Collection essentials #498: Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 FES (PS2)

As I mentioned in my previous post, the Megami Tensei series has seen a number of side games and spinoffs throughout the years. Some of those became their own sub-series, even. One of those, Persona, wound up becoming so popular that it exceeded the success of its parent series! I can’t think of too many other instances of that happening.

Persona games are turn-based RPGs like regular Megami Tensei. What sets it apart is that the games always feature a team of high-school students who discover that they each have a being called a “persona” (supposedly a manifestation of their inner self) which they can summon to use special powers, usually in battle. The main characters of these games is always a “silent protagonist” and has the ability to obtain a very wide variety of personas rather than just one, and there is a special place they can go to “fuse” multiple personas together to make newer, stronger ones.

As you can see, this is the third installment in the series (though it’s technically the fourth game, since Persona 2 was a duology). The first two Personas were on the original PlayStation, and…well, I’ve tried to get into them, but they feel a little too “rough around the edges” for my taste. There are some things to like about them, but I don’t find them especially fun to play, so they didn’t make my list.

Persona 3 is very notable anyway, because it made drastic changes to the core gameplay structure which would define the series going forward. This was such a big change that it was almost like a second birth for the series. When most people talk about Persona, and whenever Atlus incorporates characters from the series in something other than a main installment, you’ll almost never see representations from Persona 1 and 2 anymore. 

Persona 3’s major change is that, rather than the structure of a regular JRPG, this game operates on a calendar system. For each calendar day of the game, you can engage in one of a series of activities in the afternoon and then one at night, after which the calendar will turn over to the next day. You can freely roam around different areas like in a normal RPG, but only certain activities will cause time to pass. 

So what kind of activities do you partake in? The most notable are your “social links”. There are a variety of characters in the game that your main character can befriend. These social links can “level up” (maxing out at level 10) after you spend time with the person, and upon doing so you’ll see a scene play out. Each social link provides more power to a certain type of persona when the player creates them through fusion, and the higher the social link, the more experience points that type of persona will get upon their creation. The other major way to spend time is the game’s main dungeon, called “Tartarus”, which has dozens and dozens and dozens of randomly-generated floors. There are limits to how far you can go in Tartarus until certain calendar dates are reached. 

The turn-based battle system is similar to other Megami Tensei games, though not quite the same. Your main character’s ability to equip one of many different personas is certainly a notable difference, as their attributes and abilities can be changed on any given turn. Exploiting enemy weaknesses is a crucial element as expected, and in this game you have an additional incentive to do so because once all enemies are “down” from being hit by their weakness, you can perform a special “all-out attack” which does a large amount of damage to all of them.

The story of the game revolves around a mysterious phenomenon called the “Dark Hour”, a time each night when the world transforms into a grim and dark place and most people are unknowingly turned into coffins in a special kind of sleep…but there are a few select people who are able to be normal and awake during the dark hour, who are also able to wield personas to fight the dangerous enemy “shadows” which lurk during that time. Our heroes are part of an organization called “SEES” which aims to get to the bottom of this mysterious “Dark Hour” and thwart whatever evil is behind it.

Persona 3 is certainly a game that brings its own style, and a big part of that is the soundtrack. I’m not the best at describing unusual music, but it’s likely at least a little different from anything you’ve heard before. Not many video games regularly incorporate vocals in their background music, but this is a case of a game that does so to establish its own distinct style and does so very well. There are a few vocalists featured in the game, one of them being Japanese rapper “Lotus Juice” who has become well-known in the West for his work in video games and anime. The lyrics of the game are English but sung by native Japanese speakers, and you can tell that it’s not their native tongue, but they do a good job and I feel like that this dynamic contributes positively to the music. The music of the game may strike you as strange the first time you hear it, but it’s the type of thing that can grow on you if you play a long RPG and hear it regularly.

You may notice the “FES” in the game’s title. That’s because this isn’t the original Persona 3 release. FES came out a year later, and the big selling point is an entirely new epilogue which is almost like a mini standalone RPG in and of itself, which has to be selected and played separately on the main menu. There were some tweaks to the core game itself, too. I’ve actually heard a lot of negative things about the epilogue, so I never bothered to play through it myself.

Persona 3 was quite a late PS2 title. The North American release was in 2007, after the following console generation had already started and the competing GameCube and original Xbox were already dead. For what appeared to be a somewhat niche game on an old console, it did very well, garnering a lot of critical acclaim and a strong fan following. The addictive gameplay loop, compelling story and interesting characters won over many, and the ensuing success solidified this formula as what the Persona series would be moving forward.

As for my own experience, I certainly remember when Persona 3 came out and received widespread praise. I wound up picking up FES upon its release in 2008 at a budget price. I got a file started, but wound up putting the game down in favor of others intending to revisit it at some point. I waited quite a few years, but eventually picked it back up and played through it at the start of 2015.

I did find a lot to like about it, but it did fall just a bit short of my high expectations. The game can be pretty difficult, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but some of the difficulty spikes of the game were a bit frustrating. This was exacerbated by what I think is the game’s biggest flaw, the fact that you can only directly control the main character in battle, while other party members have AI make their moves for them. You can give each one a general strategy to follow, but they will still very often not do the things you’d like them to. This was put into the game to make you feel immersed playing as the main character who has to rely on his friends, but in practice I think it does more harm than good. It’s also a very long game. At 67 hours, it’s still one of the longest games I have ever beaten. You could see that as a positive since you can get a lot of “bang for your buck”, but I generally prefer my games to be shorter than that.

I went on to become a big Persona fan along with my sister. For me personally, this was more because of the sequels than this game. But even in its own series, Persona 3 certainly stands out with a cast and a vibe that are distinct from what came after, so it’s certainly not an obsolete game by any means. There is a modern remake called Persona 3 Reload available on modern platforms, which is probably a more noob-friendly way to experience Persona 3. While I haven’t played through Reload myself, I don’t really like some of the changes they made, such as the remixed music.

Even with its imperfections, Persona 3 was a really big deal and is a game that I have a lot of appreciation for. FES on the PS2 is a clear choice as one of my collection essentials.