Burn My Dread
Persona 3 is finally here, and it's every bit as awesome as we'd hoped.
Published: August 26, 2007
One of the biggest reasons why P3's battles work is because there's precious little busy work needed. With the exception of the Tartarus tower guardians that block your ascent at certain floors, enemies can be scanned and from then all of their information is instantly accessible. Since you can switch Personae, you can craft your attacks to take advantage of an enemy weakness -- important since doing so not only does more damage, but puts enemies into a "Down" state where they're more vulnerable to attack. Get all of the enemies Down and you can do a tag team bum rush with all four members of your party. To keep things fair, it works against you too, so again, it pays to equip a Persona that can block or absorb certain attacks.
Further easing the process of fighting monsters (which you can sneak up on to get a free turn if you're careful about it, but monsters can do the same if you don't watch out) is the fact that the rest of your party acts on their own. For the most part, the AI in place is quite good, and at the start of a round you can issue specific orders to make the party heal or try to put all enemies in a Downed stated, or conserve their magic (SP in this case). These orders can be issued party-wide, or to individual members, and doing so is the absolute key to winning some of those boss fights once you figure out their weaknesses and strengths through good ol' trial an error.
The battles themselves can be incredibly speedy if you need them to be, as the opposite would be something of a death knell a game with this much combat, and after learning some of the particular quirks of your party's AI (unless you explicitly order it, for the most part they won't actively move onto another enemy if they happen to use an elemental attack that puts them Down, for instance, even if there's another enemy that's got a weakness to that element) it's actually nice to just enjoy the rest of the turn passively instead of micro-managing everything. It'll undoubtedly turn some people off, but I really dug how streamlined the fights were.
It's a balance, then, between running Tartarus every night and hanging out with friends or doing the school clubs, plus making sure you study and pay attention in class -- both of which will slowly increase your academics and charm, which along with eating mystery food and singing karaoke will boost your courage. All three of those things; academics, charm and courage, are key to forming new relationships. Though the quasi-dating game style approach could have been either distracting or outright annoying, the fairly lax way it's handled in the game (you juggle most relationships with people after school) means that you're free to do what you want rather than being forced down one path.
It's possible to play the game a couple of times and work on different aspects of things if you'd like to explore more powerful Personae of those affinities (the game links them to tarot card signs). When you add in the fact that overloading your character can sometimes drag him down into a tired state (at which point you would be stupid to go to Tartarus that night and instead should sleep earlier or visit the school nurse for a mystery brew that probably won't make you feel better but at least boosts your courage a little), there's a ton of stuff to do day to day. It doesn't completely negate the need to grind fairly often before boss fights (the big plot advancing ones happen during full moons), but at least it eases some of the repetition.
