Your high school life can save the world.
So the game is divided into 3 parts. 1 is day time social activities as normal high school student. That consists of talking to your fellow school mates, joining clubs, going on a date, making friends and chilling with them on weekends, and even playing MMORPG. 2 is dungeon crawling which is fairly basic dungeon crawler. 3 is time management. The time doesn't move by actual time. Any event done moves time period forward, which limits what you can do within that time period but you don't have to worry about time running out when you are running around thinking what to do. Let's break down each parts. Social activities is easily the most enjoyable part of this game. However, be warned that this is huge part of the game and this part of the game is very much of an acquired taste. Not everyone enjoys to see their character drinking coffee or watching romantic movie to raise his charm or singing karaoke by himself to raise his courage, or worst of all, studying for mid-terms and finals. These activities are needed to raise stats of your character, but that stats is unrelated to anything action oriented. This is your social stats and higher those stats are, easier it is for to create social connection with others. If you have played any dating sim involved with stats, this should feel right at home. To those who dislike reading large amount of text, this will easily annoy you and turn you off from this game right away. If you think you can just ignore this and just enjoy randomly generated dungeon, then you will be solely disappointed to know that without creating these social links, the game becomes much more difficult because your cards will be lower level and you will lack magics and stat boost from them. You can get by with leveling, equipments, and grinding with your cards (which is called "Persona" they level with you as well), but if you do that, the game will be one very shallow and repetitive game, not to mention difficult. So if you don't enjoy games where you have to read a lot of text and making choices withing daily routine of a boy's life in high school, you might want to skip this game. However, if you do give it a chance, you will realize there is plenty of fun in this simple formula as there are quite a bit of quirky humor and some warm fuzzy moment of innocent high school love relationship you get to create and build. Now moving on to randomly generated dungeon. This is something that can turn off many classic RPG fans. Most RPG fans like exploration and having that sense of adventure. Going to new places and meeting new kinds of people if often what attracts people to RPG games. However, being stuck in one town and one dungeon can sound not very attractive feature of a game. However, Persona 3 has interesting way of making randomly generated dungeon fun. It relates to your allies. First, only playable character is your main character and no one else. Rest of your party members are automated by A.I and A.I does fairly good job at making right decisions. You can give commands to A.I to take certain type of tactics but it will be automatically controlled. This is unique aspect of this game because the game is turn based combat so the need of making A.I automated doesn't make a lot of sense until you actually experience it. By doing this, the characters you travel with doesn't feel like just another pawn for you to use but companions where you will have to rely on to survive. Another interesting part about randomly generated dungeon is the cards. Going around to collect cards to use them to fuse with other cards to make even stronger cards. That can easily be good motivation to explore this huge randomly generated dungeon over and over again. Also there are these requests certain NPC makes that works very much like quests. All of them are basically fetch type of quests but searching for them is not easy because certain floor of the dungeon has specific monsters that gives those certain items. Last but not least, best part about this dungeon is that you really don't have to go if you don't want to. If you want to concentrate on your social life, you can concentrate on it and ignore the dungeon for a while. You will miss many of things that is dungeon related, but the game does great job making it feel like you have a choice between life of a hero living in danger and regular school boy life. How you manage between these two is another part that makes this game so much fun. In the end, the game ends up being one of the most entertaining RPG that has been released so far in PS2. The game is certainly won't be enjoyable to everyone but to those who can appreciate what this game has to offer, will enjoy this game very much and embrace it as much as you have with any other games. Still, the game does have number of flaws. Visually the game is very basic. You can call it a style but even games with this kind of style usually shows more details. Also the music is rather difficult to judge as many of them do feel little out of place even if they are catchy music. Also worst flaw of the game is voice acting. Unlike Atlus game, this game doesn't have Japanese voice acting option, which wouldn't be much of a problem if voice actors did great job. They didn't do a bad job, but they certainly over-act their roles quite a bit and some of the voices doesn't seem to fit the character very well. Aside from these small minor flaws, the game is more than solid in every aspect, despite it's small scaled feeling of the game. Also unlike what many would think, the game isn't exactly that creative game because it just use existing formula that American audience isn't used to. All it did was add two existing formula and make it work. In the end, if you can keep your mind open about this game and give it second or third try, you will find unique turn based battles, interesting randomly generated dungeon, fun high school life sim, excellent story, and experience of unique mood you don't get to see very often. If you think you can keep open minded about this game, give it a try. To most people, it will certainly be something you've never experienced before and that alone is good enough reason to try it.