I’ll be perfectly frank: I love me some Japanese RPGs. They also drive me insane. A lot of my hostility towards Japanese RPGs originates from my track record with them as a kid. Isn’t it a royal pain to play something that feels like it’s built around the concept of crushing your soul? Nothing is more degrading that spending hours leveling the snot out of your team only to get whupped into submission by a boss that’s eight times your size. So, despite my professed love, I am always hesitant when jumping into a JRPG.
Take Persona 3, for example: I didn’t get my hands on it until this month when it was re-released as Persona 3 FES. But Atlus couldn’t have made my decision to purchase it any easier: new content not seen in the original game, an extra storyline called FES, and a price point of $29.95USD…come to papa. Since loading it up in my PS2 a week ago, it has officially replaced GTA IV as my go to game of the month. That is saying a lot of this little game.
Like a lot of RPGs, the first order of business is to name the protagonist: your voiceless avatar that gets stuck with whatever exotic name you decide to bestow upon him or her. Hindsight being 20/20 I wish I had gone with Iroquois Pliskin (an MGS 2 reference to Solid Snake), but instead I went with Tsunami Sunday (and if you don’t like it…tough).
Having taken Tsunami through the first block of Tartarus, the evil tower your school turns into at night, and defeated the second big boss in the game, I can honestly say: I am hooked. At its core, it’s a pretty standard JRPG. But P3 has several unique design elements that place it above the competition.
For one, combat is quite streamlined. Although you have a three-member team you can only control your character and issue generic orders to your party members. This is quite sufficient for each battle, though, because the personaes do a lot of the work and come ready with spells for both attack and support roles. This makes combat very fast; far shorter than in most RPGs.
Also, ‘training’ usually takes place over a period of 29 in-game days with boss battles occurring during the full moon. In order to keep your explorations in Tartarus fresh your party usually tires out after around 20 or 30 minutes. While that might annoy some, this is actually set up to help you in game. The better rested you and your team is, the better you fight in Tartarus. Your status also effects how you participate in the other half of the game: school.
Although one might be quick judge this part of the game as superfluous, it would be a huge misconception. While you do gain the ability to control higher level personaes through battle, the strength of your personaes are dependent upon stat-trees you can only level during the day.
There is your personal stat tree consisting of Charm, Academics, and Strength. You can level these at any time during the day. Then there is the Soul Link tree. You level this up by interacting with certain characters in your school and around the city. Each Soul Link pertains to a class of Persona. As your relationship with a certain group or person increases, your ability to control personaes of that Soul Link increases. This turns what could have been a chore-like hurdle between you and the combat into an integral part of defeating the shadows.
Lastly, Persona’s fuse and collection system, while not a gaming breakthrough, is no less addicting than it was in Pokemon. Every time you go to Tartarus you have the ability to collect Personas that you can use until you level up enough to fuse them into more powerful personaes. Fusing personaes, like in a chemical reaction, results in the loss of the original personaes used (even if the fusion fails, a rare occurrence). This constant recycling of personaes encourages you to keep heading back into Taratrus. The more personaes you have at your disposal, the greater your tactical options are. Often I find myself going, “just one more trip to Tartarus. I need to get ‘x’ persona for the next boss battle!” This is usually occurs around 3am, of course.
So far, Persona 3 is turning out to be a very worthy experience. It’s no wonder that it has received the accolades it has up to this point. If I had to complain about one thing, it’s the lack of a dedicated inventory screen. I can understand not being able to see my party’s status and inventory when I’m not with them, but if I’m standing with my party members in Tartarus I shouldn’t have to talk to them in order to check their status and inventory. It just adds more windows to navigate through…and I am lazy.
Next time on Late to the Party I plan to be most of the way through “The Journey”. I’ll let you guys know how it went when I get there.
GCB
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