High School Reunion
Persona 3 FES has finally made it to American shores, and one of the best RPGs ever made just gets better.
Published: November 30, -1
This is probably going to be a fairly short review. Not the full thing, since I'm going to go the lazy route and paste in our original review of Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 in here. The actual review of the additions/tweaked added to Persona 3 FES (short for festival, and a reference to the original creators giving fans a little something extra to enjoy), will follow, separate so as not to lessen the impact of our initial review. The game is still absolutely stellar, and deserves to be picked up, but with FES around... well, why not have the best of both worlds?
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You're a coffin, dude, and you don't even know it. Every night at the stroke of midnight, for one hour, you transmogrify into a freakin' coffin and during that time an extra, 25th hour takes place. During that time, a collection of mostly high school kids battles evil shadows all because some dude wanted to build a time machine using occult powers. Or at least that will be the case in 2009 somewhere in Japan.
To say that Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 is imaginative would be selling the game short. Yeah, most of the core gameplay is made up of elements that populate any number of Japanese role-playing games, but somehow Persona 3 manages to tweak them such that I never seemed to mind. Yes, there is a fair bit of level grinding and some tedium that comes with climbing the tower that results from Gekkoukan High School transforming into the demonic Tartarus, but the game manages to throw enough distractions at you that there's enough stuff to do beyond just powerleveling over and over again.
See, you're an orphan that just happens to transfer to Gekkoukan in March of '09 and for the next year or so, you'll slowly work out just what happened 10 years prior that completely borked the sleepy island area of Japan and all of its residents. People are turning into zombies (the moaning, stationary kind, not the feasting-on-brains kind), and it's all because something very, very bad happened a while back. The year long journey that will explain just what caused hell to open up on Earth for an hour a night is what makes Persona 3 so much fun.
Well, that and juggling school work, music class, friends, kendo practice and maybe a girlfriend or two.
Making friends and strengthening the bonds between you in between slaying monsters and going to school is important because it strengthens hidden bonds that in turn power Personae. See, you're special. Most people with the "potential" don't turn into coffins and by blowing their brains out (it's a metaphor, man) and releasing the Persona within, they can fight the things that go bump in the Dark Hour, but they're locked into one Persona. You, for some reason, can use multiple Personae, and what's more, the relationships you have with people can strengthen them, making them even more power -- especially if you choose to fuse two or more of them into a new form that takes some of the powers of both and adds new ones.
Fusion isn't anything new, nor are the occult themes, nor the admittedly unfair battles that populate the MegaTen games, and anybody who has played those games in the past probably knows that. Persona 3 at least eases you in a little better than most, but it should be expected that you'll end up seeing the Game Over screen more than a few times due to an enemy casting an insta-death spell on you. See, if one of your party members kicks the bucket, you can bring them back, but if the lead character dies, the game's finito. That's just how P3 rolls, man.
You can take steps to prevent this, of course, since every Persona has particular affinities and weaknesses to a handful of elemental and physical attacks -- including the light and dark spells that would normally mean game over. Equipping a Persona gives you all of their added physical and magical benefits too, so it pays to constantly level up and fuse Personae, gaining both stat increases and new spells that do everything from buff yourself or other players or just outright attack with slashes, fire, ice, lightning, dark, light, wind, and so on.
----------
You're a coffin, dude, and you don't even know it. Every night at the stroke of midnight, for one hour, you transmogrify into a freakin' coffin and during that time an extra, 25th hour takes place. During that time, a collection of mostly high school kids battles evil shadows all because some dude wanted to build a time machine using occult powers. Or at least that will be the case in 2009 somewhere in Japan.
To say that Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 is imaginative would be selling the game short. Yeah, most of the core gameplay is made up of elements that populate any number of Japanese role-playing games, but somehow Persona 3 manages to tweak them such that I never seemed to mind. Yes, there is a fair bit of level grinding and some tedium that comes with climbing the tower that results from Gekkoukan High School transforming into the demonic Tartarus, but the game manages to throw enough distractions at you that there's enough stuff to do beyond just powerleveling over and over again.
See, you're an orphan that just happens to transfer to Gekkoukan in March of '09 and for the next year or so, you'll slowly work out just what happened 10 years prior that completely borked the sleepy island area of Japan and all of its residents. People are turning into zombies (the moaning, stationary kind, not the feasting-on-brains kind), and it's all because something very, very bad happened a while back. The year long journey that will explain just what caused hell to open up on Earth for an hour a night is what makes Persona 3 so much fun.
Well, that and juggling school work, music class, friends, kendo practice and maybe a girlfriend or two.
Making friends and strengthening the bonds between you in between slaying monsters and going to school is important because it strengthens hidden bonds that in turn power Personae. See, you're special. Most people with the "potential" don't turn into coffins and by blowing their brains out (it's a metaphor, man) and releasing the Persona within, they can fight the things that go bump in the Dark Hour, but they're locked into one Persona. You, for some reason, can use multiple Personae, and what's more, the relationships you have with people can strengthen them, making them even more power -- especially if you choose to fuse two or more of them into a new form that takes some of the powers of both and adds new ones.
Fusion isn't anything new, nor are the occult themes, nor the admittedly unfair battles that populate the MegaTen games, and anybody who has played those games in the past probably knows that. Persona 3 at least eases you in a little better than most, but it should be expected that you'll end up seeing the Game Over screen more than a few times due to an enemy casting an insta-death spell on you. See, if one of your party members kicks the bucket, you can bring them back, but if the lead character dies, the game's finito. That's just how P3 rolls, man.
You can take steps to prevent this, of course, since every Persona has particular affinities and weaknesses to a handful of elemental and physical attacks -- including the light and dark spells that would normally mean game over. Equipping a Persona gives you all of their added physical and magical benefits too, so it pays to constantly level up and fuse Personae, gaining both stat increases and new spells that do everything from buff yourself or other players or just outright attack with slashes, fire, ice, lightning, dark, light, wind, and so on.