Persona 3 FES (PS2): The fascination continues...

So as you read a few months ago, I fell completely in love with the Persona universe when I started playing Persona 4 Arena. Playing through the story really got me into the characters and I wanted to know more about it. As I played that I downloaded and watched the Persona 4 anime as well. A fun but somewhat cut down recap of the events of Persona 4 with some characters from 3 spruced in there. But as I watched it, I reflected on that I never actually finished Persona 3. The game had a crazy difficulty spike and because of it I set the game down and never finished it. But with this re-invigoration of mine with the Persona series I decided to dust off the ole PS2 and give it one more go.

PERSONA 3: FES (PS2)

You take the role of Insert Name (in my case Akira Mizaki since this takes place in Japan), a 16ish year old transfer student to Gekkoukan High who has lost his parents. While your are traveling via train, the animation cuts to a young girl holding a gun to her head, breathing heavy and trying to pull the trigger.  Exasperatedly she drops the gun and buries her face in her knees. Upon transferring in and coming into the dorm where you will be staying, you are greeted by a young boy in striped pajama's and he makes you sign a contract stating you will take responsibility for your actions.

After signing the contract you come across the same girl from the scene transition, and is in panic wanting to know why you are there. As she goes to pull the gun, another student named Mitsuru Kurijo stops her and informs her that you'll be here for a bit, and introduces you to her as Yukari Takeba. Cooler heads prevail and you all crash for the night.

The next few days you begin adjusting to school life until one evening there is seemingly a monster attack, as a large beast is chasing another dorm student. Yukari takes you to the roof to escape where you are cornered by the beast. And in a desperation move, she goes to use the gun she has but drops it as she brings it to her head. The protagonists picks it up with eyes dilated and holds it to his own head and pulls the trigger, unleashing a monster that lays waste to the one that was attacking you. 

You come to find out that you were actually being watched by this dorm, as they are actually a task force called SEES who assembled to fight these monsters called shadows, who only appear in a hidden hour that takes place between midnight and 12:01am called the Dark Hour. Only a select few can fight in this hour, and they implore you for your help to fight the monsters and end the Dark Hour by investigating a massive tower that appears during it.

Sorry that was a bit a mouthful. The game is essentially a blend of a Dungeon Crawler, JRPG, and High School simulation. During the day you have to attend school, keep your grades up, join clubs and maintain relationships. All of these social ties affect your ability to create Personas, which affect you characters statistics and what spells they can use. As you level you can create new Personas by mixing the ones you have together to create better stronger ones, and in some cases transfer abilities from one to the others. 

At nights you can explore the Tartarus, the mysterious tower that appears where their school is every night during the Dark Hour. An apparent nest of shadows, the goal is to go in and push upwards as best you can before the night of a full moon. In the tower you can grind for experience, items, money, or new personas. But you don't want to stay in for too long, your character can become exhausted or sick, which will effect your ability to perform during the day. So the whole game you have to strike a balance between all of these things in an attempt to maintain pace with everything.

While dealing with maintaining friendships in the game can be kind of tedious at times, many of the characters have some very funny dialogs about them when you hang out. Some of them have problems you need to help them through to help strengthen the bond, but you need to know their personality quirks to get the best results to evolve the relationship. My two favorites were Kirijo and Maya. Kirijo is funny because she's the rich heiress to massive conglomerate, so she is positively baffled at how to eat at a fast food restaurant since the food is so cheap and there is no silverware. Maya is a player you meet in an online game who just speaks in excessive l33t, and while those are funny, the best is the payoff at the end when you finally meet face to face. Its not often during a game I actually find myself laughing out loud, but it was totally worth it.

So if you haven't been able to tell up to this point, the game is directed to a very niche audience. I love the idea in concept, but some of its execution falls a little bit flat. For one thing, you actually have to pay attention to the lectures in school. Because getting good grades raises your academics and charm, which you need to befriend certain characters and make certain persona types stronger. Some of the lectures are fucking long and boring (just like in real high school!) and a lot of the time you don't even get a hint to the question before you have to guess at it.

This guy never shuts his fucking mouth. Just find a walkthrough with the answers.

Then when the school day actually ends, traveling from location to location can get a bit tedious. If I wanted to date Kirijo I would groan because that would mean I would have to walk all the way to the other side of the school. While the movement speed is fast there is at least 3 or 4 screen transitions. God forbid I needed to buy new equipment first because then I gotta walk my ass out of the school, ride to the mall, buy my shit, walk all the way back before I could go on my date. I can be tedious because its pointless walking. There is a place where you can jump right out of the school to the travel menu which is handy, but its only in one spot so that can be annoying.

The music has a handful of notable and catchy songs, and some of them are just awful. I am a big fan of the "Burn My Dread" song from the beginning of the game, its got a catchy kinda techno-y rap kinda thing going for it. But on the other hand, I would hate exploring the Tartarus because it has this dismally boring piano rhythm of like 3 to 5 notes. Make sure you have your own music on standby. Midway through the game you can change the dungeon BMG but none of the selections are all that spectacular.

I really like this f'n song.

The dungeon crawling is pretty well done. The map is constantly changing except for boss floors or section transition floors. You can travel as a team or split people up to fight shadows or look for treasures. Most of the time you will explore with the group because as I mentioned before, this game can have a huge difficulty spike and being caught alone if you are under leveled can be certain doom. Almost every level has an escape  which you can use to get out and recover your health and magic if you are out of items, but if you don't make it to the boss floors you have to do that same section you just completed over again (luckily, you don't have to beat the boss to escape down on their floors, so you should do so anyways to recover, save, THEN tackle the boss.)

I stuck with small swords, It was much easier to time preemptive strikes.

The combat follows the JRPG team leader format. You have full control of your character and you can give vague instructions to the rest of your team for how you would like them to perform. Players of the Pokemon series will feel right at home because it operates in the same way. Many of the shadows feature some form of weakness and if you can strike their weakness (or get a critical hit) you can knock them down and have an opportunity to attack again. If you can knock down all of the enemies, you can go in for a massive team bum rush for big damage.

But you need to be careful because your own persona's have strengths and weaknesses too, which means you do as well. So its important to get a feel for what kind of monsters you are facing on a floor and what abilities your teammates have so you don't wind up getting floored every turn and crushed. You can revive teammates but if the main character bites it, game over.

My big tip is this: early in the game, you can fuse a demon girl called Lilim. She is probably the best personas to fuse early because she really only has a weakness to Light magic (few enemies use light), and has the ability to have all 4 major elements at the same time. With the right type of stat boosting items (like things that raise strength, magic, and luck), she can end up being a persona you can ride for most of the game, I made it nearly to end with her because while the spells may not have had the same power by the end, they still knocked things down for a massive attack. Figure out how to make them and make sure the fusion gives her all 4 elements.

She doesn't have Bufu, but if she did instead of Marin or the Rak's
this would be one of the best 4-Elements Lilims you could make.

I had to tone down the difficultly in this game to get all the way through it. But in hindsight I am glad that I did. Yeah the game could get a little slow from time to time, especially when I was waiting for full moons to proceed with the game. But it has a likable cast and follows a pretty tried and true JRPG format that I had a good deal of fun with. Story featured some twists and turns and had some pretty interesting moments. I can see why this game didn't take the world by storm, but I can also see why the Persona series has the cult following it does.

Persona 3 FES also features a bonus chapter that extends upon the ending staring Aigis, but I only played it a little bit to set that aside to move on to Persona 4 (and it kind of makes the ending of game a punch in the crotch). If you are looking to give this a try, you can try to find it on the ps2, they updated the game slightly for the PSP release, and looks like it can also be found on the PlayStation store under PS2 Classics. I believe the PSP version has updated combat which borrows elements from Persona 4 and a female main character as well, to change your dating options. If the PSP game can be played on PS3? Get that one.

One thing I can definitely say about this series is this: If the game didn't have my interest before, it fucking has me now.

If only I grew up in Japan...
Maybe I coulda grew up as popular as I was in this....