[Scroll to the bottom for a summarized "verdict", or read ahead for my full thoughts.]I struggled for a long time to write this, my first video game review for this blog. After four or five fresh starts ended up as long, rambling non-reviews, I decided to try a different tactic:
Persona 3: FES (hereafter P3) is one of my favorite games of all time -- just so you have a frame of reference, some others, in no order at all, are Psychonauts, Portal (both games), Ogre Battle: Person of Lordly Caliber, and Mass Effect 2. When I began playing P3, I skipped the instruction manual (which I recommend doing), turned on the Playstation 2, and watched the teaser trailer that played while the game waited for me to press start. By the time that glorified music video had concluded, I was caught. I simply had to know what this game was about, and how the video I had just seen reflected that.
I’m going to guess that an average reader, if I had one, would not be as fascinated by weirdness and inexplicability as I am, so I obviously need to find another way to justify my love of this game. The problem is that I don’t wish to say anything about the game, other than that you should play it right away, by any means necessary. In order to make this a meaningful review despite that reluctance, this is what I’ll do: first, I’m going to lay out all the reasons why a person might not enjoy P3, then I’m going to list all the reasons you should play it anyway as best I can without revealing anything.
Topping the list of drawbacks, then, is pace. Depending on your play style and thoroughness, P3’s progresses at a pace that falls somewhere between “deliberate” and “glacial”. On top of that, a good portion of the playtime is spent either in semi-interactive conversation with a large cast of NPCs, or navigating the many, many randomly-generated, enemy-patrolled dungeons.
Another potential sticking-point: P3 has an odd relationship with the storytelling tropes of anime. I don’t want to say too much about it, and I argue that these tropes are handled intelligently and used to great effect, but if such things are prone to annoy you, be warned that they’re present.
The last major problem that an imaginary average player might have with P3 is a combination of two things: grind and progress-saving system. It’s not World of Warcraft grind, nor even Final Fantasy grind, but this is a turn-based-combat JRPG (Japanese roleplaying game), and there will be times when you have to hang back and build up your strength for a bit in order to progress. The progress-saving system ties in in that it can be hard to make enough progress in a brief (hour or so) play session to make it to the “next” stopping-point. If your play-time is not unlimited, there will be times when you feel like you weren’t able to accomplish anything in a given session with the game, and there are enough lengthy, conversation-and-plot-heavy stretches without a save-point that they could become an annoyance to busier players.
The reasons why you should play this game anyway, right now if you can, are harder to separate out into list items, but I’ll try to make as much sense as possible. I’ll start with the characters. How many games, especially Japanese games, have improbably-awesome teenagers for protagonists? Maybe even making up the whole cast? Well, P3 subverts that trope by making the cast up of mostly thoroughly ordinary, believable teenagers doing mostly ordinary, believable things in an ordinary believable way. Sound boring? Well, it’s really not, but the reasons why would require quite a bit of revealing explanation, so suffice it to say that a lot of the initial impetus for the plot comes from the tension between all this ordinary believability and the frankly insane situations these characters find themselves in. On top of it, in a stroke of genius, most of the ordinary, believable stuff the characters get up to actually has a direct effect on the insane goings-on.
Which segues nicely into the other big strength P3 has: narrative. Here is a game with a compelling, utterly central narrative that really feels character-driven. And the characters, as mentioned above, are so well-realized and well-defined that you almost can’t help but care -- and in my case, care deeply -- about what happens to them. On top of that, I use the word “narrative” instead of “story” or “plot” very intentionally. The narrative unfolds in a number of subtle, not-entirely-explicit ways, and covers an astonishing number of thematic and symbolic bases, managing to be at once episodic and epic without ever losing sight of the personal tales it’s built on -- story and plot are only two facets of the narrative (albeit large, important ones). Gameplay, combat, soundtrack and sound design, character design and animation -- everything in this game is expressive of the central narrative.
All of that leads me in turn to the large umbrella of “production”. As is usually the case in Atlus’ games, P3’s production is top-notch, and in the way I described above, this strengthens the core of the game rather than just acting as polish. Dialogue, localization, voice-acting, artwork, animation, design, soundtrack, sound effects, color palettes -- nothing is neglected. With the highly-debatable exception of the frequent use of randomized levels, every aspect of P3 is carefully crafted to augment every other aspect.
I could go on (and on and on), but instead, I’ll just give you...
THE VERDICT: Persona 3 is perhaps the only “M for Mature”-rated game I’ve ever played on a console that was actually mature, rather than just graphic or explicit. It is powerful, thoughtful, compelling, stylish, nuanced, and fun. It doesn’t really have any weak points; it just has some things in it that won’t appeal to everyone. Regardless of your own tastes, you’d be doing yourself a disservice if you didn’t at least give Persona 3 a try, especially since it’s old enough to be pretty cheap! Play it.
