 |
| A party about to enter a dungeon. |
The player takes control of the new student at Gekkoukan High School. Every night at midnight, the school turns into a mysterious tower and unleashes demons called Shadows, which drain the emotions out of humans. It falls to a group of students called SEES, which the new student joins, to climb the tower and find the source of the Shadows, using their own monsters called Personas to fight the Shadows.
The first thing that needs to be said is that this game is very long. The main game can take at least one hundred hours to complete, while “The Answer” can take another fifty hours to complete. A lot of those hours are not going to be fun.
Persona 3 is broken up into two parts. During the day, the new student goes to school and makes friends. All the player has to do is talk to people over and over again during the school year. The difficult part is finding time during the day to also do school work and other activities that increase the player’s academics, courage, and charm stats. These need to be raised so the player can do more things with their friends and strengthen their “Social Links,” which are the way that the game records how well the student is doing with his friends.
This is the most fun part of the game. While it is not really challenging, it is slightly difficult to balance a virtual social life with saving the world. This is where most of the story happens.
The second part of the game takes place in the tower, called “The Tartarus.” Every night it is possible, though not necessary, to take the student and three other members of SEES into Tartarus and try to climb as many floors as possible before the characters get tired. Eventually SEES will reach a floor with a boss on it, and then another floor that cannot be unlocked until a month has passed in the game.
In the meantime SEES has to fight the Shadows. To do this every member of SEES can summon a Persona. Each Persona has a strength and a weakness, and every Shadow has a strength and weakness. For example, some Shadows on a couple of floors might specialize in fire spells and be weak against ice spells. So, it would be smart of the player to bring a member of SEES who has a Persona that specializes in ice spells to fight the Shadows on those couple of floors. The one exception is the new student, who can summon multiple Personas that vary in specialties, which adds more strategy to every fight.
The way this part ties into the first part is that creating stronger Social Links makes the Personas that the new student can summon stronger, so it is imperative for the player to maintain the students social life if they want to have a chance of winning.
While fighting the Shadows, the player earns money which is needed to buy new armor and weapons for the characters. This is vital because the bosses are extremely difficult and every advantage is needed. Incidentally, while the player is gathering money the characters will level up and become stronger.
The biggest problem with this game is how ridiculously hard it is. As stated before the bosses are really difficult. Usually they have attacks that can wipe the entire party in one hit, including the main character, who, if killed, ends the game automatically. That is why the armor and weapons are needed. The strength/weakness part also applies to bosses, and knowing their weakness is usually the only way to do any significant damage to them. But because the bosses are so powerful, and because exploiting their hidden weakness is the only way to do any serious damage, the bosses come off as really cheap. Even after buying all the equipment and leveling up, the chances of beating a boss are not very good.
The game is also really tedious. Armor and weapons are expensive, so several hours need to be dedicated to fighting Shadows every month. There is no reason that the weapons could have been cheaper, and the characters levelling up could have taken less time. It just drags out the game. And the player has to do this a couple of times every week in the game’s year. At first it is reasonably challenging, but by hour fifty the game is a lesson in masochism.
The story is interesting enough. The Tartarus gets an explanation which gets more complicated as the game progresses. It is not really memorable, but at least the characters are entertaining enough so it never feels boring.
“The Answer” is like the regular game, except much harder and does not have the going to class part of the game. It is nice to see what happens to the characters at the end, but it really does not make up for all the extra work.
No comments:
Post a Comment