Persona 3 is a long damn game. It manages to stretch what should be a 20-30 hour adventure into 60-70 hours due to pure repetition and grind. The game consists of one endless dungeon that spans literally hundreds of floors, and the design of the floors never changes with the exception of a change to the tileset. Every on-screen enemy that you find in these dungeons looks the exact same from the first hour to the last. You will hear the same dungeon and battle song for dozens of hours, and while you can change the music if you want, it’s usually not worth it.
Persona 3 splits its gameplay into two main sections. During the day, you go to school, take tests, make friends and advance your relationships. This process, like most things you’ll do in Persona 3, is very repetitive and without a whole lot of depth. You talk to a person, say you want to spend time with them, make a couple of choices which will advance your relationship in various ways, gain a relationship level and then go back to your dorm. Every relationship has 10 levels and advances in much the same way. The times of the day are segmented in much the same way as the relationship levels: during school, after school and evenings.
At night, you go into the endless dungeon and kill shadows. After battles, you collect monsters called personas and can combine them into new monsters at the entrance to the dungeon. Your aforementioned relationship levels give you experience bonuses upon creating new monsters, and beyond this, the school sim and dungeon aspects are completely separate.
Even the story sections of the game are compartmentalized. Every major event happens when a full moon comes, and by “major event” I mean “boss fight”. For the first 75% of the game, there is little to no storyline, just a general “we gots to stop the shadows!” theme that never really resonates (or even tries to resonate, really). Persona 3 is a game based on the gameplay – there are story bits and they can get pretty expansive towards the end of your 70 hour quest, but overall, this isn’t a game you’re playing to advance the narrative.
Instead, you’re playing against the clock. Everything in Persona 3 is timed: certain people are around at certain times. Your day is split into 2-3 time blocks. The boss fight will come in x number of days, a number that is prominently displayed on the top of your screen for the entire game.
The purpose of playing is to strengthen your character in time to be able to handle the next major event. You continue doing this until your quest is at an end. At no point is it about anything other than getting stronger. Strengthening your relationships so you can strengthen your personas so you can level up your characters so you can learn new skills so you can advance to higher levels of the dungeon so you can gain more experience so you can level up your characters better so you can beat the boss, and to beat the boss you’ll want to strengthen your character relationships so you can strengthen your personas… and so on. It never ends. It is an endless cycle, just like the moon that is sitting on your screen with a number telling you how much longer you have until some evil shadow is going to jump you. When you finish playing Persona 3 – whether it’s by choice or because you finished it – it’s more a feeling of relief, of getting rid of the constant time pressure that you’ve been under for dozens of hours. A weight lifts off of your shoulders and you live life just a little bit slower.
And despite all this, Persona 3 is probably in my top 10 games of all time.
I cannot think of a game with a better sense of progression than Persona 3. There are an infinite number of small improvements you can make to your characters, all of which make you feel really good. Everything in Persona 3 is very carefully and deliberately designed with progression in mind. You have a limited amount of time to get everything done, forcing you to make hard decisions about how you’re going to spend it on a day-to-day basis. Should you level up your academics stat so you can do well on the test so the smart girl will pay attention to you? Or will you work on advancing your courage stat so you can impress a sports team? Do you want to ignore all stats and friendships and just pay money to increase your stats? Or will you forget all that and just hang out with a friend and advance that social link? Or you can skip all that and just level up in the dungeon – but you can only do that for so long each night because your characters will get tired. Unless you’re just blindly following a FAQ from beginning to end, you can’t do it all. You have to pick and choose how you develop your characters.
The game has a level of difficulty to it that demands smart decision making. This extends to more than just battle. Having the right combination of skills means everything in P3 and the easiest way to advance your characters is to create personas using those social links that you’ve forged during the daytime. Persona 3 isn’t hard so much as it is smart: you have to make the right choices in battle and one mistake will kill you very, very quickly. The battle system has a high risk/reward aspect to it since you can get bonus turns for hitting opponent weaknesses. The key is to have the skills that you need in order to maximize your chances of success. Persona is notorious for stories about missing an attack on an enemy and getting utterly annihilated because the enemy went after your weaknesses and killed you without you getting another turn. That sense of tension – that you can die at literally any time – is key in making the game’s choices feel worthwhile.
There are so many stats to advance that you often feel like there’s no right thing to be doing. You end up playing favourites and picking out what you like best. Maybe you want to ignore the kid that likes to eat and instead want to hang out with the kid that’s dying and wants a friend. Or maybe you think that kid’s a whiny brat and you want to just sit at home and play an MMO, complete with netspeak. Persona 3 features some smart writing that keeps you engaged despite the silly premise.
Perhaps the most important thing to making this all work, and something exclusive to the PSP version of the game, is how incredibly fast the game plays. In P3P, you don’t even control your character directly: instead you move a cursor around the screen. You can instantly warp to anywhere instead of having to walk around. You can hold a button to have text zip past the screen at 100 miles an hour. There’s an auto-attack button in battle that makes things fly. Battles go very fast thanks to the fact that you’re either going to murder the enemy or see the game over screen within 15 seconds.
Combine the endless sense of progress, along with the blistering pace at which you can make time pass and you have an incredibly engaging game, one that’s very hard to stop playing. Persona 3 Portable turns me from a regular person who likes to play video games into an addict who is sitting there slamming the button to get a new ability, level or item. It’s classical conditioning at its apex and it’s incredibly effective. I sit there drooling like a brainwashed animal waiting for the next level up jingle to play. When I do get it, a smile comes across my face, I breathe a sigh of relief and do it all over again. Suddenly it’s 2:30am and I don’t know what I’ve been doing for the last four hours. It’s heroin in video game form and I cannot get enough of it.
I love this stupid game. It’s got great music, an awesome sense of style and all those things that everyone likes in their RPGs, but ultimately It’s not about that. That’s not why the game is so good. It’s everything smushed together and how the game functions as a whole instead of dissecting the individual systems. The recipe is just perfect.
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