Sorry about the late posting. I’ve been busy going over to friends’ houses and all that other stuff and just haven’t had time to come back on. Not to mention I kind of forget that I need to update this at times hehe…
Anyways lets get going with this review!
Persona 3. Released in the states this month and offers a very unique style of “gameplay”. It offers your classic roaming along with getting into battles like in Valkyrie Profile 2 (thats the only game I can think of that involves you to hit an enemy before they hit you to get into a battle and gain an advantage). The battle system is slightly turn-based which you, the protagonist, will order your teammates around to either focus on healing, buffering, acting-freely or weakness scanning. The only person your really controlling is the protagonist. Everything else is just used via commands and the computer will act upon that. This is all what you do during the night pretty much.
While going out and fighting “shadows” is fun at night you also have to deal with daily school life. Everything from participating in clubs, making friends (which affect your Persona stats and all), increasing your 3 stats of Charm, Courage and Intelligence, and even going out and dating (which is really just part of making friends). You’ll be asked questions in school which will require prior knowledge of the topic and also take the mid-year and answer based on your memory of the question you got in class.
The characters in the game are quite ranged. You’ll find just about anyone you can think of. Of course you’ll probably end up befriending everyone anyways, which kind of works in real life…Regardless this is only half the fun of the game. The questing inside Tartarus is pretty annoying. At first you would get to a “checkpoint” (I call them that) every….5 levels or so and you’d fight a guardian/mini-boss before proceeding onto the next few levels. As you get higher up the enemies become stronger and also the checkpoint areas become less and less frequent. Not to mention when you reach a road block at the “peak” of the area you will need to walk all the way up from the check point once the wall is down allowing you to proceed. Walls will be taken down each time you kill a boss…. or in other words every full moon you will be forced to take down a boss which will then pull the wall down. Your party can only consist of 3 members excluding yourself so when you start to get more people you will need to choose wisely. Also EXP points are shared and the more members you have in the party the less you’ll get….so if you decide to go solo you will gain more.
The battles will require you to use a mix of physical attack and Persona summons. Now depending on the enemies weakness you may be forced to only use Persona based attacks or Weapon based attacks only… Personas are only summoned for the split second it needs to attack via an Evoker (which is a gun pretty much….that you aim at your head). Each Persona has its own weakness and strengths which will also determine your survival against specific enemies. An example would be if your Persona was weak against Wind then a Wind-based attack would be strong on you and will also give the enemy one extra attack. NOW! if you attack the enemy with an attack that its weak against then they will be knocked down and you’ll receive an extra attack. If you get multiple enemies you can target them in various ways and if all enemies are knocked down you can do a “gang-rape” attack where you all attack at once (with pretty cheesy English voice acting and dialog to spare). After the battle you will be asked to pick cards that will be shuffled. Cards will contain money, HP healing, EXP boost?, or a new Persona. You can’t have the same Persona on you, so that means no doubling up on one Persona.
The game features full English voice-acting (which in my opinion is kind of lame and funny at the same time) with somewhat mildly funny dialog, which feels really awkward to me.
The game itself is quite easy to pick up and requires no prior knowledge of the previous Persona games and does not require anyone to get a “Megaten” fan to enjoy it (cause I have never played any “Megaten” games prior to this) The game MAY! be somewhat contraversial to some since the process to summon a Persona requires the user to use an Evoker (gun) and shoot themselves in the head. Although not a real gun the fact that it looks like they are shooting themselves with one in the head means many parents might get angry.
This game is rated “M” for some mildly stupid reasons (In my opinion), but regardless I recommend many to try it out.
~Kevin~
Sorry for the horrible organization.
