Review: Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3

I feel I've played enough of Persona 3 now to give it a decent once-over in review format, so here goes.

Visual Presentation - 9/10
If you enjoy anime, you'll definitely enjoy the eye-catching action scenes and googly-eyed characters. There's a lot going for Persona 3 in the eye candy department. The graphical look and distinct style of the game goes a long way to making it a memorable experience. The menu and "battle over" screens all remind me a lot of Cowboy Bebop and its "silhouette over solid color" title sequence (or, if you're not an anime fan, think the Apple iPod commercials). In fact, the whole game leans toward the eclectic feel of that particular anime.

The characters are fairly well animated, especially in cut scenes. One of my favorite little sections of graphical "flair" is when you activate an all-out attack. All of your party members jump into the middle of the battlefield where the enemies are and disappear into a cloud of smoke, all the while cartoon-like sounds emit and words such as "POOF!" and "BANG!" pop up on screen. While the game does tackle much deeper and darker topics than most JRPGs, there are many things which add to the fun, this being one of them.

On the downside, sometimes the graphics can get a bit boring and monotonous (not bland, mind you), especially inside Tartarus. It appears that each "block" of that massive dungeon has a different look to it, but you're in each area for quite a while and the seemingly endless hallways can get rather drab after a while. That's really the only criticism I can give the game on the visual side of things.


Sound Quality - 9/10
I'm a fan of JPop music, so the music used in Persona 3 really stands out to me. I believe its the only RPG I've ever played with a mostly lyrical soundtrack. The tunes are constantly shifting as you enter and exit various areas, especially throughout the daytime hours.

While you're in Tartarus, the score shifts to a more eerie, orchestrated piece, which definitely lends itself to the darker nature of those areas of the game. I think what I like most are the tracks they use for battles, which really amp up the excitement of each encounter. What I really like is, after a certain point in the game, you're able to change the background music you hear while romping through Tartarus. That does prove to lesson the monotony that you sometimes feel while making your way through the dungeon's levels.

The only issue I have is the repetitive nature of the background music. In many other RPGs, the music isn't lyrical and thus it fades into the background more, almost to the point that the player seems to ignore it. In Persona 3, the music seems front and center, and gets a bit annoying sometimes, especially when you're spending quite a while inside shops at various times during the game. (My wife felt like clawing her ears out the other day because the same track would play over and over and over again when I would shift from zone to zone, mostly outside the dorm and inside the mall.) Perhaps more variety for these zones, or the random switch between lyrical and non-lyrical tracks, would have helped matters. Needless to say, I think the game's soundtrack is a breath of fresh air.


Game Play & Battle System - 10/10
This is where I really think the game shines - this is where all the fun lies. Its a traditional Japanese RPG (turn-based battles and all) with just enough tweaks and innovations to liven things up a bit.

First off, you play through each and every day in about a 10 month period. The day is split into various sections, such as Morning, After School, Evening, etc. During the day, you usually participate in typical school activities - hanging out with friends, extracurricular activities and the like. You can choose who to hang out with and what to spend your time doing. Also, quite a few story cut scenes and related tidbits happen during this part of the day, as well, some triggered by you, some not.

When it comes to the Evening part of the day, you can choose either to go to Tartarus, where the bulk of the game's battles take place, hang out at the mall, walk the dog or just head to your room and study, then go to bed. If you choose to go to Tartarus (and you'll be required to to level up your characters, but sometimes I find it hard to when I want to level up my social links instead), you enter the Dark Hour. How long you choose to spend there fighting enemies, progressing farther up this immense tower and leveling your characters up depends on you. However, early on in the game your characters will tire easily, so you won't be able to progress very far. Eventually though, you can stay in Tartarus for quite some time.

Who you chose to hang out with during the day is completely up to you. Early in the game you'll be tasked with chosing an after school activity to get involved in. Eventually you'll get several of them. Myself, I chose to be on the swimming team, in the photography club and I managed to get roped into being on the student council. None of them have required attendance, but are available if you choose to attend. There are friends you can make that don't relate to any extracurricular activities, as well, such as other students and even those outside your school. A few "months" into the game, after summer vacation, you also get to choose to begin personal relationships with members of your dorm - the people who fight along with you in Tartarus.

The relationships progress in much the same way they do in real life. You meet someone, establish a connection and, every time you spend time with that person or in that social group, your relationship has the possibility of growing. But be warned, many times your friends will call you during the week to ask if you wish to hang out on Sunday (your only regular day off school). Feel free to decline the invitation initially, but if you accept, then later you decide you don't want to hang out with them, your relationship could be damaged, and you'll have to patch things up with that person before you can progress in that social link.

There will inevitably be people you would rather spend time with than others, whether for dialogue or story-related reasons, or because you enjoy using persona that those social links improve. If you choose to spend quite a bit of time with female friends, expect to get intimate with them. They won't quite like it when your relationship gets intimate with another female. ;)

Beyond the mini dating sim during the day, each night you get the opportunity to go to Tartarus. (I say each night, but there are some nights that you can't go for various story-related reasons.) Inside Tartarus, you explore randomly generated levels and progress up the tower. Its slow going at first, because your characters get tired often. But, eventually, you'll be moving a quite a good clip. You can go up stairs, but can't go down. To get out of the tower, you'll have to find a one-way teleport point that will return you to the ground floor where your other friends will be waiting. Every few levels there's a boss battle and its usually on these floors that you'll be able to activate a large two-way teleporter that allows you to return from the ground floor to that specific level, which helps you progress up the tower.

Early in the game, you'll also be introduced to the characters in the Velvet Room, which is where you can go to fuse personas (into more powerful ones, based on your social links), pick up quests that you can complete inside or outside of Tartarus and record your personas for future use, because the time will come when you'll need to get rid of some when you fuse them together, or for other reasons.

And, I'm happy to say, this is just scratching the surface of the gameplay side of things in Persona 3.


Overall Content - 9/10
There is a lot to do in this game. Initially, I thought the large timer on the entire game might make the entire overall experience feel rushed, but that fear quickly disappeared once I started playing. There is more than enough time during each month (or, rather, between each full moon) to get everything done you need to do, and then some. There are side quests you can pick up in the Velvet Room and dozens and dozens of social links to explore. You won't run out of things to do very quickly, and you will have plenty of time to do them. I'm 40+ hours into the game presently and only in the month of September (the game starts in April). I'd suspect there's at least 30-40 more hours in the game before I come to the end of January.

And, this isn't even talking about the "expansion", titled The Answer, which is exclusive to the FES version of the game that came out last month, which adds another 30-40 hours of gameplay and an entirely new story that picks up where The Journey leaves off.

Conclusion
The overall story is very well executed, but it does cover some more mature content that isn't usually present in RPGs of this nature - suicide, harming onself, bullying, death, life choices and the consequences of your actions. There's also the matter of the evoker your characters use to summon their persona - it looks like a gun. While its explained many times throughout the opening parts of the story that it is not a gun, your characters are still seen during battle shooting themselves in the head with it. That, the more mature subject matter and the language used in various cut scenes is probably what gets Persona 3 its Mature rating. These aren't negatives, just a warning, because things like that can sneak up on you if you're used to a typical JRPG story.

In conclusion, this is the absolute best RPG I've played in quite some time. If you know me, you know I'm a huge fan of the Final Fantasy series, and I think FFXII was about as best as they come. Well, Persona 3 ranks right up there evenly with FFXII - a definite must-play for RPG fans.