Persona 3

So one day the Internet comes over to my house and tells about this awesome game called "Persona 3".  I'm a little confused, since I had never heard of "Persona 1" or "2", and I'm doubly confused since apparently a "Persona 4" is on its way.  Well, the Internet, being something of a scratterbrained idiot, kept on babbling about how this was such a deep RPG, with such a brilliant story, and such an amazing experience.  Its part of the Shin Megami Tensei series, the most wack-job of wack-job JRPGs.  This the series where you fight giant penises and vaginas and the last boss is God.  Yeah.  Well, the Internet had sucessfully convinced me that the game was worth trying, so it had succeeded in that mission.  For the rest of the day we watched DBZ reruns.

Well, since I really didn't want to start the Persona series in the third entry, I first began by playing "Persona 1" for the PSP.  Unfortunately P1 was an incredibly shitty game, easily one of the worst RPGs I have ever played.  Fighting enemies is a wild guessing game between trying to find out what kind of the fifty-seven types of attacks will actually do damage or talking to the enemies and guessing wildly which conversation peace will make them happy.  Worse, its a traditional RPG with rows and turns, but inexplicably there's a weird grid-thing that's like a half-assed attempt at a SRPG like "Final Fantasy Tactics", all this means is that half the time you won't be able to attack enemies.  The only good thing about the game was its soundtrack, which was an awesome composition with incomprehensible Engrish lyrics.  I can understand not liking the soundtrack, but I think its rockin'.  Anyway, I gave up that game like two bosses in or something, and I never looked back.

Luckily "Persona 3" has absolutely NOTHING to do with "Persona 1", or if it does, the game doesn't make it clear at all.  The only things the two share in common are the Personas themselves and this weird mystical guy named Igor.  I feel like the ignorant fool who played "Final Fantasy I" in order to be prepared for the other games in the series*.  And I'll admit that "Persona 3" is a bit better, but hardly as great as the Internet was claiming.  I should stop listening to that guy.

The version of "Persona 3" that I played was "Persona 3 Portable" or "P3P" if you're into stupid abbreviations.  The only difference from the original "Persona 3" on the PS2 is that you can play as a girl this time.  I didn't only because the game warned me that I should play as the guy first, apparently because of some important differences.  (Turns out there really were none, but whatever.)  The other major difference between versions is that for some utterly bizarre reason all the character models outside of battle have been removed.  Instead of the anime movies the original provided, you have flat character portraits, text, voice acting, and an empty room.  Its weird.  And the scenes take two times longer to get through this way.  I have no idea what the creators had in mind here, because there's no reason the PSP would be unable to handle the size of "Persona 3", which was never exactly the most graphically stunning game in the world.  They did not get anywhere near the actual limits of this gaming system - in fact, it looks terrible.  The PSP version simply tells the story worse.  But unfortunately the PSP version is the only one that lets you take control of your party members, where as in all the other versions force them to be AIs.  If that were the case with the version I had played, I doubt I would have finished this game.

Anyway, the deal with "Persona 3" is that you're a regular Japanese high school student.  Since its Japan you'll find weird kind cultural things:  like people called me "Blue-kun", and you have to go to school - ON CHRISTMAS!!  Santa is crying, Japan.  For shame.  Well, at the start of the game your train is late, so when you arrive at your new dorm, something very weird has happened.  All the people are now coffins, and the Moon is gigantic.  Also, there's a creepy little kid who won't let you play the game unless you sign a contract promising to "do no harm".  Meanwhile you're also shown a short scene of a girl with a gun to her head, trying her best to work up the courage to pull the trigger.  Now what in the world is going on with this place?

Sadly, it turns out its really not worth finding out.  The whole gun thing is just the method by which you summon your Pokemon, or Persona.  For some reason you gotta pretend to kill yourself in order to make your Persona pop out, it isn't all that well explained.  I think its just there to make emo teenagers salivate.  (Its also really funny when new characters just seem to know by instinct that they have to shoot themselves to summon their Persona.  Amazing that you'd even think to do that.)  You need your Personas, pieces of your psyche that can turn into monsters in order to fight Shadows.  Shadows are monsters that live in a magical hour between midnight and 12:01 that average people are unable to experience.  Are you lost yet?  You and your new buddies have to to destroy all the Shadows in order to save the world.  Also there's a humanoid robot, Psycho Jesus, and the Moon is out to destroy the universe.

If all this sounds really trippy and interesting, its because it is.  At first.  Sadly, the way that "Persona 3" goes about presenting all these wild plot points completely destroys any sense of interest, tension, or drama.  The whole game takes place during the course of a year, which means that the clock is always moving forward.  However, that also means that about half the game is long stretched in which you have nothing at all to do because it isn't the Boss Day yet.  The plot moves just as slowly, in fact there isn't even a plot until six months in.  And if you think all these crazy events are going to lead up to some wild fascinating truth behind the mystery, here's a couple of numbers I'd like for you to decode for me:  4 8 15 16 23 42.  Enjoy.  The payoff is just as good.

"Persona 3" does an amazing job of grabbing you right into the game, and for the first few hours of playing, its a really fascinating experience.  It isn't like most RPGs in that there's no real exploration, you spend the whole game in the same town.  There's only one dungeon:  a Hell Tower that appears during the magic hour in the place of your high school (and you thought your school was Hell - lame joke).  During the rest of the game you're hanging out with your school buddies, studying for tests, and working a job.  There are tons of things to do in this game and at first its very exciting to find out what they all are.  "Wow, I can go see a movie!  And it boosts my stats!"  But after the first three in-game months, you'll have discovered everything, so the whole rest of the game is solid grueling routine.  This is a long motherfucker of a game too, so expect one Hell of a grind.  By the last month I was so sick of everything I just went home everyday and went to sleep waiting for the Final Boss day.

One thing you'll discover pretty early on is that "Persona 3" is a bizarrely hands-off game.  What I'm getting at here is that the game is completely devoid of minigames and activities, despite having dozens of frivolous activities you can spend your in-game time doing.  For example, there's an arcade, but this is no Gold Saucer.  Instead of actually being able to play any of the arcade games, the arcade actually is just a text screen telling you that your stats have increased.  There's a karaoke bar, but you can't play karaoke, you're just told that your Courage stat has gone up.  There are jobs for you to take in order to get extra cash, but you don't actually do the job, you just see you stats go up.  There's an in-game fake MMO to play... oh but you can't actually play the MMO, all you see is your computer and you have raunchy text chats with your teacher.  I'm often annoyed by minigames in RPGs, but that's only if they're mandatory and more importantly:  not fun.  There's nothing wrong with having a minigame as long as its fun!  But there is something wrong with giving me no real sense of actually inhabiting the world.

That hands-off feeling is made worse in the PSP version, where you can't even walk around the town, the entire thing is a point and click game.  You do run around the dungeon though, and that's the only place that you have direct control over your character.  The point and click thing isn't so bad but it does literally take you out of the game.

What the game really excepts you to do 90% of the time is boost your Social Links.  There are seventeen or so characters you can find in the game and become friends with.  So after school you gotta find these guys, get their trust, and slowly your Social Link rank will raise until you become BFFs.  Some of the characters are kinda interesting to get to know, some aren't, and several are horrible people that you would never want to be friends with.  The whole point of this thing is to get stat boosts for your Personas when you fuse them.  Fusing Personas is really the best way of getting stronger Pokemon with better attacks.  However, purely stat-wise, I don't actually know how important the Social Links are.  I don't think they help you all that much.  Even with a master Social Link a new Persona will only gain five levels, and it isn't like the enemies aren't giving EXP either.  But that's really besides the point, because hanging out with people is really the only thing to do half the time, and it can be interesting.  You can even have a girlfriend... or even five**.  The game does nothing about being a rampant man-whore and juggling three chicks at the same time.  In fact, it encourages you to be a truly awful horrible man.  No gay option by the way, that's honestly lacking.  Unfortunately, half the time you try to talk to people, they won't actually have anything to say to you, but you still lose time, completely wasted.

Honestly, the Social Links get old too after so many hours.  Plus once you complete a Social Link, you never have another reason to talk with that person again.  I'd like to have hanged with Yuko again but I finished her link and I had many more to complete.  In fact, there are so many Social Links in this game that it is impossible to get anywhere near completing them all without a strategy guide.

Let's talk about the actual gameplay.  I'm sorry to say, but "Persona 3"'s RPG gameplay is without a doubt the worst part of the entire game.  There are no dungeons, no exploration, no real changes, just the Hell Tower.  You go in the tower, climb up a few floors, reach a boss, save, kill boss, rinse and repeat.  Slowly but surely you'll gain more and more elevator stops on your way to whatever weird thing lies at the top (and trust me, the thing at the top is so not worth going up 260 or whatever floors to reach it).  At first it won't be so bad, just basic RPG fair, but slowly your will to play will be sapped, fast.  Every floor of the tower is exactly the same.  As you go up, the enemies pallet-swap and the hallways get painted a new color, but that's it.  All the floors are a randomized maze where you're looking for the stairs to get up.  THAT'S THE ENTIRE GAME!!  No puzzles, no exploration, no secrets, no twists, no nothing.  Everything is the same.  Its one giant endless dungeon that's the same thing over and over again.  If you thought the Pharos from "Final Fantasy XII" was excessively long and boring, you will kill yourself if you were to play "Persona 3".  Occasionally, like maybe once a month, you'll find a floor where the rules change, a bit, like enemies drop rare treasure, or you have no minimap.  But its never anything awesome.  It did not take me long until I started speedrunning this game just out of desperation to finish this damn tower.

I have no idea why the developers thought this was good enough.  Did they even play this game themselves?  Couldn't they see how monotonous and boring their game was?  I can even show "Persona 3"'s devs a far better way they could have designed their tower:  see "Final Fantasy I".  FFI had these four bonus dungeons called Soul of Chaos.  As you went down those dungeons, really crazy stuff would happen.  One floor would be a regular cave, the next would be a forest, and the next would be a town with shops and NPCs.  It was wild, you'd never know what you'd find next.  Some floors wouldn't have enemies at all, instead they'd be puzzles like Beaver Counting, and then they was one floor that was a castle where all the NPCs were actually zombies.  Really awesome stuff.  That's the kind of thing that makes you feel like you're in a lunatic Hell world where literally anything can happen and the rules of space and time have broken down.  Its really frightening.  Having a giant tower where nothing changes - that doesn't make me scared.

As for the battle system, its really nothing incredibly special.  Basic turn-based combat, with things even toned down a bit.  There are three forms of physical attacks, five elements, and two special elements useful only for insta-kills.  Every battle comes down to this:  ask Mission Control (this girl Fuuka) what the enemy weakness is, find it, then use the proper spell getting critical damage and knocking the enemy down and getting an extra attack.  Now you can use an All-Out Attack, where your whole party rushes in and beats up the enemy in a giant cartoon dust cloud, causing huge damage and killing really every regular enemy.  After awhile the bosses will stop having weaknesses, so in that case you just need to find what kind of attack is most effective.  Its good, I didn't have any problems with the battle system, so that's fine.  Lucky thing I played this game on Easy, because I did not have the patience to deal with many GAME OVERs.

But there are three annoying bits about the battles.  1) The spells have silly names in some bizarre language.  The Ice spell is called "Bufu", the Fire spell is called "Agi", and the healing spell is "Dio" etc. etc..  Why the Hell don't you simply name them "Ice", "Fire", and "Cure"!?  What's wrong with simple convenience!?  Luckily, you can uncover the effect of every move by pressing square... which you'll do a lot.  When you learn a spell like Rakukaja, what kind of effect do you think it will have?  The other annoying this is 2) MISSION CONTROL NEVER SHUTS UP.  Fuka is the most annoying friggin' video game character in the history of the universe!  Everybody complains about Navi from "Ocarina of Time", but I'd so take Navi over Fuka.  There is not a round, not a single round in any battle where she doesn't give you advise.  And its always the same worthless advise too.  Like my character Ken is nearly dead, so Fuka needs to tell me "Ken-chan is in trouble!"  I KNOW, SHUT UP!!!  Let me handle this.  There's no option to turn her off, so either mute your PSP or take pruning-sheers and cut your ears off.  3) If the main character dies, the game is over.  I don't know how that's supposed to make any sense.

Speaking of muting your PSP, this game does not have good music, unlike "Persona 1".  The soundtrack is okay at first... but after like thirty hours, you will not want to hear any more of those tracks, which never change.  I hope you enjoy the sound of your PSP disc spinning, because you'll be hearing that a lot too.

"Persona 3" started out so good and just completely fell apart.  You'd think that since this game makes references to all kinds of world mythology, everything from Christian angels to Australian Aborigine deities, that they could have come up with a story better than this!  Take any one of the epic poems, religious texts, or legends that this game references, and they're all better than what this game provides.  The final boss (which of course is a winged humanoid) has thirteen forms, so she takes about an hour to kill, and then the ending simply lasts too long.  I had long ceased to care, and the ending is all nonsense.  Some monster named Nyx wants to destroy the Earth for no good reason, and you gotta kill it.  Even if you win Nyx decides that it doesn't actually count, so you still lose.  The moon's skin peals away like its an orange revealing a giant eye that fires an "Independence Day" laser, so you become the Ruler of the Universe (really) fly inside and kill an egg using the power of friendship.  Its garbage.  Oh then the game claims that you uncover the answer to the ultimate question BUT IT NEVER TELLS YOU WHAT THE ANSWER IS (42) - or even what the question was.  Half the crap that happened isn't even explained either.  Like I still don't know what a Shadow is.  But I've ceased to care.  With every plot twist the story reveals itself to be less interesting than I originally thought.  And with every passing day I found myself liking this game less and less.  Until finally, after killing the last boss and being maybe halfway through the epilogue, I turned off my PSP before the end credits and did something else.

And that's the end of the story.  I hear "Persona 4" is better but I doubt I'll be able to deal with something like this again.  Its after games like this that you really start to appreciate the "Final Fantasy" series, since those games - mostly - didn't suck.  As for the rest of "Shin Megami Tensei", the only other game that I've heard is good is the "Digital Devil Saga".  I might give that a try, since you actually do get to kill God at the end.

-------------------------------------------
* That guy was me once.

** The end of those Social Links is a scene where you essentially have sex with the girl.  The game doesn't show anything, and only calls it a "Special Moment", but things got wild and funky.  There is no option of getting the girl pregnant, so already "Persona 3" is a crappy simulator of my high school.  Also there's no option of getting high in the bathroom, beating people up, or getting arrested.  What?  Where did you go to high school?