Why Can't I Burn All These Dreads? - Persona 3

Soooo I have an obsession. And this time it has nothing to do with shuriken or maids or midday naps.

For some months now, I've been playing Persona 3. I realize I'm a little late to that party, but ever since the Great RPG Rush of '05(or whenever Dragon Quest VIII came out), I've been working on a tremendous and ever-shifting backlog of vidya games, especially RPGs. I was first introduced to the Persona series by my buddy Scrambles when Persona 3's trailers appeared on the Web nearly a decade ago. With my background in classical studies and mythology, I've been a sucker for games with a rich inner lore, so a series like Persona pretty much snagged me right away. I originally planned on playing through the preceding titles before getting into P3, and for some years I held onto that illusion, mostly thanks to the re-release of the original Persona on PSP(as well as that of Persona 2: Innocent Sin, the half of the Persona 2 story that never saw an original North American release). However, the Backlog of Insanity eventually defeated that plan, particularly since Persona 4 has been out for a long while, 5 will be released next year, and the Arena games are wildly popular among my corner of gaming fandom.

So earlier this year, I dug out my copy of Persona 3 Portable, which lets you play as either a male(default name Minato Arisato) or female(Minako Arisato) main character. At first, I chose male, in the intention of going through the original path(since the original release of P3 only had Minato). But the social segments of P3P are done more in visual novel style: rather than having characters run around on-screen like a more traditional JRPG(“Japanese Role Playing Game”), you get a mostly-static splash image of them when they're interacting with you, among some other things. Also, the script for P3P was slightly rewritten, so while it's close to the original, there're still some key differences that made me rethink getting into it first. Luckily, Persona 3 FES, the "director's cut" of Persona 3 which itself contains two games(The Journey, the full story of Persona 3 and the topic of most of this article, and The Answer, an epilogue game that picks up where it left off), went on sale on the Playstation Network that same week, so I compromised by getting FES and resolving to play through it as Minato and through P3P as Minako concurrently. As any sane, rational human being would do. Unsurprisingly, running the same game, even with slightly different storylines, on two concurrent platforms quickly proved to be a little confusing("Which Social Link am I focusing on again?" "Wait, why are my Personas all wrong?") Thus in the end, I wound up focusing on FES primarily, with the occasional few hours logged on P3P here and there.

And now that I have thoroughly confused the Persona-illiterate out there with a bunch of terms, I suppose I should actually give some background info. Persona is part of a larger series of games called Megami Tensei, frequently referred to as MegaTen for short. The games are generally darker and more mature than standard RPG fare, and Persona's particular little niche usually deals with teenagers who have the power to summon facets of their own personalities("Personas") to protect them in battle. Personas 1 and 2 had a mechanic allowing the party to communicate with monsters mid-battle, while Persona 3 marked a shift towards pairing dungeon-crawling battles with a dating sim-esque social system. This seems like a natural place to split into sections for detail on these and other things, so let's do that.

Personas

Personas can take just about any form, from angels and demons to mythological spirits and gods to the Mothman of West Virginia. The character designs of the Persona series are one of the biggest draws for me, and that's especially true of the Personas themselves. They also have a tarot card aspect that adds a nice bit of flavor, and occasionally unites groups of Personas in a theme. For example, the Justice series of Personas are all angels, while those in Strength tend heavily towards mythological figures known for their skill with arms(or just their arms), such as Valkyrie, Kali, and Siegfried. Much of the fun for me in this game was seeing what characters would pop up next as Personas, and with 170 of them in FES(and even more in P3P), I still haven't found them all.

Social Links

As I said before, you can think of Persona 3 as being a synthesis of two different game genres: JRPG and dating sim(you could probably call it “social simulator” instead, if you wanted to be nit-picky).

You'd better notice her, Senpai – the fate of the world depends on it!

During the day you're in a dating sim, and your character is a high school student doing normal(anime) high school stuff – going to class, making friends, participating in clubs, studying, and of course romancing your classmates. But your Social Links aren't just for fun, they serve a crucial purpose – each suit of your Personas(Magician, Fool, Temperance, etc.) is tied to one of your links. As you level these links up by spending time with the people who represent them, you can make stronger and stronger Personas; the only way to get the strongest Persona of each suit is to max out that suit's link. Getting all of these is also probably the biggest challenge in the game, as with any dating sim, you have to manage your in-game time very carefully to finish all of the stories involved. And several of these links are entirely different for Minako in P3P, meaning, well, that you have to be careful or else this game will eat your life.

Tartarus, the Dungeon

Now that you've heard about the dating sim aspect, now we move on to the RPG aspect. All combat in Persona 3 takes place at night, most of it in the massive tower known as Tartarus. This, boys, girls, et. al., is a good old-fashioned dungeon crawl. Armed with lethal weapons, your Personas, and the power of love and friendship, it's your job to rumble your way to the top of Tartarus to solve the mystery behind it and the Dark Hour, the extra hour that occurs between midnight and 1 a.m. where regular people turn into coffins and monsters called Shadows appear to prey on anyone awake. The Tartarus phases of P3 will probably feel more familiar to most RPG fans than the daytime phases, but you shouldn't take that to mean “boring.” The battles are turn-based but intense; finding and capitalizing on enemy weaknesses, as opposed to just spamming the Attack command, is a must for survival for most of the game. To top it off, you have one of the most slammin' soundtracks ever while you're punching Shadows in the face. I've played a lot of RPGs, and I can safely say that the system implemented in P3 is one of my favorites.

That's pretty much the basics. But seeing as how I don't know when to shut up, here's a personal list of the main reasons why this game is so effective at pulling me in and making me ignore things I should be working on(like my Magic Touch novel series, and this blog):

• The Personas

  Seriously, there's 170 of these things, and I love it. Some are intense, some are wacky, some are "Ohhhh my"-inducing, but overall, they're just spectacular. Some of my favorites are Inugami, Hua Po, Melchizedek, Hanuman, Titania, and one of Persona's most recognizable recurring characters, Jack Frost.

• The Velvet Room

  

  Igor, most trustworthy dude ever.

  The Velvet Room appears in every Persona title; it's where the majority of the main character's Persona-managing activities occur, under the auspices of Igor, the room's constant tenant. In Persona 3, Igor is assisted either by a woman named Elizabeth(The Journey), or optionally a man named Theo(P3Portable), who is fascinated by the human world and insists on accompanying you to do Human Stuff. It's one of my favorite fictional places from anything, and the way it's portrayed in P3 is wonderful; the haunting aria that plays while you're in the Room provides a perfect backdrop to Igor's slightly-unsettling enthusiasm and his assistant's comical antics. And, of course, the simple notion of an extra-dimensional jazz lounge is something I'm a huge fan of.

• Your Team, SEES

  I say often that I can't get into things, whether games, movies, shows, books, etc., where I don't like or can't understand the characters(it's the biggest reason why I still haven't touched God of War, and probably never will). I had the opposite of that problem with this game – I enjoyed pretty much the entire cast. From Junpei's easygoing slackery, to Fuuka's perpetually-uncertain optimism, to Chairman Ikutsuki's groan-inducing puns, to the fact that you get a dog as a party member(a fearless knife-wielding dog, no less), I had a lot of fun with this cast. And Aigis evokes thoughts of KOS-MOS for me, which is always a good thing.

• Shadows Need Killin' – But Tonight, Karaoke!

  I've done games and shows with darker stories, and enjoyed quite a few of them. However, I much prefer stories that tackle dark subjects to have a healthy dose of lightheartedness, even when that segues into complete silliness. Shadow Hearts is a great example when it comes to games, with Soul Eater being one of the best recent examples of this in anime. Persona 3 has a pretty grim story when you get down to it – it starts with nightmare creatures preying on defenseless ordinary folks and only goes downhill from there. Despite that, you still have time to teach a robot how to love, or to fail laughably at meeting girls on the beach during Operation Babe Hunt. Thus the fine tradition of chocobo breeding continues to see spiritual successors.



• Dat FeMC, Tho

  She's apparently non-canon for purposes of the overarching Persona series plot, but the female main character from P3Portable(Minako, or Kimiko, or Fujiko, or whatev – I keep finding other names, but I just named her Suzu, which is a made-up name and shuddap) is actually my preferred of the two possible main characters. Her character design looks cooler, she has better/more entertaining dialog options, she wields a naginata in battle, and she even has different Social Links. I'm still a long way from finishing her version of the game, but if Atlus ever retroactively inserts her as an option for FES, I'll be all over that in a heartbeat, too.

• Evokers Evoking Evocatively

  The device that lets SEES members call out their Personas is called an Evoker. And, no joke, it straight-up looks exactly like a gun. Oh, and by the way, summoning a Persona for most characters involves putting the Evoker to your own body and pulling the trigger. Needless to say, this caused some controversy when the game was released. I can definitely understand why folks would have a problem with this for various reasons, but I wound up liking the design; accepting the power of a Persona means giving up your old life and the old you, and accepting that things are often not what they seem. The game's developers weren't oblivious to how Evokers would be seen – one of your party members struggles mightily with calling out her Persona for a while, even though she knows an Evoker is not actually a gun, because she can't get past what she feels like she's doing(and she's afraid of embracing something that can fight Shadows, which if you've never seen a Shadow, is a completely-logical reaction). Still problematic? A little, yeah. But I think it was worth it. Even with all of its levity, the Persona series deals with pretty heavy stuff, and asks the player to face some very grim things. So in the end, I think that choice really played to their strengths and helped them tell the story a little better.

• Tarot and High School and Myths, Oh My!

  Among the various long-running JRPG series out there, Persona has one of my favorite general motifs: that, among other things, what makes you you is not simply what you wear on the outside, but the sum total of a sea of inner possibilities. And in my gaming experience, P3 is the best telling of this story yet. The use of tarot actually teaches you a little of the lore, instead of just wearing it as a neat aesthetic. The use of mythologies beyond just those of Japan or China really speaks to my academic interests. And playing in a game where you're in an anime high school? Sold. 150% sold. Altogether, this was the biggest draw for me, and if you've ever sank hours into playing The Sims, you might understand. There's just something fun about taking a break from your own life to live in a fictional avatar for a while; for me, it evokes some of the same feelings I get when I'm writing stories, and on top of that provides a visual representation for it all. The stories about the people you form close bonds with are often cheesy and a little melodramatic, but that just makes them that much more endearing, and serves as a nice counter-balance to the more serious story being told in the game's main plot.

Drawbacks

There's not much about this game that I haven't liked so far, but there are a few things worth mentioning:

• Mostly-uninteresting antagonists

  The recurring villains, the group called Strega, are mostly flat and just kind of annoying, and there were several moments where I fervently wished someone would just shut their leader up with a flying kick in the teeth.

• Some Social Links are not intuitively-obvious

  Generally-speaking, I feel that in a social/dating sim, you should be able to figure out a person's personality and then answer accordingly. But some of the people you form links with react counter-intuitively, and with how the point system for the links works, a wrong answer can mean two or three times as many days interacting with that person is necessary to level their link. Needless to say, if you want to max out every Social Link, you'll either be doing a lot of saving/loading your game, or you'll be using a guide.

• P3Portable added a lot, but removed some things, too

  I felt like restricting the female main character to only a single weapon, while a cool weapon, was kind of an odd decision. Also, while I love visual novels, some of the changes that the non-combat sections of the game underwent meant losing some of my favorite bits about standard JRPGS. Some of it was fairly minor - for instance, I like running around as my character in exploration scenes, but visual novels don't have those, and that aspect was axed for the game. But visual novels also usually don't have cinematic sequences, in my experience. So when the awesome full anime video of the main character awakening their Persona for the first time was replaced with regular in-battle character representations, I felt more than a little cheated.

There you have it, fellow ninjas. Both my earnest attempt at convincing you to dive into this rabbit hole, and my wild-eyed explanation of one of my most time-consuming distractions. Full disclosure: there is a lot to do in this game. Even if you're not a completionist like me, who must pursue both the male and female sides of the story, and must join every club at some point, etc., this will still be one of the longer JRPGs you'll tackle, should you accept the mission(I'll ballpark it at 40-50 hours for a bare-bones playthrough, though that's only a veryloose estimate). But if you're okay suiting up for a long trek like that, Persona 3 is one of the most rewarding you'll find. As stated before, I haven't progressed very far in P3Portable, and I've barely scratched the surface of FES's epilogue game The Answer, so there is still plenty of P3 for me to indulge in. If you are curious and want to give it a shot, but maybe want to skip the original/FES in lieu of the portable version, here's a breakdown of the basic differences:

FES

• Comprised of two games: the original story and script from Persona 3, The Journey, and the epilogue game The Answer, which continues the story.
• Social aspect combines more traditional exploration with dating sim-style mechanics and scenes
• Male main character only, who can wield a wide range of weapons
• Can only control the main character directly in battle
• Addition of a weapon crafting and modification system
• Maxing out all Social Links in one playthrough easier than in the original P3
• Three-letter title

Portable

• Comprised of only one game, The Journey
• Social aspect is a visual novel with dating sim-style mechanics and scenes
• Added option for playing a female main character, who can only use one type of weapon, with different Social Links, a slightly different story and script, and a new soundtrack
• Possible to control all party members directly in battle, plus some other slight modifications to the battle system
• Extra Personas not available in FES
• Same weapon crafting system as FES
• Maxing out all Social Links in one playthrough easier than in the original P3
• Cinematic sequences were replaced with a series of static CGs
• More letters than FES

Much of my information, including all of the pictures, for this article came from the Persona Wiki at http://megamitensei.wikia.com/wiki/Persona_(Series), so even if you're not interested in playing the game for yourself, you should definitely go have a look over the art style and basic story points. (And then you might know why I really want to get a Shiba Inu and have him wear a little jacket with wings). As for me, we'll see if I can hold off on getting into Persona 4 long enough to finish The Answer. Until next time, I am Ro, Ro art I. In the sea of Ro's soul shall I be chillin'.