The game is oozing with personality, and it's backed up by great gameplay.
The game is oozing with personality, and it's backed up by great gameplay. The characters are well personified and the voice-acting is a good addition. The story is interesting, and the random events present themselves well. The main objective in the game is to attempt to fully explore Tartarus, an incredibly tall tower that appears in place of your new school during the Dark Hour, a time separating the end of the day to the start of the next, where only select individuals have the power to move around and interact with the world. Typically, you are one of them, which plays out with you joining SEED, a force of operations studying the Dark Hour and Tartarus, composed of the people who live in your dorm. You start out with only 4 dorm-mates and your sort-of-leader who visits once in a while, but the roster grows as you progress through the game. With your companions, you explore Tartarus by navigating maze-like layouts on each floor that randomize themselves everytime (except for select special floors), which can get quite tedious thanks to the repetitive environments. Luckily enough, you can distract yourself, as there are usually a lot of enemies to fight on each floor which is one of the best parts of the game.
Fighting is a turn-based system that is fairly simple to get used to. You can perform a very helpful scan of your enemies to find and exploit their weaknesses in order to level up and become more powerful along with your Persona from which many of your skills will come from. As the Protagonist, you have the special ability to take on a vast number of Personas, giving you the advantage of changing your Persona to suit your needs in battle. All this works beautifully well, from the graphics to the pacing.
There are also many things to do outside of exploring Tartarus. Naturally, as a high school student, you have an obligation to attend school on weekdays, and the rest of your time after school is devoted to many things. You can purchase weapons at the police station, eat in restaurants to boost your personality (composed of Courage, Charisma and Academics, which will help you unlock more events in the game) and interact with certain members of the population to improve your relationships and in turn, your Social Link. Leveling up your Social Links will help you create Personas and give them hefty experience bonuses upon creation. You can also take on sidequests, which usually deals with finding certain things. One thing about it is the vague clues you get on what item to find. Some items that you need to find outside of Tartarus are presented as clues such as 'a Christmas star' or 'a glasses wipe' with no real basis as to where you should start looking. Cluelessness aside, this also serves as a challenge to make you think. You really have to rack your brain to find out who you should get that item from or where to find it. You wander the map using a cursor, to talk to people, enter shops and the like. Unfortunately the 3D maps in which you explore the world just like you would Tartarus did not make it to this port.
Overall, the game is incredibly good. The repetitive exploration is negligible thanks in part to the character models that look stunning for a PSP game and the immersive battle system, along with the story that should keep you playing for hours.