Persona 3 FES

What would it be like to be a High School student in Japan? Would the notorious six day school weeks, scant vacation time, cram school, vicious exams, public display of class rank and intense academic competitive pressure beat you down? Or would you be able to manage all that, succeed at a few relationships, and throw in nightly midnight sessions of fighting monsters and saving the world? The gigantic RPG Persona 3 gives you a chance to see just how well you’d manage your time as a student of Gekkoukan High.

First Impressions by Tanx
Video Game Reviews by a Very Busy Math Teacher

Game: Persona 3 FES
Platform: PS2
Played For: a whoppin’ 118 hours!


Persona 3 is a very odd hybrid between randomized dungeon crawl and dating simulation. As two genres spliced together, neither side manages to fully succeed on its own. But the bizarre product that results has its own curious merits. Why just look at the ancient Asian mythical monster the Bonnacon. It was cursed with a bull’s head and a horse’s body, but at least this strange chimerical beast somehow developed the ability to poop deadly explosive excrement. How’s that for unexpected perks?

It is hard to know where to begin in discussing a game this immense. Longer even than a play through of Oblivion, the game encompasses almost an entire year of the primary characters’ lives… and that’s not even including the expansion. Each virtual day you’ll go to school, hang with friends, sing karaoke or visit the arcade, and finish the night with a foray into the Dark Hour, a 25th hour of the day that only our heroes can perceive (most all other life automatically sleep through it, making the dark hour kind of like some of my less inspired math lectures.) In the Dark Hour your very Emo hero points a gun-shaped “evoker” at his head and fires, conjuring up an inner avatar called a Persona to battle the creepy and often vaguely art-deco Shadows that inhabit this strange post-Midnight world.

There’s a lot more to the narrative, of course. In fact, there is enough new terminology, complicated plot twists and strange Japanese-isms to make you utterly incomprehensible when trying to explain this game’s story to your very patient but exasperated family and friends. Also adding to the experience is the game’s edgy visual style, reminiscent for me of the popular Japanese manga series Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. For example, no attempt has been made to have shadows conform to traditional monster archetypes… rather than goblins and oozes you’ll encounter masked ballroom dancers, walking kitchen tables with hovering pans and knives, and lions dragging huge ball and chains. This was a nice invention, serving to make Shadows both more alien and unexpected as you progressed through the giant dungeon Tartarus each night.

One unfortunate aspect of the game is your lack of control over the other members of your party. As you progress through endless and slightly boring randomized dungeon levels, you’ll have up to three additional characters accompanying you at all times. While I was pleased to see that the computer-controlled heroes act fairly logically and do offer good support, you can only see them go through their moves so many times before you start to wonder why the game is spending so much time playing with itself instead of with you. In a typical battle I’d go ahead and issue my character’s command, and then read a paragraph from my book, torment the cat, flip through a magazine or otherwise do something else as the game wasted time running through all the other characters’ moves. Clearly a goof in design, it is an issue that has already been promised a fix in the upcoming Persona 4.

I found the dungeon crawling in this game fun, but not fun enough to stand on its own. Randomized dungeons have never been a favorite of mine, and only Diablo stands in my mind as a truly successful incarnation of this type of game. The secret lay in copious treasure and rewards, and Persona 3 just doesn’t offer the variety necessary to keep you guessing what may lie around the next corner. I found myself making a rush for the next boss, and hoping to get the fighting part over with each game month so that I could concentrate on the relationship sim and story side of the game. As an aside, I couldn’t make it through the add-on expansion, which is essentially the dungeon crawling with no school life. The story was still interesting, but it was easier to watch the important cut scenes on YouTube than to slog my way through more endless hours of leveling characters.

Back to the main game. As Persona 3 progresses your primary hero learns to summon multiple Personas, and a very weird old dude and his intensely alien elevator operator Elizabeth invite you into their “velvet room” to mix and combine Personas you’ve discovered into new ones (see what I mean about trying to explain this one?!) The slouchy but over-achieving main character, who I decided to name “Taku” in honor of a particularly memorable Middle School friend of mine, can ultimately discover something on the order of 160 different Personas. Each Persona has multiple skills, and these can be inherited by other Personas that you craft in the Velvet Room, allowing for some strategy in the customization of your Persona arsenal. Personas gain a huge amount of experience and power from Social Links, the relationships you develop during the school day. This means that Taku was wildly dependent on getting people to like him in order to effectively fight monsters and save the world… luckily Taku is quite a likeable guy!

Yes, the game definitely knows its audience, offering a glittering fantasy of High School popularity and eager female classmates practically throwing themselves into your arms. Each social link unfolds in a series of ten episodes, with faster progression if you choose to say the right things during dialogues. Social Links also correspond to tarot card Arcana, with some of my favorite links being with Yukari Takeba (lovers), the drunk old monk (tower) and the dishonest businessman (devil.)

Magic is a major underlying theme in Persona 3, expressed in every aspect of the game. Tarot cards govern not just social links but personas and shadows as well. Most persona are based on myth or legends of various types. Oh, and apparently one of the core classes in Japanese High School is magic class, with an instructor who gives impassioned lectures on everything magical… Kabalistic stuff like the Sephiroth, historical personages like Aleister Crowley or the Theosophists, ancient artifacts like the Book of Thoth and types of magic like divination and witchcraft. Who knows, if you actually pay attention in class you might learn a thing or two in this game!

One final enjoyment I had in playing was to observe the differences between Japanese and American school life throughout the calendar year. From little oddities like your “charm” skill increasing each time you answer correctly in class (from experience, it doesn’t seem to work that way in the American model) to larger differences like National Holidays and the school year beginning in March, Persona 3 offers an enjoyable glimpse into the Japanese High School years.

Will I play it more: Alas, it is time to say goodbye to Junpei, Yukari, Mitsuru et al.