"Oh, hey, Rariow, you've crowned
Persona 4 your favorite game, have you not? How about you go back and play the prequel? You know it's a bit rougher, but you'll get the same kind of experience.
It's the story that you
really loved in
Persona 4, so you'll probably still enjoy this one, right?"
And so, Rariow bravely set out to play
Persona 3 FES, the extended edition of the prequel to his favorite game of all time. Oh boy.
 |
| You only get this image. I don't want to play more. |
|
Now, I admit, my expectations of this game were colored by having played
Persona 4 before it. I know now, after surfing the web, that it's a common thing to love the first PS2
Persona game you play, and hate the second. I wouldn't go so far as saying I hated
Persona 3. It's definitely got its merits, and even surpasses
Persona 4 at times. Now, because I'm lazy, I'll do something that really shouldn't be done with this review: I'll reference
Persona 4's. A lot. And make direct comparisons between the two. You have to understand, my expectations were strongly colored by
Persona 4, and I'm doing the exact opposite of what good practice would dictate here: I'm bashing the prequel for being worse than the sequel, instead of praising the iterative improvements the sequel makes.
I'm also only reviewing the
The Journey section of
FES. This is, as far as I understand, all that's included in both the vanilla edition and
Persona 3 Portable, with a few mechanical improvements over vanilla and a few inferior mechanics to
Portable.
The Answer actually feels quite different, but has the exact same combat mechanics, and I frankly can't be fucked to play through it. The plot doesn't seem interesting enough, and I can't be force myself to go through more of the combat. I'll play through it, eventually, but not before cleansing my pallet with something that isn't a JRPG. And by something, I mean a bunch of things.
Link to Persona 4 review, since I'll definitely be referring to that more than I should.
Presentation:
You can definitely see how the Persona series evolved. Persona 3 presents its story in a way much similar to Persona 4 (though I should probably say Persona 4's plot is presented similar to Persona 3's), but feels worse realized. The biggest problem with the story is the pace. Persona 4 presented you with a roster of characters, some of who were initially jackasses but evolved throughout the story. Yosuke is a good example of this: He starts off irresponsible, arrogant, and selfish, but begins a journey of realization upon first entering the Midnight Channel. In
Persona 3, however, the characters are all jackasses, and stay that way for way too long. Instead of beginning journeys of self-improvement quickly after the beginning of the game, the characters are content to stay completely unlikeable for most of the game, gaining redemption only near the end.
It's frustrating, too, because the redemption arcs are actually really well realized. The one involving Junpei, in particular, was very impressive to me, and I'd say it surpasses a lot of the arcs in
Persona 4. However, the problem lies in the pacing. This arc happens when there's only about ten hours left in the game. Now, this seems like a lot, and it is: the arc develops at a fantastic, crisp, yet not rushed pace, hits all the appropriate points, and is extremely moving. Or would be
. Persona 3 is an 80 hour game, much like its sequel. This means that you've spent 70 hours with a Junpei who is profoundly, deeply unlikeable. It's hard to feel moved by a character when you've spent so much time learning to utterly hate him. Despite the fact that I could appreciate how well his story was written, I couldn't get over my dislike of Junpei by the end of the game.
Junpei is perhaps the biggest example of this, but it's true of almost all the main cast. Of the three characters that don't suffer from this, one is genuinely well written, one goes through an extremely trite and tired cliche of an arc about halfway through the game, and the other is a dog.
But what about the side characters?
Persona 4's strength lay with the main cast, but it was backed up by a fantastic cast of side characters, some with Social Links and some without. Maybe that can save
Persona 3? Thankfully, yes. The side cast isn't as universally strong as that in
Persona 4, but is still varied and interesting. It does have a terrible case of gems and turds. The good Social Links are really, really good, with one or two of them outshining the best of
Persona 4. The bad Social Links are really, really terrible, and a complete waste of time. Avoid the Magician and the Moon! Check out the Hanged Man and the Sun! The worse Social Links are written extremely illogically. The actions of both the Linked character and the main character make no sense at all, and it brings you out of the experience. To worsen things, most of them are based on cliche, though some of the good ones actually manage to make that work, the Sun in particular.
The overarching plot of the game is... magnificently OK. It goes for a darker tone than what
Persona 4 has, and falls flat on its face. That said, even as not a straight-up detective story, it managed to hold my interest, seeing what discovery would come up next. It's certainly a mysterious narrative, and that manages to hold out well. I can't help but feel that the reason
Persona 4 is a detective story is how good the mystery elements of
Persona 3 turned out.
Now, the tone of the game deserves its own paragraph.
Persona 3 tries to be all dark and broody, but it comes across as effectively as a self-styled depressed 13-year old poet does. It uses shocking imagery: You summon a Persona by shooting yourself in the head with a gun-shaped machine, people turn into coffins, blood leaks out of walls... but it's all empty. None of it has any meaning, symbolic or otherwise, and it rapidly looses any weight it has, becoming little more than a cool looking visual effect a few hours into the game. It suffers the same problem a lot of JRPGs have,
Final Fantasy VIII coming especially to mind: The entire game takes itself so seriously and it has so few moments of joy that it's hard to notice when the sadness intensifies. This is made especially annoying because the one or two times the characters do indulge in a
Persona 4 style goof-fest it leads to some of the best, most noticeably dark, moments in the game. It also tries to have a dark theme, but fails to say anything about it. It seems content to just point out that death is imminent, and leave it at that, making no real comment and having no real moral apart from a very hastily tacked-on one in the last two hours of play about the power of friendship. That would be alright in a 5 hour game, or even a 10 hour one, but once you reach the 80 hour mark, I'm expecting something a little deeper and more significant than the most overused platitude in the history of humanity, especially when you're insisting I take you so damn seriously.
I'll admit, the set up for the story is ingenious. Between each day, there's a time "The Dark Hour" where time freezes for everyone but Persona users and Shadows. People attacked by Shadows get all their emotions sucked out, and turned into apathetic husks. You're a transfer student conscripted into an investigation group of Persona users attempting to put an end to the Dark Hour. There's a mysterious tower, nicknamed Tartarus, appearing where your school is every Dark Hour that serves as a Shadow nest.
It's a good setup, and makes sense mechanically, which is a fantastic factor. However, it doesn't really go anywhere. The story slowly meanders around the backstory of how the Dark Hour started, before realizing it's running out of time and hurriedly introducing a threat for act 3. What's even stranger is that said threat is actually introduced at the end of act 1, and promptly forgotten about by all the characters for a good 30 hours of gametime, then awkwardly brought back out of nowhere.
That's it for my unfocused critique of the story. The visuals fare better: The artstyle of
Persona 4 is obviously a continuation of this style, but considerably more refined. Whilst the 3D rendered stuff looks about the same, the drawn art is considerably weaker in
Persona 3, the animation sequences in particular. That said, less imagination is put into enviroments: Tartarus is really generic for most of the game, and only once you get to the last two or three blocks does it start looking interesting. The town, however, looks amazingly enough, better than in
Persona 4, mostly through virtue of a slightly more colorful palette. It's not a huge improvement, but it's nice, especially considering how much time you'll be spending there.
In the
Persona 4 review I guessed that a lot of the enemy models were recycled. I was right, a lot of the enemies in
Persona 3 are exactly the same. However, they're a lot less well spaced out. Consecutive blocks of Tartarus will often have re-colors of the same enemy, which bogs the variety down a fair bit.
Finally, the soundtrack. It's a lot more of a mixed bag than
Persona 4 was, in my personal opinion. Whilst Meguro's genius still shines bright through, a lot of the songs seem unfitting. You've got hip-hop playing as your battle theme, which makes next to no sense given the darker tone of the game, and some of the town themes are rather ear-shatteringly high-pitched. The real crime is the Tartarus theme, which is one of the most boring pieces of music composed by man: ambient noise with occasionally a note or two being played on a piano. You can luckily change this once you get your second navigator, but by that point I had long stopped caring and just been played my own music instead. However, some of the songs later in the game really give it atmosphere, and this was when it came closest to achieving the dark atmosphere it so wanted. Until, of course, someone opened their mouth.
Presentation Verdict: 7.5/10
To summarize: An interesting plot with a clever set-up is ruined by being about a group of unlikable assholes, as well as trying way too hard to be dark whilst not really making any sort of point. The game looks good, and the music goes from brilliant to utterly boring.
Don't get me wrong, despite all my negativity, when
Persona 3´s story works, it
really works. There's some real gut-punch moments in there, but it's offset by an upsetting amount of incompetence.
Gameplay:
Persona 3's gameplay is, for the most part, identical to that of
Persona 4. Your life is divided up into life sim and dungeon crawler, where bonds made in the life sim half (called Social Links) allow you to create more powerful personae to use in the dungeon crawler half.
Astonishingly enough, the life sim half of
Persona 3 is actually slightly better than that in
Persona 4. There's more areas to go to, and a lot more viable things to do apart from Social Links. Whilst you have less stats (three to
Persona 4's five), these feel considerably more important, blocking access to several Social Links. Party member Social Links are very rare, with only four members of your party being available to link with (One of which is exclusive to
FES), and they don't give the combat bonuses that party member Social Links would give in
Persona 4. This means that it's feasible that you might decide to skip out on a Social Link to raise your stats in order to get a Link you're more interested in.
Evening periods are also a lot more useful. Whereas in
Persona 4 you're confined to your house, in
Persona 3 you can also visit the mall, where you can pay to raise certain stats (both life-sim stats and Persona stats), or participate in a few Social Links. Later in the game you unlock more things to do in your dorm, as well, which provide something to do once you've maxed out your stats and Social Links.
The other thing you can do in the evening is visit Tartarus, which does remove that element of weighing the importance of completing the dungeon versus increasing Social Links
Persona 4 had to some extent. Evening periods are useful, sure, but once you've completed the available evening Social Links, nothing you can do outweighs going to the dungeon until you've completed a block.
Now, the Social Links themselves, as I said, are much more of a mixed bag. The problem I have with the gameplay aspect within them (this being the choices you can make) is that, completely the opposite to
Persona 4, most of the time it's considerably too easy to know what to pick to make the Link advance faster. Here's how most stories go: The characters you spend time with will have a glaring character flaw, or be committing an obvious mistake. To increase faster, you have to agree with them, and perpetuate this. Then, around the late ranks, they'll realize the error of their ways, at which point you agree with them about this too, and advance faster. It's annoyingly obvious once you've gone through a rank or two of any Social Link how to advance all of them, and it isn't helped by the fact that you've got to act like a complete enabling tool to do so.
Once you've finished an evening period, you get a choice between going to bed early and studying. Studying results in an increase to your Academics stat, which is significantly slower to raise than the other two stats, but may tire you out, whilst sleeping early will increase your energy status.
Energy status is another interesting system put into the game. As you progress through the dungeon, characters will get tired, causing them to become significantly weaker in battle. They'll take more damage, hit less often and for less, and take more turns to get back up after a knockdown. There's three states: Tired, Normal, and Great. The better you're feeling, the harder and more often you hit. Characters feeling Great will go down to Tired a lot slower than those in Normal condition. Tiredness takes a few days to wear off, unless you as the main character take a few actions, such as the aforementioned sleeping earlier or going to the toilet... for some reason.
This system is implemented because of the structure of the dungeon. Unlike in
Persona 4, you only visit the one dungeon, Tartarus, divided into blocks. Every month, you'll climb through a block, reach an impassable area, and stop until the plot event where the next area opens. You'll usually reach a blockade halfway through a block and at the end of a block. The problem is just how damn big this fucking tower is.
Tartarus is huge. Each half of a block is about the size of a
Persona 4 dungeon, but there's more blocks in this thing than there were dungeons in
Persona 4. To add to this,
Persona 4 limited you through very stingy SP regenerating items. You'd have to leave the dungeon once your SP was finished, and this was alright, because you could leave at any floor and come back to that floor when you next entered the dungeon.
Persona 3 does not do this. SP regeneration is easy, and travel is a pain in the ass. You can only leave on select floors, if you find an exit point. To be even worse, most exit points are one-way only, meaning you're left to climb all the fucking way up again next time you enter. Two-way exit points, which unlock a way to teleport straight back to them when they're activated, are extremely stingily spread out, often 10 or more floors apart.
And there's just no reason to leave at a one-way exit point. All that means is that you've wasted your time and made no real progress. You
have to push on to a two-way exit point. And two-way exit points are
rare. From one to the other, you'll likely be spending a good two hours slogging through Tartarus. This wouldn't be that bad if Tartarus was interesting in any way. It really is not. Aside from the last two blocks, it's a completely bland environment.
The game does attempt to pace you. The tiredness system is a good idea, discouraging you from going too far, and even maybe forcing you to use one-way exit points, then coming back more leveled up and breezing through the floors faster. In theory. However, you seem to get tired slower the later you get in the game, and after the first block, you'll be getting tired slower than you'll be arriving at two-way exit points (read:
way too slow). Even when you do get tired before reaching a two-way exit point, the extreme pointlessness of leaving through a one-way exit point will most likely compel you to power on until you reach a two-way. As much as the game tries not to, it encourages you to spend two or more hours at a time within Tartarus. You also have to go to Tartarus considerably more often than you have to go into dungeons in
Persona 4, a new half-block (each of will take two or three two-hour trips to complete) unlocking each month. Even this could be compensated by good combat.
Could be compensated by good combat
.
That's the real problem with
Persona 3. The combat is
GODDAMN AWFUL.
On a surface level, it's very similar to
Persona 4 (and I recommend you read that review for an overview of the combat. It's decently in-depth, and I don't want to have to re-explain it). But there's one key difference that ruins the entire experience. In
Persona 4, you have the option to take direct control of your teammates. This was an innovation in
Persona 4. In
Persona 3, you're limited to setting your companions to a few behavior patterns. The problem is, these patterns seem to be suggestions, not orders. I'd often set my healer to "heal/support", and she'd then proceed to cast damage spells on the enemy instead of healing my weakened party. What's even worse is that, even when your suggestions do come through, you don't have the level of control you want. An annoyingly common occurrence late in the game was the aforementioned healer, set to "heal/support", would cast an extremely powerful and costly single-target healing spell... when my entire party was mildly damaged, and a slightly less costy mid-range AoE heal would restore everyone to full.
This is a tremendous issue. Hours upon hours of frustration were spent yelling at the screen for my idiot party members to do a slightly different thing. By the end of the game, I'd come to dread my party member's turns more than my enemies, because there was always the real chance they'd do something batshit retarded that would make the fight drag on even longer.
Which brings us to the second issue that stems from the lack of direct control over your party members. During combat, you'll only be playing for what I estimate to be about 10 seconds per minute, less if you've already set your party members to do what they want and don't need to change their tactics. The rest of the time will be spent watching AI controlled characters fight each other. It's tedious as all hell, and made even worse by knowing that if your moron party members would stop using spirit drain instead of casting an AoE spell this fight could have been over in mere seconds. There's also the baffling decision to unlock tactics options over time, which makes the game go at an even more insanely slow pace until you unlock the "knock down" tactic, which at least gives a decent chance your posse of idiots might set up a chance for an all-out attack.
This, of course, also means the difficulty is completely gimped. The devs obviously knew you can rely on your party members to do what you want as much as you can rely on a wolf in a fairy tale to be a friendly pacifist, and as such, the game is pathetically easy. Playing on normal difficulty, I managed to beat the final boss with a Persona that had become under-leveled two blocks ago with minimum fuss. Story bosses are, with exactly one exception, complete pushovers. This affects the plot, too, because in this dark game where you're fighting against overwhelming odds, your supposedly nigh-on invincible enemies go down ridiculously easy. There's a group of human villains in the game who are presented as tough and terrifying, yet I managed to beat all of them within four turns of starting their battle.
That said, story boss design is creative. Every story boss has a gimmick that is fun and interesting in its own way. The problem is that I'm talking about
story bosses. Tartarus also has bosses in it, which are some of the most tedious encounters in the game. These do present more of a challenge than the story bosses (for whatever reason, it was decided that random shadows have to be stronger than the Arcana Shadows or any of your human enemies), but it's mostly through their inordinately large health bars. As long as your healer doesn't go full retard, you'll be able to whittle them down given enough time. Which is boring. To make it even worse, these bosses don't have unique designs. They're all just bigger, recolored versions of normal enemies, that act exactly the same way their normal counterparts do. It's just a longer, more tedious version of a random encounter.
Perhaps the final thing to mention is a small one, the equipment system. Unlike
Persona 4, your main character is able to wield almost any weapon type. This makes a significant difference. You get to pick and choose who needs what weapon, since your main character will now almost be guaranteed to be clashing against a party member when it comes to a weapon. It provides interesting choices, as you'll also have to consider each weapon's field attack animation. Heavy weapons may do more damage, but are considerably harder to get an initial advantage with. A negative change, however, is the division of armor into body and feet. Bodies affect damage resistance, whilst feet affect evasion rate. This just adds an unnecessary layer of busy work, having to buy both the best armor and the best shoes. It does allow for some mixing and matching of passive buffs to work best together for every party member, but these are minimal enough that most of the time it's not really worth thinking about, especially seeing how easy the game is.
Gameplay Verdict: 5/10
To summarize: You've got a life sim aspect that's actually marginally better than
Persona 4. However, the dungeon crawler aspect, despite its solid mechanical core, is riddled with tonnes and tonnes of moronic design decisions that turn it into an immensely boring, sluggish, and frustrating experience. And, unlike its sequel, the time balance leans overwhelmingly toward the tedious, tedious combat. It's the quality of the criminally underused life sim elements that barely pushes it out of "below average" territory.
Final Verdict:
(7.5+5)/2 = 6.25
6.25/10
Persona 3 is not bad. It's not good, either. The story gets close to carrying it, but more than a few amateurish mistakes with the writing ruin it. Gameplay wise, it does the life sim aspect well, but focuses considerably more on a dungeon crawling aspect that is mind-bogglingly dull. When
Persona 3 gets good, it does get
really good, but these parts are just overwhelmed by tedium. If you really appreciate the good parts, it might be worth playing
Persona 3, but in a world where you've got a myriad games that do story and atmosphere as well or better than
Persona 3 does, whilst providing a gameplay experience that has way less tedious bits, I find it very hard justifying recommending
Persona 3 to anyone. But then again, I might very well be biased because of my expectations. As I said, playing
Persona 4 first colored what I wanted from
Persona 3, and I may just be trying to justify my disappointment. Similarly, maybe I wouldn't have had problems with some of the mechanics in
Persona 3 if I hadn't experienced the more polished way they're implemented in
Persona 4.
