 Expect a lot of suicide action. Image provided by http://bleaves.com |
Enter the Shin Megami Tensei series, a vast collection of great gameplay, dark storylines, and creative battle systems. My first foray into the Megaten world was a few years ago when I first heard about SMT: Nocturne. I read about the game and finally played it sometime later, and I was hooked. Then I heard about a new installment: Persona 3. I’d never played Persona 1 or 2, but when I saw this game, I was interested. However, I soon came to a sinking realization that there was no way this game was coming to North America.
Fast forward to my birthday, last year. I walk into my local Gamestop to spend some birthday money, and lo and behold, behind the counter, was a brand new copy of Persona 3, complete with artbook and soundtrack.
I bought it. Anyway, enough backstory.
Persona 3 is a very stylish RPG. If the Final Fantasy series is the McDonald’s of the video game world (they’re everywhere, there’s tons of them, and they make loads of money), then P3 would be the swanky downtown cafe frequented by broody twenty-somethings who wear berets and listen to Bjork. And hippies. The story behind P3 is a complex one.
You are the nameless main character (who actually has a name), a transfer student to Gekkoukan High School. It sounds ordinary enough, but from the second the game starts, it’s clear that the situation is anything but. You are immediately drafted into SEES, a group of students masquerading as a school club that fight Shadows (obligatory baddies) in a place called Tartarus (better known as your school) during the Dark Hour (the hour that passes for a select few people between 12 and 12:01 am.)
Confused yet? Good.
So how is a group of students supposed to fight the things that go bump in the night? Easy, by summoning spirits called Personas.
How does that happen? With the power of suicide!
...Okay, let me explain. The characters carry around tools called Evokers (which are shaped like pistols for some unexplained reason) which they hold to their heads and shoot whenever they need to call upon the power of Persona. This is why I initially thought that this game would never make it over here. Lucky for us, someone over at Atlus overcame their fear of offending or scaring the general public.
So anyway, your friends, who fight with you, only use one Persona each. You, however, are the super special awesome main character. One Persona is hardly enough for you! You want them all! Fortunately, you actually get to use all of the Personas the game has to offer. And this game offers a LOT.
You can find them through cards in Tartarus, the 266 floor randomly-generated dungeon that appears every night during the Dark Hour, or through fusing others. Thankfully, you can register all of your Personas in the Persona Compendium, where for a fee you can re-summon your favorites for battle or fusion throughout the game.
Speaking of nights, the passing of time in this game is a lot of fun. Each day is split up into parts, most of which you’ll spend at school (just like in real life, doing well on your exams comes before saving the world.) You also get time to study and hang out with friends, and if you choose to go to Tartarus that night or if a story-related event comes up, then you enter the Dark Hour, which is when you’ll do the majority of the fighting in the game.
The feature I enjoyed most of all is the Social Link system. Every Persona has an alignment, as does every person you befriend in the game. The closer you get to a certain person, the more extra experience you can earn to make all of the Personas in that alignment even more powerful through fusion.
For example, one of the first people you meet at school is of the Magician alignment. Spending time with him will give you more and more experience until finally, you max out the Social Link and earn the ultimate Persona of that alignment. Some of them are story-driven and level up automatically, while some are only accessible once you get your Charm, Academics, or Courage up to a certain level.
However, the opposite is also true. The ignoring or mistreating of a friend may cause them to become annoyed with you and send the Social Link into a reversed state, which means that you won’t be able to gain any more experience until you reconcile. This becomes especially hard with the girls once you get them to the higher levels. You get into romantic relationships with them and you have to watch what you say to avoid getting them angry. Like real life, some of them are crazy and you may have to say something odd (like the opposite of what most people would typically want to hear... looking at you, Yukari) to get them to be the LEAST annoyed with you. Ugh, let’s just say that I now understand what you guys have to go through, and on behalf of women everywhere, I apologize.
Persona 3: great game. I really love the whole RPG-meets-Japanese-dating-sim thing, and the story is great. Megaten games are traditionally hard to find after their initial release, so grab this one when you can.
