Revelations: Persona

""Welcome to world between consciousness, and unconsciousness.""

Introduction: Revelations Persona was one of the most unique rpg's at the time of it's release. While most games in the genre had dragons and castles and all that other fairy tale junk, Persona was set in modern times with a typical bunch of teenagers as the cast. Persona is actually part of Megami Tensei franchise, which from here on out will be referred to as Megaten. The real name of the game is Megami Ibunroku Persona: Be Your True Mind, long isn't it? Persona underwent a big change when it was localized in the US, Atlus USA in an attempt to interest NA players, westernized the game to give it more of an American flavor. Some examples include throwing in references to US related shows and movies, changing character names, changing hair color, and even changing ethnicity for one character. Despite all this surgery, Persona still manages to be an awesome experience for the hardcore rpger, read on to find out why.

GAMEPLAY(10/10): The gameplay for this game is phenomenal. It basically works like the usual turn based rpg (random battles, level building, equipping weapons and armor, etc...), but with lots of unique tweaks added in for the Megaten flavor. The mechanics revolve around something called Persona. In game, personae are explained to be other sides of yourself, or your different personalities. During the game your characters are given the ability to manifest these persona and use them to assist in battle by casting magic and physical attacks. It's basically the game's magic system; but not only are they there for casting magic, they also boost the character's stats according to the rank they are on. Each character will have a starter Persona, but as the game goes on the enemies will get stronger, and your personae will become outclassed. You can make new Persona by ultilizing something called the fusion system. Throughout the game, something called the velvet room will be scattered throughout the different environments, that is where you will fuse your new persona; but before you can even do that you will need to collect spell cards from enemies, and that is done by conversing with them.

Battles in Persona can end in one of three ways, your characters koing all the enemies, the enemies koing all your characters, or through contacting. Contacting is very important, it has been in every Megaten game and Persona is no exception. Instead of negotiating with demons to come and fight for you, contacting serves a different purpose in Persona. Demons have four distinct emotions you can influence while contacting; they are joy, interest, fear, and anger. Joy will result in the demon either giving you an item and ending the battle or nothing, interest is the most important one as an interested demon will give up its spell card needed for persona fusion, fear will usually result in a demon running away and anger almost always results in the enemies getting a free turn. It is also possible to elicit two emotions at once. Once you get a few spell cards, you'll be able to fuse new personae

Fusion is back once again, but this time it is used for creating new persona. Once you get two or more spell cards from contacting you'll be able to fuse a new persona in the velvet room by talking to Igor. The resulting persona is influenced by many things, such as the spell cards used in the fusion, the order that the cards are fused in, and the items that you add to the fusion process. Throwing in items can add moves to the persona's repoitore or even result in a different persona all together. The cycle of the moon phase that the persona is fused in will also affect it, though the effect is minimal. Players should be aware that you cannot equip persona that are higher than your persona-level, and certain characters cannot equip certain arcanas. Once a persona has outlived its usefulness, you can delete it at the velvet room. When that's done you will get an item from Igor and depending on the rank that persona was at when it was deleted, the item will vary. Usually fully developed Personae (Rank 8) will yield better items. Personae sort have a growth system in this game, newly fused personae are at rank 1 and as they grow up ranks their spell list increases as well as giving a boost to your characters stats. You rank up your persona simply by using them over and over until they finally max out at rank 8.

As you have probably guessed, persona aren't your only means of attacking, each character is also capable of using a melee weapon and a gun. The combat in this game is based around a grid like system, depending on where your characters are placed on the grid they are limited to what they can attack, characters up front can attack most of the enemies but are also at the risk of taking the most damage while characters in back are safe from most attacks but can't really hit any enemies. Dungeons are in labyrinth format with a classic Megaten first person view (battles are in third person), so if you don't like dungeon crawling then you should probably look at videos or rent the game first.

Story (10/10): The plot for this game is one of my absolute favorites of all time. Everything from the cast of characters to the setting was just so fresh and original that it practically spoiled me. I especially thought the decision to use a modern day setting and cast of characters was a brave act on Atlus' part and it definitely turned out for the better. The game opens up with a bunch of high school students playing an occult game called persona. The game, if successful is supposed to bring forth spirits, not long after they finish playing, the ghost of a seemingly distressed little girl appears and after a few moments of awe whisks away four of our heroes, you (there is no default name, so you can call him whatever you like), Mark, Yuki, and Nate to another world where they encounter a higher being that calls himself Philemon. He informs you of the existence of "Persona", and bestows that power upon you claiming that you have a great purpose to fulfill. You then wake up in the school infirmary being watched over by Nurse Beverly and your classmates, with your teacher Ms. Smith just coming in. Being the ever so caring teacher, she insists that you and the others go to the hospital for a checkup just to be safe and that while you're there to go and visit another fellow classmate Mary, who has been confined to the hospital for a year due to mental problems. You and the others arrive at the hospital and pay Mary visit, but after a few minutes of casual conversation she starts to have a psychotic breakdown. You run to get some doctors but as soon you set foot outside Mary's room the whole building shakes, looking to see if Mary is ok you open the door to her room only to find out that whole layout of the building was changed! You then find out that demons have started appearing out of nowhere, even the dead is starting to come to life. Through a battle with some demons, our heroes awaken their persona abilities and discuss that they have to find out why their town has gone all loony, and thus begins the great adventure known as Revelations Persona...

Music/Sound (9/10): Persona has one of my FAVORITE game soundtracks of all time. I can't even put into words how much I love this ost; it mainly consists of techno with a lot of the tunes matching the modern setting of the game. You have your tracks that you can just sit back and relax to, and then you have the tracks that you can rock out and go wild to! Four composers slaved away on this soundtrack and indeed composed a masterpiece, so I give kudos to Shoji Meguro, Hidehito Aoki, Kenichi Tsuchiya, and Misaki Okibe. Yes the music is that good, but you're probably wondering why I deducted a point from this category if I think so highly of the music. Well, this section is for sound to and while the sound effects were all nice, the dubbing for the game wasn't. The only time this game has voices is the quotes during battles and they were pretty bad. At first they were funny, and I giggled every now and then when I heard them, but after a few hours of game play my ears were starting to bleed. Hearing Nate shout "TAKE IT!!!!" in a horribly done voice every time he summoned his persona was starting to take its toll on me, and the other characters aren't much better. But this problem is minimal, and the awesome soundtrack should eventually just block it out entirely.

Graphics (8/10): Ok, these definitely aren't the best graphics ever, but for its time they were pretty decent and if you like two dimensional graphics there is absolutely no way you can go wrong. The character models are crisp and colorful with no signs of pixilation anywhere, and the battle animations are very well done. I was especially impressed with the persona animations, I was awed by how fluid and clear they looked and there are just so many designs. The backgrounds were also very well done and many them are just plain eye candy, the 3-D dungeons however can be a pain to go through. They're pretty plain looking, there really isn't just much to them, it consists basically of the same graphic tile being repeated thousands of times over with a few 2-D rooms here and there. This however, is negligible as Persona's great game play and story should immediately counter that.

Replay ability (7/10): Persona is definitely a game to play again, not all the characters can be used in a single run of the game and you're not likely to discover all the persona there are in one play through either. There are also multiple endings to get as well as the pleasure of seeing a great story unfold a second time. I would have given this section a 10 if it was the Japanese, but the biggest hit Persona took from Atlus USA's localization was the omition of something called the Snow Queen Quest. This is essentially a second half of the game, an alternate path you can take instead of going through the main story, almost like taking the game; shrink wrapping it, and then opening it as if you've never even played it before. There are a few different rumors as to why Atlus USA left this out but I won't get into them here.

Final Recommendation: If you like obscure and unique rpg's, I would definitely say pick this game up. It's a great change from the normal rpg fanfare and really requires thinking to play. If your already a Megaten fan then that's all the more reason to pick this up if you haven't already. Problem is, the game is very old; a 1996 rpg I believe, about the only way to get it is through eBay and it's fetching some pretty nasty prices there at the moment. Still if you have the money, or just happen to get lucky and get it for a cheap price, snag it. I trust you won't be disappointed.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 01/28/08, Updated 02/12/08

Game Release: Revelations: Persona (US, 1996)