Persona 3 reviewed

In May, I bought Persona 4 for reasons unknown to me.  I think I just got swept in the hype since I have no idea what a Persona was, what the story was and how the series related to each other.  But I thought little of it since I had a few long games in my queue.  A few months later, I was getting close to playing Persona 4 when I saw Persona 3 and I bought it so I can have some sort of grasp on Persona 4.  So after over 75 hours of gameplay, I think I know what a Persona is!  And they seem to stand-alone entries so that's nice.  Anyways, enough personal history, let's get on with Persona 3.

What if there were more than 24 hours in a day?  What if at 12:00 AM, a whole new world opens up where if you lucky, you just trapped in a coffin unaware of your situation?  And if you're unlucky, you have Shadows destroy your psyche resulting in Apathy Syndrome where you do nothing but sit or stand as you slowly die from starvation and exposure.  That is the world of Japan and soon the rest of the world but fear not, there is hope.  You're this student with ridiculously hilarious blue emo hair who has the potential to save the world.  With him, are a bunch of other high-schoolers and, then eventually, a kid, a robot and a dog.  It's up to you to rid the world of the Dark Hour and save the people from Apathy Syndrome.  Also, you have your school work and friendships to attend to.


This game is made of two parts, a RPG part and a Dating Sim, for lack of a better term, part.  The RPG part is pretty much you scale the huge-ass tower that is the base of evil operation and kill everything in it, and then one of the leaders on a Full Moon.  So, in short it's basically a huge-ass grindfest.  I'm not that adverse to grinding if there's a bigger purpose, like in an obscure Dreamcast RPG Evolution where grinding and dungeon crawling was for eliminating the family debt.  Persona 3's bigger purpose is to kill the bad guy a lot easier...which is what grinding usually is, but there's a side effect that kept my interest.  Leveling up your Persona's, the thing that grants you amazing powers and if you remember my Final Fantasy IX review, I said it was much more fun to level up for abilities then levels.  It doesn't hurt that the battles have a nice sense of strategy, where certain attacks can knock an enemy down giving you an extra turn and if you knock them all down, you can do a powerful attack that either kills or severely wounds all the enemies.

And then there's the Dating Sim aspect which is necessary if you want the best and strongest Personas. You talked to various people and if some conditions are just right, then you just made a friend with a Social Link to power up your Personas.  Each link starts off as a 1-D stereotype like the jock, the kid, the businessman, the online game and so on but as you build each link more and more depth comes through.  Also, you could level up your charm, courage and intelligence by doing stuff like watching movies or studying so you have the complete school experience plus some extras like not being beaten up for being smart and going to school on Saturday.  And yes, you will spend almost every day during this stuff for almost seven months, game time....joy.

Both parts of Persona 3 work well on their own but they don't really form a totally cohesive experience.  The Dating Sim parts makes it poorly paced when the RPG part's plot only goes into effect about once or twice a month.  However, there's enough good in this game for it to be fairly entertaining overall.  The game looks nice, most of the voice-acting is rather good and the songs are awesome.  When the plot does kick into gear, it's usually full of shocking twists and turns.  There's a lot of good in this game, just spread out a bit.

7/10