Persona 3: FESAtlus
Anthony: Our first experience with a Shin Megami Tensei/Persona game was a daunting one. Persona 3: FES sent us through a huge array of emotions about the game as time went on. At times, we felt like this was one of the most incredibly modern and engaging games we’d ever seen. Later, we felt like it kind of dragged on. Then when we finished up the unnecessary bonus chapter included only in the FES version, we were actually genuinely angry with what they’d done with the game.
But to be fair, even if we left the game on a very sour note, I know we still vividly remember all that made the game a great experience overall. Having only played a bit into the game, we eagerly purchased Persona 4 when it came out, knowing that it was our kind of RPG. It’s that rare kind of RPG that’s so engaging that if it had been a bit shorter, it might’ve had us completely overlooking the parts we really had to struggle through. And with many, many RPGs out there trying out bad storylines and keeping clichéd characters and plots running throughout, being truly engaging is something worthy of praise.
What’s good:
- The characters and voice acting to accompany them are fantastic. The game really manages to absorb you in these characters’ lives, and the massive amount of quality voice acting and (mostly) realistic dialog only furthers this. While there are a few oddities in here... Fuuka is meek and uninteresting, and you’ll probably find it hard to believe that Akihiko and Mitsuru are high school students from how they speak. We hated Yukari as a character, but she was entirely believable and realistic, so when it was over, we minded that much less than we minded a dull character. Junpei is especially awesome. Overall they pulled this aspect off fantastically.
- The graphics are excellent. The towns and characters are all very realistic looking, and the character portraits convey a good amount of personality throughout. The dungeon keeps from being stale by eventually taking on a very lively appearance as well. It does a great job of making the whole thing feel modern and realistic without being some enormous GTA-style rendered city.
- The Social Link system was a nice development. By choosing to spend time with certain characters throughout the game, you get to experience snippets of their life dramas while inherently benefiting yourself by being able to create stronger Personas for use in battle. With a few exceptions, they left it nice and open-ended. You’re not obligated to hang out with almost anyone in the game, but if you pick out a good set of them, it’ll give you things to do during the many “after school” periods you’ll have, and benefit you in the end. Some stories were sweet, some were sad, some were amusing, and some were dull as can be and we abandoned them as a result.
- The story was presented wonderfully. Many scenes had serious impact on us watching them, others made us chuckle, and many will be memorable years down the road too. Due to the very effed-up nature of the story, some creepy things that happen, and numerous “aw, man!” moments throughout, it stays very intriguing. Rarely did a scene that was intended to have an impact not manage to do so. Great ending too.
What’s neutral:
- While the game is impressively long, it’s also just a bit too long. This is a game that has a fairly lengthy story alone, but will also have you spending days upon days with no story, and mashing in multi-hour trips into a dungeon throughout this as well. Add that to the fact that surprisingly enough, the game’s momentum actually kind of petered out at the end rather than hitting an exciting climax. It really dragged on at the end, and I could’ve easily taken them shaving off 20-30 hours of the non-story and dungeon crawling parts.
- The music was almost a good point. It’s full of funky, modern tunes that really give the whole thing a lifelike feel. The downside is you’ll be hearing them a lot... a lot. The same scenes tend to have the same music, and you see similar scenes constantly given how long the game is. Further, the default dungeon music is very dull, and although you eventually get the option to change it, you can only do it once you’ve entered into a floor of the dungeon, and it unfortunately resets every time you go back to heal. In other words, you’ll probably forget or not want to bother changing it every single time.
- The battle system is overall kind of a mixed bag. On the positive side, there are some very cool strategic elements to it. By analyzing enemies and using the right attacks, you can overcome enemies in more dominating fashion, sometimes wiping out a whole group of enemies by knocking them down and having the party rush in to do free attacks. By that right, it’s pretty cool. The downside is that your party will be vital to your proceeding, but you can never have direct control over them. As a result, they will make some absolutely boneheaded choices that may very well infuriate you at times, and the only way to stop it is by constantly changing their “Tactics” to attempt to stop them from doing certain things. The AI is decent in that it will “learn” things... like if a Fire attack is nullified/absorbed, they won’t try to use it again, which is appreciated. Additionally, the fact that the main character’s death means an instant game over, coupled with the fact that many one-hit kill attacks exist, and that if an enemy gets a critical on you, they get to attack you again, it can be sometimes brutally cruel to deal with, especially when party members may have spells that could theoretically revive you!
What’s bad:
- While the Persona system isn’t inherently bad, and is at times fairly cool, some really bad decisions were made in how you utilize the system. In order to have any chance of progressing the game, you will have to collect numerous Personas with different strengths, weakness, stats, and abilities/attacks, and fuse them with other ones to create stronger ones with more useful combinations of abilities. A few problems arise here. For one, when a Persona learns or inherits new abilities, you’re forced to jettison an old one when you’ve reached the maximum of eight... except you cannot at any time during that process see what the ability you’re trying to learn is. With moves with names like “Marakakarn”, expect that you may need to look at a guide or reload your game to know what’s best. Additionally, fusing Personas makes the new one inherit abilities depending on a bunch of factors... beyond those factors, it’s completely random what they’ll learn. While you can see this ahead of time, what it means is you’ll be constantly choosing fusions, canceling, and choosing them again until you get the abilities you want... over and over and over and over. There’s simply no way you’ll just want to settle for some useless ability over a powerful attack you need, so you’ll be forced to redo things often. And further still, sometimes upon leveling up, a Persona may try to change one of its skills. This too, seems completely random as reloads don’t produce the same results... it can mean the skill turns into a stronger version, or it could be that a powerful attack spell turns into some pointless status-healing spell. It was very random and unnecessary; simply showing what attack you’d get would’ve made it useful.
- Through much of the game, during major plot events (typically having difficult fights), characters will be unable to fight, or forced upon your party. Because there are numerous major plot points that will mess with your characters, I obviously didn’t want to look ahead in a guide to find out who will or won’t be available. Thus, you’ll feel you need to keep other party members up in levels, which means a lot of time spent in the dungeons. However, at a certain point they just stop doing this and put no restrictions or force on party members at all, which means I wasted numerous hours in the dungeon trying to catch up all possible party members’ levels. Obnoxious.
- The 30-hour bonus chapter included with FES, “The Answer” was not a good experience. Lauren’s section explains further, but not only was it not a particularly enjoyable time; it actually negatively impacted our experience with the main game.
This is a tough game to review. Chances are if you haven’t played a Persona game, you’ll never have played anything quite like this. It’s massive, immersive, full of fantastic voice acting and characters, thoroughly modern and yet somehow still accessible to play. However, its too-long story doesn’t sustain itself perfectly... some clichés start to rear their ugly heads later on, large portions of the game go by without anything happening, and the impact really kind of peters out in comparison to the early and mid-game sections. Battle related sections contain some great and strategic elements, but have some very frustrating and unnecessarily time-consuming elements to them.
When you get past the negative though, there’s no doubt this was an impressive RPG that had us glued to the TV for a very long time. A very low price for the FES version too was a major plus.
The localization is fantastic. I was very amused by all the slang and swearing. The friends you can make are quite endearing, especially with their bizarre flaws. There's a character you can meet in an online RPG, and she talks exactly as you'd expect - emotes, typos, and all. Details like that gave the game a very real-world feel even while the storyline took a supernatural route.
The social links were a cool idea. About half of the social link stories were interesting or funny, and the rest were somewhat boring. You can "date" some of the female characters, but even that ended up fairly dull as well. I think my favourite parts of the game were the tours you give to "Elizabeth" - a being who is unfamiliar with life on Earth. They were some of the most amusing scenes I'd seen in an RPG (along with Mana Khemia). My only other minor complaint is that I wish they'd toned down the amount of gratuitous scenes and unnecessarily suggestive Persona "art", but I realize that's par for the course for Atlus these days. Still, not every game needs a hot springs scene, not every female summon has to be dressed like a street-walker, and gamers who want to see that stuff can easily get their fix elsewhere.
But. But! We got FES, the special version of the game, which included many improvements to the normal game, and that's great. It also had a New Game + of sorts, called The Answer. It's essentially a bonus dungeon. But it wasn't enough to say, "Hey players, here's another dungeon - you can't access all the normal parts of the city; just grind for a while and get another ending." Instead, they tried to tie it into the main game's story. To do this, another character was introduced for the purpose of the new segment, and an annoying series of cop-outs and weird explanations (and plot holes as a result) followed.
To be honest, Anthony and I very much disliked what happened with the story at that point - some characters acted very differently in this segment than we felt they would have otherwise. Calm and collected characters suddenly made violent impulse decisions instead of working through a problem with their teammates, for example. The gameplay itself just seemed like basic dungeon-crawling, and that's fine. I didn't mind that the developers just threw the bonus dungeons at you in Tri-Ace games, where they basically said, "Hey, here's a dungeon and a bunch of silly scenes that don't have anything to do with the regular plotline. Have fun!" I understand that they were trying to convey a message here, but after 140 hours of getting attached to the story and characters in The Journey, the sudden character changes, cop-outs, and weird additions cheapened the experience for us and left us wishing we'd ended our playthrough when the first game wrapped up.
In summary, Persona 3: FES was excellent for the most part up until that point. Play the original game/The Journey if you want a unique and engaging RPG experience, but I simply cannot recommend dragging oneself through The Answer.
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