review: persona 3 FES

Videogames and controversy go together like peanut butter and chocolate. Politicians,
like the moderately unhinged Hillary Clinton, and lawyers, like the generally despised, frequently untruthful Jack Thompson, have a field day whenever something like the hot coffee mod scandal crops up. Decrying sex and violence in games that they view as “for kids” earns the politicians votes from parents too lazy to check the game’s rating, and the attorneys earn more cash from frivolous lawsuits against game companies than they can from running down eight ambulances. They even go so far as to try to get some games banned, like the extremely tame, teen rated high school free roamer Bully, simply because they think that there might be something naughty in it. Recent attentions have, of course, turned to the blockbuster game Grand Theft Auto 4, and Jack Thompson even went so far as to threaten Rockstar to get it cancelled before even seeing gameplay footage. With so much attention on offensive video games, it boggles the mind to think that a game featuring, among other things, teen suicide, illicit student/teacher relationships, and kids who use weapons to “repay” bullies, could completely slip under the radar. It would seem impossible that it could do it TWICE, especially if it were part of a long running series with similar themes. One game has managed this perfectly, and the result is the ultimate edition of one of the finest games ever made: Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 FES (festival edition).

The premise of the Persona series is simple, it’s a classic turn based RPG with a twist: instead of attacking with the party characters, you mostly use “Persona,” a magical representation of the characters’ psyches to do battle. Characters with fired up personalities, for instance, have fire based personas, whereas characters with an icy disposition will…well, you get the picture. Persona 3 expands upon this concept by giving the main character, who is an emotional blank slate, free choice of his magical assistants. The result is somewhat like an awesome version of Pokemon: you can collect Personae in the game and fuse them to form new, stronger warriors. This system is joined with something akin to a Japanese dating sim: by forming friendships with other people at your school and in the community, you can create more powerful Personae of Aracana that match to the personalities of your friends. The stronger the friendship, the stronger the Persona, which is good, because with the battles being as tough as they are, you’ll need all the help you can get.

It’s a bit of an understatement to call the battles in Persona 3 difficult. This is not to say that the battles are overly complicated, in fact, you only have direct control over one party member, and the only thing you really have to worry about in terms of trumping enemies is your elemental affinity (fire beats water, for instance). But simple, again, does not mean easy. You see, because you control just one character, if that character dies in battle, it’s game over. At first this isn’t too brutal, as enemy attacks will damage you down to half health at most (unless you equip a persona with a weakness to your enemy) but when you get to about the 30th floor of Tartarus (the game’s single, massive, randomly generated dungeon) regular enemies start bringing out one hit kill attacks. Completing a difficult side quest only to be killed at the exit by a Hama or Mudo skill is infuriating, but with proper planning it’s preventable. For one thing, if you manage to get behind an enemy and hit them, you can get in a free round of attacks before they respond; however, enemies can do the same, so watch out and stay stealthy. Higher floors almost force you to use stealth tactics to win, and also force you to use the game’s other major tactic: elemental rock paper scissors, a system in which attacking with your enemy’s weakness allows you to get an extra turn and takes theirs away. Using this tactic allows you to leave battles completely unscathed, so long as your AI teammates don’t attack and let the enemies get back up.

The AI varies based on the personalities of party members, and certain members are unfortunately extremely lacking. Fortunately, AI mess-ups are avoidable, so long as you make use of the battle tactics option in the battle menu. This option acts like a simplified Version of the Gambit system from Final Fantasy XII, allowing you to influence the decisions of AI teammates by choosing from a list of useful tactics. It takes a while to get the really useful tactics (like the one that prevents your teammates from attacking downed enemies), but they come along at a fairly steady pace, and because each one is gained after a big boss fight, you feel like you’ve earned them once you get them. You can get to the end without using tactics, of course, but expect to see the Game Over screen a lot. That much dying will mean that beating the game might take much longer than usual, and considering how long the game is, that is quite a vast amount of time.

The original Persona 3 could last over a hundred hours depending on which ending you chose and how much time you spent on side quests. FES, the Re-release, adds a lot of content to the main plot, and adds a number of extra side quests to chew up your time. That’s just the tip of the iceberg, though, when compared to the thirty hour long additional chapter that’s been added to FES. The Answer, as it’s called, is essentially a mini sequel to Persona 3, and it ties up many of the loose ends left in the original story, which, by the way, is outstanding.

Persona 3 really is excellent on all fronts, from the storytelling to the gameplay, everything is truly masterfully done. Not only is the game close to perfect, but now you can get it in it’s ultimate form for only thirty dollars, which is a deal that you’d have to be a zombie to pass up. It's a darn good thing that Jack Thompson missed this one, because otherwise we might have missed out on this rockin' awesome RPG.