SMT:Persona 3 is the most accessible satisfying and best experience in either of the series it represents.
Story & Characters This is the first point where SMT stands strong as game, in this game you play the usual quiet, fairly unlikeable lead character whom you name at the start and I as a female found as equally impossible to project my personality on as usual. However fortunately the other cast more than make up for the ineptness of your lead along with a well crafter story. The game takes place in Japan where you and the other cast members gradually awaken to the fact that there is an hour that occurs at midnight that only you experience and during that time while the rest of humanity turn into coffins you and your cohorts must battle creatures called Shadows in a dungeon on top of your school called Tarturus. This is all fleshed out in great detail in the game, but for the purposes of the review I'll keep things simple as most of you will have played it already. In Tarturus you battle shadows by shooting yourself in the head and summoning forth a "Persona" (this time one of the SMT demons) that fights for you. Your allies do the same. Soon you find that every 30days or so (the game works on a day by day basis) you'll have a big shadow to fight and gradually a dark and epic plot reveals itself and you can save the world. Hooray!
The dark, demon summoning plot is backed up by a strong cast most of who are fantastic. The cast includes..
Yukari – Possible love interest and adorable cute girl with a big heart. I didn't like her that much.
Junpei – Your thickheaded brash classmate with a nice guy buried deep within the normal teenage exterior, a deep character who takes time to develop.
Mitsuru – Ah Mitsuru, how I thought you were awesome. The leader of the shadow busting group Mitsuru is a cool collected upperclassman and she heads up the student council too.
Akihiko – Amateur boxer, whom all the girls adore Akihiko is a character with a dark past.
There are many others but mentioning them would include mega spoilers. However each of the large cast has some amazing moments of drama, their own stories to be found and even possible love interests for you. There are simply to many great characters to cover here.
Gameplay
Persona 3 has two distinct styles of game, a day to day schoolife dating sim style game where you gain social skills and abilities from every day actions and interactions and dungeon crawling in Tarturus.
The traditional more "interactive movie" aspect of the game works well with you being able to pursue many different stories with multiple cast members (your gaining of social links with people powers up your Persona's for battle), including romances, dramas etc.. as well as shopping for new items, studying and taking part in school exams and going to the movies. There are so many possibilities to find and it's difficult to find all the social links in the game in just one play through (maybe impossible?)
The dungeon crawling involves you and three chosen allies going through one of Tarturus' 240 something floors battling shadows. The shadows are visible on the map but once you hit them or they hit you, you enter a turn based battle. In the battle you control primarily yourself with your allies acting independently of you with you having basic control over their actions such as "Support" or "All out Attack". The game uses the SMT spells and battle system most people who have played these titles are familiar with, it has a heavy focus on enemy weaknesses being exploited to win. It isn't as tough or frustrating as most SMT games though and can be forgiving even on normal. A refreshing change. Upon winning fights you get to pick cards from a shuffled deck to find more Persona's and can fuse them together to create new ones in the usual SMT style. It's as deep and complex as you expect from the tried and tested fusion system.
The only problem with SMT's gameplay and indeed the entire game is the repetition which is a BIG issue. You can easily get bored of grinding in Tarturus and running through hundreds of similar looking floors. It falls flat on its face when it comes to original content after the first few months and for this reason alone I deduct too much, it needs more variety to be a perfect game and this repetition means its still good, but isn't quite there.
Graphics & Sound Persona 3 while having dark subject matter uses chibi-style graphics on its cast members which while crisp and well done can spoil the atmosphere a bit. I find it hard to take emotional scenes seriously when the cast look like they are made from duplo. However, the SD characters when they speak are shown in detailed beautiful anime style art and there are anime cutscenes too which greatly improve on this. These factors let me look over the way the SD can be mildly annoying at times.
Sound wise we have a LOT of cheesy Jpop that will possibly drive people mad, and some good atmospheric tunes and decent voice acting. Nothing remarkable but I kinda liked it.
Lastability
About 40 hours if you just play through, hundreds if you grind. It's up to you but judging by how repetitive in terms of dungeon crawling a 40 hour game is, I would consider myself insane to want to play 100. The 40 hours is just bearable length wise.
Overall
Overall P3 has an amazing plot and cast, some great schoolife/dating-sim aspects which are really original for an RPG released outside of Japan and the combat is fun, addictive but the overall length of the game can make things repetitive and drag on a bit. Not perfect. But a great game that everyone needs to play.