Written By: Romel Ramos
D&W Reviews Editor
A very interesting game indeed, Persona 3 is not your average RPG. The story begins with your player (you have to name him yourself) getting off a train. At midnight, the Japanese city he’s gone into transforms into some freaky silent hill-type town where coffins encase everyone around and darkness looms everywhere. Apparently used to this, he calmly walks to his new dorm where he, through a series of exhilarating events, finds out that others like him exist: those who can summon Personas and must experience the dark hour, a dangerous time between midnight and the following day, an hour where “shadows” prowl and feed on other humans.
Naturally, the dorm turns out to be a secret school club for people who can experience the dark hour and summon personas. You decide to join to put an end to the dark hour for the sake of humanity. When you’re not off fighting shadows in the dark hour, you’re living at the Japanese High School as a transfer student. The game plays very similarly to any dating sim game. You raise your intelligence, courage and academics through various activities and cultivate relationships with those in the school and around town. The relationships you make have depth and always come to a climax then resolution where an important life lesson is learned, and of course, you are in charge of whether relationships fail or bloom in a dating sim questionnaire type way. Relationships are also not only intertwined with the ending, but also help with creating powerful personas (explained later). The game runs along a school-year calendar, along with special holidays, midterms, and finals. The game ends on graduation day.
You have the choice of going to Tartarus, the source of the shadows and the dark hour, almost every night. With an arsenal of eight characters to choose from (you get them all eventually), you venture up Tartarus, whose floors are automatically generated so they’re always different, but the same in a way. However, it’s not as monotonously boring as it sounds. The monsters show up on the screen so you have to constantly be aware of your surroundings, being sure to ambush them and get the upper hand. Death also has a probability of showing up on every level and other things can go wrong too, so you always have to be on alert. Apart from the bosses you fight at given intervals in Tartarus, at every full moon, a powerful shadow roams the city. Those are the real boss battles.
The way the battle system is, the normal fights [and EARLY boss battles] rely heavily on getting the upper hand. Every monster has different strengths and weaknesses. Exploiting them makes the game a lot easier. You can breeze through floors on Tartarus doing this; however, if the enemy exploits your weakness, the battle could easily be lost. Thus being alert in Tartarus is necessary to prevent getting ambushed, which adds to the excitement of this RPG. The only character you can control in-battle is your person; the other 3 party members are AI's, which you can give general commands like “heal and support” or “full assault.” Your character can switch through various Personas; with different parameters and spells, making you the most useful of the party.
Personas are acquired from battles or persona fusions, which rely on the strength of your relationships to determine how strong the fused persona will end up being. Fusions are fun because it's always exciting to see what new and powerful personas can be forged and what new spells can be added to your repertoire. Fused personas inherit some skills of their parent personas so fusing isn’t mindless. You must fuse personas in a way that the inherited skills complement their other natural skills and parameters.
Through battles and story plots, the colorful voices of the excellent voice-actors of Persona 3 can be heard. Persona 3 has EXCELLENT voice-acting skills. They’re high quality, easy to understand, audible and real. The graphics are all right and the environments are detailed with appropriate props lying around everywhere. For the most part, the camera is static, only allowing you to rotate it at big places like Tartarus, the school and your dorm. Many important story scenes are rendered into Persona-style anime cut scenes while J-Pop is blaring in the background. Most of the music is J-Pop; silly Japanese songs with a few English words thrown in. But for the most part, the music’s upbeat and bearable, though not always the best.
Persona 3 was a fun and enjoyable adventure for me. I grew to be attached to the characters, their great depth and the innovative persona fusion system. However, I felt a SLIGHT feeling of restriction while I was playing the game. With the exception of field trips, I was stuck to the same city, and restricted to Tartarus, where a very Diablo and Dark Cloud type feeling grew, but to an extremely low extent. As this is a hard to get game, shelves with Persona 3 copies are emptying quickly. I suggest you get your copy now if you’re interested. If possible, you should get the Persona 3 FES version of the game, which comes with extra personas and an additional optional 30+ segment to the story. Also, the game is rated M for mature… I don’t believe it should be though. As far as nudity goes, it shows a girl showering, no butt, boobs, or crotch, just face shots and her back. They can also get a little profane sometimes, as they refer to “drugs,” but they’re special persona drugs that normal people like us have no care for. Anyway, I highly recommend Persona 3 to RPG fans both new and old.
