a way that works very well. Thankfully the game is bursting at the seems with the amount of gameplay that is offered.

Lasting Appeal: 8.5 – It will most likely vary if you replay this game again, but this is by no means a short game by any stretch of the imagination, this alone will have you playing for months.

Overall Score: 8.0