So, having just completed Persona 3, I'd like to take a moment to recommend this game to you all.
It is, simply, the best damn game in the best damn series of games there is.
A little background:
The Shin Megami Tensei: Persona series is characterized by a group of people who have the ability to summon mystical beings, their 'other selves'
called Persona. These beings are based on mythology around the world, and are also all split up into various groups based on the Tarot arcana. In each game,
some whacky shit goes on involving otherworldly beings, and it's up to your characters to figure out what's going on and to stop it.
While combat in each game is different, it's characterized by being unusally contemporary. Character use melee weapons like swords, but they'll often
have guns. All magic in the game is done through your persona. If you for example want to heal someone, you summon your persona, it appears over your head,
the spell happens, it buggers off (people who watch/read Jojo's Bizzare Adventure will recognize this).
Persona 3 doesn't have this, but the previous two games (as well as some of the related-but-seperate games like SMT: Nocturne and Digital Devil Saga) you
could talk to the enemies, and sometimes make deals with them and/or recruit them for your persona.
Another common feature of the series (and related games) is Igor and the Blue Velvet Room. Igor is a creepy little guy who has the ability to fuse your
persona to create new ones. (Yes, there's a Pokemon aspect, too.)
As I mentioned above, the game takes the persona/enemies from various mythologies - including the Judeo-Christian mythos. Higher-level persona usually include
things like: Satan, Lucifer, the Metatron, the Messiah, Gabriel, Uriel, Raphael, Michael, Beelzebub, Thor, Odin, Shiva, Vishnu, Chi You.
Okay. Background done.
Now, about Persona 3:
Persona 3 centers around a small made-up area in Japan, specifically the high school. You play a transfer student who comes into town, and on
that day you are introduced to the Dark Hour, and a group of students who are trying to figure out what the deal is. All of you are persona users, but YOU are
special.
The Dark Hour is a magical, sinister time that occurs between 0:00:00 and 0:00:01. Everyone living in the world is in stasis during that time, stored in
coffins - except for persona users. For them, the Dark Hour is a period during which they can use their persona. The Dark Hour is also home to sinister
beings called the Shadows, who prey on the few people who don't end up in coffins (latent persona users?) and turning them into near-mindless zombies.
The other big change (other than the fact that the Dark Hour makes everything look creepy) is that your school turns into this massive tower called Tartarus.
Tartarus is a 250+ level 'dungeon', each level randomly generated (they're small levels) and haunted by shadows. Your job as a member of that team
is to figure out what's up with Tartarus, what's causing the Dark Hour, and how to stop all the badness.
I mentioned the persona of your team members, and how you're different. Each of your team members has their own persona, that they develop (and at a late
point in the game, promote). They only get to use that one persona each - so one character will be your fire user, another your wind user, another your ice,
etc. YOU, however, can equip all the persona out there, up to 12 at a time, and change your active one as you see fit. You also have the ability to use all
weapons.
The combat system is a standard turn based, except for some small caveats:
1) You don't control your teammates. You can assign a strategy to each one, but no specifics.
2) Hits that knock someone down, be they a standard attack or an elemental attack on a weakness, gives you another turn. As long as you keep knocking people
down, you get free turns.
3) Once you knock all the enemies down, you can trigger a dogpile attack that does massive damage. (And looks hilarious.)
When not in combat, your character is a standard high-school student. That means you go to school every day. During your free time, you get a chance to
persue Social Links - a sort of dating game, including attributes like Charm, Courage, and Smarts that you have to improve to get the most out of it. Each
Social Link is attached to an Arcana, and will aid you for creating persona of that arcana. It can get a bit frustrating trying to reach level 10 on each one
(I missed on like 5 of the 15 or so), but the rewards are worth it. It also adds a bit of social engineering, because a good chunk of them are with girls, and
they don't like competition. Once you reach a certain level with a girl (6-8, usually) you have to make sure you don't reach a similar level with any
other girl, or she'll get pissed, and you'll have to spend 2 socialization periods making it up to her.
The graphics of the game are decent. While the 3D stuff isn't FF12 extraordinary, it does a *really* good job of replicating an anime world in 3D.
There's some anime cutscenes, but they're minor. One of the gems is the fact that each persona you can equip is also rendered in 3D - no 2D sprites
for this game. The mentu interface is also a gem - clear, large text, and looks very stylized and clean. A little slow due to all the fade effects, but
it's not too bad.
Where this game shines above all is the dubbing/rewrite. The voices are *perfect* for each character. They kept the original Japanese names, and use the
honorifics-in-English style you often see in fanfics - so a character may refer to another as Akihiko-sempai, or Ken-kun. The writing is clean, without
Engrish, funny where it needs to be, serious where it doesn't, and all in all exceedingly well done. ATLUS knows their stuff when it comes to translations
these days. The music in the game is top-notch, and just when I started to find it a bit repetitive, they change soundtrack. How can you not like that?
While this game is *long*, taking me more than 100h to finish, I enjoyed every damn minute of it. The Shin Megami Tensei group of games are really well done,
and Persona 3 is easily the pride of my game collection.
It is, simply, the best damn game in the best damn series of games there is.
A little background:
The Shin Megami Tensei: Persona series is characterized by a group of people who have the ability to summon mystical beings, their 'other selves'
called Persona. These beings are based on mythology around the world, and are also all split up into various groups based on the Tarot arcana. In each game,
some whacky shit goes on involving otherworldly beings, and it's up to your characters to figure out what's going on and to stop it.
While combat in each game is different, it's characterized by being unusally contemporary. Character use melee weapons like swords, but they'll often
have guns. All magic in the game is done through your persona. If you for example want to heal someone, you summon your persona, it appears over your head,
the spell happens, it buggers off (people who watch/read Jojo's Bizzare Adventure will recognize this).
Persona 3 doesn't have this, but the previous two games (as well as some of the related-but-seperate games like SMT: Nocturne and Digital Devil Saga) you
could talk to the enemies, and sometimes make deals with them and/or recruit them for your persona.
Another common feature of the series (and related games) is Igor and the Blue Velvet Room. Igor is a creepy little guy who has the ability to fuse your
persona to create new ones. (Yes, there's a Pokemon aspect, too.)
As I mentioned above, the game takes the persona/enemies from various mythologies - including the Judeo-Christian mythos. Higher-level persona usually include
things like: Satan, Lucifer, the Metatron, the Messiah, Gabriel, Uriel, Raphael, Michael, Beelzebub, Thor, Odin, Shiva, Vishnu, Chi You.
Okay. Background done.
Now, about Persona 3:
Persona 3 centers around a small made-up area in Japan, specifically the high school. You play a transfer student who comes into town, and on
that day you are introduced to the Dark Hour, and a group of students who are trying to figure out what the deal is. All of you are persona users, but YOU are
special.
The Dark Hour is a magical, sinister time that occurs between 0:00:00 and 0:00:01. Everyone living in the world is in stasis during that time, stored in
coffins - except for persona users. For them, the Dark Hour is a period during which they can use their persona. The Dark Hour is also home to sinister
beings called the Shadows, who prey on the few people who don't end up in coffins (latent persona users?) and turning them into near-mindless zombies.
The other big change (other than the fact that the Dark Hour makes everything look creepy) is that your school turns into this massive tower called Tartarus.
Tartarus is a 250+ level 'dungeon', each level randomly generated (they're small levels) and haunted by shadows. Your job as a member of that team
is to figure out what's up with Tartarus, what's causing the Dark Hour, and how to stop all the badness.
I mentioned the persona of your team members, and how you're different. Each of your team members has their own persona, that they develop (and at a late
point in the game, promote). They only get to use that one persona each - so one character will be your fire user, another your wind user, another your ice,
etc. YOU, however, can equip all the persona out there, up to 12 at a time, and change your active one as you see fit. You also have the ability to use all
weapons.
The combat system is a standard turn based, except for some small caveats:
1) You don't control your teammates. You can assign a strategy to each one, but no specifics.
2) Hits that knock someone down, be they a standard attack or an elemental attack on a weakness, gives you another turn. As long as you keep knocking people
down, you get free turns.
3) Once you knock all the enemies down, you can trigger a dogpile attack that does massive damage. (And looks hilarious.)
When not in combat, your character is a standard high-school student. That means you go to school every day. During your free time, you get a chance to
persue Social Links - a sort of dating game, including attributes like Charm, Courage, and Smarts that you have to improve to get the most out of it. Each
Social Link is attached to an Arcana, and will aid you for creating persona of that arcana. It can get a bit frustrating trying to reach level 10 on each one
(I missed on like 5 of the 15 or so), but the rewards are worth it. It also adds a bit of social engineering, because a good chunk of them are with girls, and
they don't like competition. Once you reach a certain level with a girl (6-8, usually) you have to make sure you don't reach a similar level with any
other girl, or she'll get pissed, and you'll have to spend 2 socialization periods making it up to her.
The graphics of the game are decent. While the 3D stuff isn't FF12 extraordinary, it does a *really* good job of replicating an anime world in 3D.
There's some anime cutscenes, but they're minor. One of the gems is the fact that each persona you can equip is also rendered in 3D - no 2D sprites
for this game. The mentu interface is also a gem - clear, large text, and looks very stylized and clean. A little slow due to all the fade effects, but
it's not too bad.
Where this game shines above all is the dubbing/rewrite. The voices are *perfect* for each character. They kept the original Japanese names, and use the
honorifics-in-English style you often see in fanfics - so a character may refer to another as Akihiko-sempai, or Ken-kun. The writing is clean, without
Engrish, funny where it needs to be, serious where it doesn't, and all in all exceedingly well done. ATLUS knows their stuff when it comes to translations
these days. The music in the game is top-notch, and just when I started to find it a bit repetitive, they change soundtrack. How can you not like that?
While this game is *long*, taking me more than 100h to finish, I enjoyed every damn minute of it. The Shin Megami Tensei group of games are really well done,
and Persona 3 is easily the pride of my game collection.
![[Image: embarassed.gif]](http://www.ezboard.com/intl/aenglish/images/emoticons/embarassed.gif)
)
