Is dread flammable? Well, Burn it nonetheless.
Don't let the game's childish exterior fool you into a state of complacency. Underneath the cartoon children with massive eyes and weirdly emotive dialogue portraits, you will find a JRPG that neither commands another comparison, suggests another peer, nor has a minute to waste. What kicks off as a technically uninteresting PlayStation 2 game where you press the X button every few seconds blossoms into an experience that can only be undeniably called the JRPG done right.
Your virtual doppelganger -named by the player, naturally - is a male student transferring to a new private high school whose name starts with a G and ends in some scary combination of letters I'll never learn how to pronounce. As he steps off the train to find his newly assigned dorm room, the city's clock strikes midnight. Things go past sour - it turns out that at midnight an extra hour is inserted where every man, woman and child freezes in time and space, oblivious to the fact that an ominous coffin has appeared around their body. Shadow creatures roam the streets, and for the unlucky souls that find themselves without a coffin, a distinctly violent end is in their future.
Our protagonist rushes to the dorm room as the world around him turns green and black, with buildings exploding and reforming, and pulsating green mist floating everywhere. Darkness lurks in every place the moonlight doesn't touch. Just as our player reaches the dorm room, the spell passes, and the world goes back to the way it was. The player begins to try and explain what he saw to his new guests in his dorm, but without success (mainly because he rarely speaks, aside from Bioware-esque dialogue trees). Little does he know that the dorm he was assigned to secretly knows about the shadows in this dark hour, and fights them with the power of Personas, a collectible physical manifestation of a person's mental well-being. Personas are summoned by shooting a Evoker (a gun without bullets) into the user's own head, which makes for a shocking opening few hours but ends up weighing into the plot with heavy significance as to how this struggle is affecting its characters.
The plot harbors its distinctly Japanese taste with style, keeping around the fascinating culture but translating anything that wouldn't make sense to a Western or European audience with aplomb. The story thickens dramatically around the half-way point and goes into overdrive mode near the end, and even throughout the quiet moments the game drops gobs of symbolism, references and thematic elements that make Persona 3 one of the most delightfully thoughtful and purposeful games I've ever played. Few games have become as powerful as this game becomes in its second and final acts.
Part of me was slightly disappointed at the purely aesthetic nature of the game; the story oozes creativity and talent, but a small nagging voice suggests that this game would have been better off with, say, a Twilight Princess art style. The game's faintly isometric view point and low-key technical prowess certainly don't tax the PlayStation 2 much. The game is more concerned with a progression of time rather than space, and it shows. Environments are limited, and character models are reused often.
However, the variety and depth of animation in this game is certainly sufficient, and at times impressive. The creativity displayed in the art design, character drawings and monster battles are above and beyond most games and even other forms of visual media. The music accents the mood with a unique soundtrack that sounds like absolutely no game before it (though repetition does grate on the ears after the twenty-hour mark). But this is a petty issue; the game is filled with so much content that yelling at Persona for mediocre visuals is like yelling at a paperback copy of Ulysses because the font they chose wasn't very good. This game has so much going on that the visuals are the least of your worries.
As a transfer student, your player must quickly acclimate to the society of his new high school. On the very first day, one of your female dorm members escorts you to the premises, and almost immediately the two of you become the talk of the town as a rumored item. As you start to integrate yourself into this complicated world of drama and obligations, you start to see that your dorm of shadow-fighting Power Rangers contains the most powerful, intelligent, and well respected students in the school. Coming to school with one of them certainly didn't hurt your popularity much. It's hard not to feel a smug sense of elitist accomplishment for doing absolutely nothing, but then again, that's what video games are about most of the time.
The game's social structure builds very slowly but eventually becomes compelling to the point of comparisons with Civilization. Your character often will be assaulted by overly-friendly classmates who want to be your friend, sports organizations that would die for your interaction, clubs that thrive on cool members like yourself, and lonely girls who want someone to walk them home on a quiet afternoon. As you begin to sign up for these social interactions, you start to feel the pressure coming from all sides. Every afternoon is a slot to be filled - how do you fill it? The student senate needs help with various projects. The swim team expects you in your top physical condition, so maybe you should practice with your water buddies. Your friends and romantic interests want your company - you're a good listener who only talks when someone asks a question. Eventually the two key thesis statements of the game begin to set in. For one, you pick your own pace of social interaction, and any pain inflicted on yourself from a million different obligations is your own damn fault. Secondly, there just aren't enough open afternoons in the day.
Why bother with any of this? Well, the game's pacing suggests it, which we'll discuss in a minute. Secondly, these social interactions create social links. As your web of influence grows in the school, your mental self-image grows as well, and as a result your Persona abilities become stronger. Within the vast array of options to consider every afternoon, your stats could increase in some fashion, or you could unlock new attacks, powers and types of Personas to aid you in your fight against the fiendish shadows. This whole system certainly offers some interesting social commentary on the usefulness of friendship, both positive and negative, which some players may find interesting.
This all becomes useful because very night during the Dark Hour, the school you attend in the daytime slowly morphs, Tim Burton style, into a massive tower filled to the brim with evil shadows to be defeated, mysteries to be explored, and loot to collect. This part of the game plays like a combination of Dragon Quest and Nethack, and it's a fast, brutal, and often satisfying RPG romp. Levels are randomly constructed mazes that lead into stairs that go higher and higher up this massive tower, which the game calls Tartarus. Shadows roam the halls, and they will often attack if they think they can win, or flee if you're too powerful. Battles take place on a separate screen similar to the Final Fantasy games predating the MMO-like transition, but the pace of these battles is extraordinarily quick and nimble, making the entire combat system a rewarding exploratory grind that never quite feels as repetitive as it really is.
Of course, you're still a student. You have to get up every morning for school, study for tests, and keep your other party members in shape. Often the limits on how far you can climb up Tartarus are the limits of your scrawny youngsters - after two dozen battles or so, they'll complain of being fatigued and want to go back to bed. In this state, their attack and defence is decreased, and they'll take a lot longer to stand back up if a monster knocks them down. Few PlayStation 2 games can match the unique terror of running about Tartarus with a fully fatigued party, looking frantically for an exit.
This all sounds rather overwhelming at first, but the game's unassuming beginning turns into a blessing in disguise. The plot development slowly ladles these advancements to you until you're juggling six balls at once without really thinking about it. Additionally, Persona 3's plot advances in a regular timer, with key story elements always falling on a full moon. This allows the player to keep everything in check. By the time the next full moon appears, the player should be strong enough to battle whatever new experience the game might throw his way, and should have explored all of the section of Tartarus that was available to him. The game's overarching pace is only as fast as the player chooses it to be - while the game's plot progress is distinctly linear, the rails come off completely between full moons. You know what you have to accomplish, and there are several dozen different ways you can accomplish it. You just have to get stronger.
The game remains deep, and at times to its own detriment. This is not a game for everyone; it takes a lot of time, effort, and work to beat Persona 3. But I'll be damned if I didn't enjoy every single moment of it. It was seriously fun, and I found myself underestimating how much enjoyment I'd get out of even the smallest things. Every nook and cranny has something fun, new, or funny to play with, and the meaning behind nearly every line of dialogue is often overwhelming. The game is not hard, but it is large and some people will simply be put off of its breadth.
I purchased the FES version of Persona 3 for several reasons; the main reason being that they still sell it new at a good price. For anyone who wants to make a good Ebay investment would be well advised to pick this gem up, considering the illogical combination of the series' popularity and relative obscurity (the former triggered by this game's unexpected acclaim, critical and from the fan base). But the FES edition adds an extra "Hard" mode that has earned its name, extra Personas, and most notably, an entirely new expansion pack-like campaign that adds even more content onto this enormously long game. Few RPG's make a sixty-hour playtime feel inadequate, but Persona's replayability and lost possibilities makes a second run-through practically mandatory. A second, far harder campaign approaches a misdemeanour offence.
This all adds up to an experience that has yet to be matched. Comparisons require entire lists of games, and a genre description would use more dashes than a Pokemon racing mini-game. Uniqueness is not a trait commonly associated with Japanese-made role playing games, and yet here we have a lovingly crafted, extraordinarily well told adventure that is unlike any game on the PlayStation 2 (save Persona 4). Pick it up before it becomes two hundred dollars on Ebay.