Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 FES

"The arcana is the means by which all is revealed..."

Persona 3 for the Playstation 2 is the third game of the Persona series. Technically fourth though, if you count Persona 2 Eternal Punishment the second half of Persona 2 a additional game in the series. Before this game came out, Persona was a underground series. However, upon Persona 3's release the game had massive success and Persona 3 put the Shin Megami Tensei series on the radar for RPG series. It sold almost 50,000 copies in America. While that may not sound impressive, for a previously underground series that's quite good. Not to mention, this is a expansion of sorts to the original version of Persona 3. Which sold almost 40,000 copies. So, for the game to have sold 10,000 more copies in it's expansion shows that just about nearly everyone who bought it liked it.

I heard of the game around FES's release from a friend and then began looking into it. It seemed to have extreme positive reviews so I couldn't go wrong. Persona 3 FES was also apparently a expansion too and a overall enhanced version of the original. The game was indeed extremely good, but it does have some annoying shortcomings and in some ways is worse then it's predecessors. Read on to find out why.

Graphics:8/10:Like Persona 4, Persona 3's graphics will not blow you away. They aren't extremely detailed or amazing, but have a lot of style to them. Character designs are done excellently. I would probably say the character designs are among the best I've ever seen. Each of the characters just look awesome. In addition to the great character designs, what makes Persona 3's graphics stand on it's own despite being low quality are the dungeon designs inside Tartarus. There's a crazy amount of style to be found in certain blocks of Tartarus and some of them are awesome. While field graphics are not too good, but saved by style, the battle graphics are great.

All of the in-battle graphics are far more detailed and the attack animations look far better then most games. Enemy designs are surprisingly well done and the final boss's design is probably one of my favorites of any game. While everything may sound good about the battle graphics there is one problem... Occasionally, during battles the framerate will drop. That's actually quite rare for a PS2 game to have frame rate issues that's a RPG too. I can't really think of any RPG's on the PS2 that I've played where it had such noticeable frame rate issues. They aren't really that bad and only rarely happen, but when it does happen it is indeed noticeable. Since I pretty much covered towns, dungeons, character designs and enemy designs, there is really nothing left to cover regarding graphics. So, I score graphics as a 8/10. Character and enemy designs are excellent, but otherwise graphics aren't too amazing aside from the in battle graphics. With Graphics out of the way, it's onto Gameplay which is regarded as the most important aspect of a game to me.

Gameplay:8.4/10:Just about every player will discover that Persona 3 has a quite unique approach to JRPG gameplay instead of a rather standard typical style. Not just the battle system or any features like that, but how the entire game progresses etc. Due to the protagonist being a high school student who attends school you must go through a day by day progression system in the game. Where each day you can choose to do certain events if possible or not. The possible events are Social Links, Shopping, Exploring or just merely going to a area in order to increase social stats. Social stats effect whom you can do Social Links with. Outside of dungeons, the game entirely revolves around this system. You'll be doing one of the four things usually in the daytime. I say the daytime since, at night the game gets quite different.

At night you cannot do anything and are forced to go back to your dorm. There you can head back to your room to sleep or choose to go to Tartarus the primary dungeon of the game. If not those two options, then you can speak to your party members. Speaking of options, you do have two choices once you head back to your room. You can sleep earlier so your in a better mood which effects battle performance or study and stay up later, but get more tired if you do so which negatively effects your mood. Provided you choose to explore Tartarus, you will then head to there.

Upon arriving at Tartarus, you'll be at the bottom floor. Here you can check your party member's stats, check their equipment, or form your party. There's also a save point and a teleporter which can warp you to different floors of Tartarus provided you've activated the corresponding teleporter on that floor. Aside from those two functions, there's also the Velvet Room which will be explained later on. Last, but not least is the official entrance into the actual interior of Tartarus. Once you enter, your officially inside the massive tower of Tartarus. Which serves as the only dungeon in Persona 3, but a gigantic one at that.

The whole dungeon of Tartarus consists of 263 floors in total and is split into six blocks. Each of the six blocks has it's own theme among other several things too. You pretty much run around and explore each floor until you find the stairs that will allow you to ascend to the next floor. However, if the floor is not fully explored, you can continue searching the floor until it fully is. Treasure chests among enemies lie waiting for you on every floor and you definitely don't want to be missing those chests. While exploring, you'll encounter shadows along the way. These are pretty much the enemies of the game and coming into contact with one initiates a battle. However, to make these encounters more involved you can gain a preemptive attack on your enemy if you manage to whack them with your equipped weapon before they notice. If the enemy runs into you and you don't hit them with your weapon though, you get ambushed and they go first. Either way, once you come into contact with one the battle begins.

You'll discover that Persona 4 has a innovative battle system that's not complicated at all and is a lot of fun. To begin with, you have most of the typical commands to select in battle. Attack, Item, Wait and Persona(Magic pretty much). Well, wait isn't too typical as it's Persona 3's guard command, but you actually don't guard and just simply pass a turn. As for Persona, it does serve as your magic, but also additional things. Which I will expand upon shortly after explaining the battle system. Basically, in battle you only have control of the main protagonist. Your other three party members are A.I. controlled. If there were any major flaws regarding the gameplay this would definitely be one of them.

It's extremely annoying being forced to have everyone in your party, but the protagonist A.I. controlled. Due to it being forced, it makes battles far more reliant on luck to win and prevents a plethora of strategies that could normally be used if you had full control of your party. To make matters worse, it seems like Atlus tried to be the biggest jerks ever went it came to the bosses and tried to create situations that would make the A.I. screw you over and lose boss fights. Bosses pretty much use as many status effects as possible which can present a major problem if the protagonist is effected. In that case, you better hope you somehow don't die before you naturally recover from the status effect or pray that your A.I. party members have the intelligence to cure you of your status effect. Fortunately, while the forced A.I. is annoying, the depth of the battle system makes up for it.

As with Persona 4 and Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne/Digital Devil Saga 1 and 2 Persona 3's battle system is all about exploiting weaknesses and protecting your weaknesses. Like Persona 4, Persona 3 uses the 'Once More' battle system. It's pretty much a prototype of the version used in Persona 4. Simply put, if a enemy is weak to wind and you use a wind spell on the enemy, you'll knock the enemy down and get a additional turn. When a enemy is knocked down it cannot do anything until it recovers and is more vulnerable to critical hits etc. On paper this battle system seems flawed, but don't think it's easy to abuse it. There are certain conditions to it. If you attack a already knocked down enemy with it's weakness again, you won't gain a additional turn and the enemy will recover from it's knocked down state Same applies to your characters with the exception of All-Out-Attacks.Your probably wondering what a All-Out-Attack is so time to explain.To further add even more depth to the battle system you can perform a All-Out-Attack if you knock all enemies down.

A All-Out-Attack basically deals a insane amount of damage to all enemies and is quite valuable. Almost every battle specifically normal ones, will revolve around you trying to score a All-Out-Attack which will most likely severely injure the enemies or kill them upon use. While this may seem repetitive and technically is, I found the battles to be extremely addicting and had a difficult time putting the game down when I needed to get other things done. The battle system is only merely the tip of the ice berg of Persona 3's incredible customization though. Beyond that, there's Persona's and the Velvet room. Both of which add a ridiculous amount of customization to this game.

During the beginning of the game, you'll be introduced to the Velvet room. A staple of the Persona series. Inside, you can fuse Persona's together to create different ones. There are over 200 possible Persona's you can obtain from fusing and each comes with their own stats and skills. Adding for a insane amount of depth/customization. Full knowledge of fusions is not required to be the game on easier difficulties, but to get the best demons or beat the game on Hard it will definitely help. When fusing a Persona, you can have the fused persona inherit skills from it's component Persona's. However, what skills it inherits is random. Fortunately, you can see before fusing, but it's extremely annoying when you need specific skills to be inherited and have to repeatedly exit the fusion result screen and again choose to fuse the desired persona. Once you learn the feature of Persona's you'll truly realize how much more depth they add.

Each Persona has their own skills they learn and stats they begin with. They also level up too in the same fashion as your characters by gaining EXP. Basically, you equip a Persona to a character and then you gain all of it's functions. However, the protagonist is the only one who can use any other Persona's in the game aside from the one he begins with. Your other party members are stuck with their default Persona's from the beginning. However, generally their Persona's get slightly better stat gains then normal and the spells tend to be quite good to compensate. The protagonist can not only switch Persona's, but he can do so in battle as well. This allows the protagonist to be extremely flexible and fill any role in battle depending on which Persona he's using. Hell, depending on if you fuse a good Persona, the protagonist can pretty much completely dominate. However, that's in the case you really know what your doing. As mentioned, spells are not the only thing your Persona determines.

In addition to spells, your Persona also has stats and levels. Not only that, but each Persona has different strengths/weaknesses. When you equip a Persona, whatever it's stats are determines your stats in battle. If your Persona has high STR, but low DEF you'll do a lot of physical attack damage, but take a lot of damage from physical attacks. By leveling, a Persona's stats will randomly increase and depending on their level, the Persona may learn their next skill. Each Persona is only useful for so long though, so don't plan to get too comfortable with one Persona. You'll eventually want/need better ones. Just about everything has been mentioned regarding the gameplay except for full moon events and New Game +.

Every month of the game there's a full moon. The game will give you a indication of when the next one is going to begin and you'll have a certain amount of days to prepare for it. When a full moon day comes, there's always a boss fight that's usually harder then most in the game coming. Not just that, but you usually have to go through a minor dungeon in order to reach the full moon bosses as well. Aside from full moon events, there's one last feature in Persona 3 that's good.

New Game +. Once you beat the game you can select New Game + using your cleared game save data. In New Game +, you carry certain things over and unlock a few more optional things in the game. So, re-playability is definitely high due to this. It makes future playthroughs be easier and different, but also offers more optional content for you to do as well. Definitely good to see New Game + in Persona 3. Overall though, the gameplay of Persona 3 despite it's shortcomings is quite good.

Game is a lot of fun and quite linear. It has a unique take on the RPG genre and plays out quite differently then most. There is indeed dungeon crawling and Tartarus can get repetitive, but it's still a enjoyable experience the whole way through. Battle system is unique and has a lot of depth, but the forced A.I. is definitely not a feature to be happy about. All-together, I give the gameplay a 8.4/10. For the third section, it's going to be on storyline which I consider the third most important aspect of a game.

Storyline:8.2/10:In Persona 3, you play the role of a silent protagonist who's a high school student. He's moved into a dorm occupied by several other students after the death of his parents and begins experiencing extremely odd events. As time goes on, it's discovered he has the ability to summon Persona's who are magical beings that are really powerful. Not only that, but he's extremely proficient at it too. It turns out that the dorm he's moved into really serves as a organization known as SEES.The group's purpose is to eliminate the shadows whenever the Dark Hour happens.

Between midnight and 1AM the Dark Hour occurs to a few. Most who are effected during it, experience what's called Apathy Syndrome. A extremely bad effect that puts it's victim into a comatose state and possibly even kills them if they are unlucky. At this time too, shadows which are evil creatures wander around aimlessly killing whatever they find. If that's not bad enough, the school which all the characters attend turns into a gigantic tower known as Tartarus during this time. It's assumed that Tartarus is the origin of where all the shadows are coming from. So, it's up to you and SEES to eliminate them and save everyone from them. Like most RPG's, it eventually turns into a journey to save the world. However, Persona 3 does do it in a interesting way.

Game takes place in a modern setting. You play the role of a silent protagonist whom mainly just chooses choices during conversations and has other characters do all of the talking in the game. However, the game does a good job of keeping you immersed in the role of that silent protagonist.
All of the other characters are quite interesting too, but if I had one issue it's that they aren't dynamic personality wise.

Some of them are quite straightforward and predictable when it comes to their behavior patterns. Not only that, but some of their backstories are generic too. For example, one of your party members failed to save someone in the past and has a hard time looking past it despite there being nothing he could have done. That's a backstory that's quite frequently used in stories nowadays. However, despite that, the character interactions are interesting and the dialogue is pretty well written. Each of the characters are well developed too. You learn their motivations and backstories etc. Aside from the lack of dynamic personality shown in characters, and generic backstories there's also one other major gripe.

Antagonists in Persona 3. Oh boy, does Persona 3 have some horrible antagonists. The main antagonist group Strega has got to be one of the least interesting villain groups I've ever seen before. Their personalities are extremely bland and they have poor motivations for what they do. This is essentially their motivation:Life is too painful for us and death alleviates that problem. So, we're trying to kill everyone so they no longer have to deal with the pain. Fortunately, the final boss/final main antagonist of the game is quite well done and ties in to the whole plot and Strega well. As for Persona 3's main plot it's decent.

For the most part, the plot is pretty simple. However, later on it becomes more intricate, but it's still quite easily understandable. Yet, it is well done and all ties in well together towards the end. In addition, the ending of the game is pretty good and the final events were handled pretty well. Overall, the Storyline receives a 8.2/10. Main plot is decent, but I don't really care for main plots much. Characters are what makes or breaks a storyline for me. For the most part, the game succeeds, but the lack of dynamic personalities in characters and generic backstories brings them down.

Not only that, but it takes a while for the ball to get rolling in the storyline. Once it does get good too, it's only for a short while then dies down a little. Compared to Persona 2 Innocent Sin, which took a while to get going too, but had a amazing plot once it got good. Fortunately, for more character development you can also do Social Links with other characters in the game to learn more about them and gain additional EXP for fusing Persona's in the Velvet room. Last, is the Music. Which I consider the second most important thing in a game.

Music:9.4/10:Shoji Meguro did a extremely good job with the music. The OST(Official Soundtrack) of Persona 3 comes close to being one of the best out there, but falls just barely short. To say the least, voice acting and sound effects are great. Soundtrack mainly consists of J-Pop and rock/jazz music. The rock songs are more light and not really heavy metal or anything like that. Most of the rock songs which is only a few, are the boss songs. Personally, my main gripe with the OST is Tartarus's music. It's about a 6-8 second loop and gets extremely repetitive to hear after a while. Aside from that though, the music, sound effects and voice acting is great. Music obtains a 9.4/10 for it's score. With the last category reviewed, what do I think of Persona 3 overall?

Overall:8/10 - Great

Pros:
+Extremely fun game.
+Deep innovative battle system that's not complicated to get the grasp of.
+Really good soundtrack and voice acting.
+Storyline is great, but does have some problems.
+Good character/enemy designs. Lots of creativeness.
+Insane amount of customization.
+Extremely unique and refreshing approach to the JRPG genre.
+New Game + for more re playability.

Cons:
-Forced A.I.
-Lack of dynamic attitudes in the characters. Extremely one dimensional characters.
-Generic back stories for some of the characters.
-Horrible uninteresting antagonists aside from the final one.
-Plot takes a while to get going, but doesn't become nearly as good as Persona 2 Innocent Sin's plot which took a while to get good too, but was so much more incredible then Persona 3's storyline when it did.
-Game doesn't feel too epic. Feels really broad in scope aside from maybe the end and one or two events.

Shin Megami Tensei Persona 3 is definitely worth a purchase. It's a great game all-together, but does have some flaws that prevent it from being a nearly perfect masterpiece. Graphics are good, but not really high quality and relies on style. However, I don't care for Graphics unless it negatively intervenes with the gameplay or anything else so I won't count it. Gameplay is ridiculously fun, but the forced A.I. is annoying and dungeon crawling in Tartarus can get repetitive. Storyline is pretty good too, but there's a lack of dynamic attitudes in the character and the antagonists are terrible for the most part. The story takes a while to get good and the scope of the storyline just isn't that epic. Last, but not least the Music is really good, but falls short just barely of being a excellent soundtrack. Voice acting is well done though. If someone was trying to get into the Persona series or SMT in general, and asked Persona 3/4 I would personally suggest 4 first. Yes, 3 is a great game, but 4 completely improves over it and is more accessible. If you do have the patience...Wait until the PSP port/remake of sorts comes out which removes the forced A.I. and improves the game more comes out. Overall, Persona 3 FES receives a 8/10 from me. Great game in my opinion, but doesn't hold a candle to Persona 4 or 2 Innocent Sin.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 09/25/09

Game Release: Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 FES (US, 04/22/08)