(Originally published to Glitchwave on 4/16/2020)
[Image from igdb.com]
Persona 3
Developer: Atlus
Publisher: Atlus
Genre(s): JRPG
Platforms: PS2
Release Date: July 16, 2006
The first Persona game I played was Persona 5, and due to the style, story, characters, and gameplay, I fell in love with it. Because I loved Persona 5 so much, I decided to go back and play the previous two titles to satiate my Persona fix that playing through Persona 5 twice didn't even satisfy. Yes, I was well aware that the previous two Persona games would've been much more primitive looking and lacked the style that made Persona 5 so stimulating. However, I understood that these games still carried the same dungeon crawling, paired with Japanese high school life like Persona 5, which is one of my favorite dynamics of the franchise.
I then went to Persona 3 before Persona 4 because I knew the least about the game initially, while I knew a bit of Persona 4 and wanted to start something that seemed a tad more fresh in my mind. I played the FES version on the PS2, which is arguably the game's definitive version. Even though the graphics made everyone look chibi, the style similar to the one oozing through the pores of Persona 5 is generally present here. This game also has stylish menus, daily pacing throughout the in-game months, the cutscenes with characters' caricatures moving enough when they talk to look life-like enough, and anime cutscenes sprinkled in whenever the game wants to that are always a nice change of pace.
The story and characters, of course, are what make each Persona game special. This game, for brevity's sake, is edgy as fuck. It's the dark Persona, the bleak game of the franchise in which ultra-serious tones and themes take center stage despite the lighthearted nature Persona games tend to have in contrast to Shin Megami Tensei's hardcore appeal in style and substance. Every Persona game, especially 3,4 and 5, has a consistent color scheme, and this game's primary color is blue for a reason. The game's overarching themes are depression, grief, loss, and death, with death being the core theme surrounding everything else. The people of this world are coming down with something known as "apathy syndrome," and the people who succumb to this phenomenon become one of "the lost." If that isn't an obvious metaphor for depression and suicide, then I wasn't paying attention. The main characters of this game activate their persona by shooting themselves in the head with a fake gun. Need I say more? "Apathy syndrome" is caused by something called "The Dark Hour," which takes place every night between 12 AM and 1 AM. Most people don't notice this hour because they are asleep/stationary in things that look like coffins. Those conscious and aware during this hour have something called "the potential" and are obligated to stop The Dark Hour by scaling the tower of Tartarus where the Dark Hour shadows live. The people with the potential in question are a group of high schoolers who go by the group name of SEES, and their leader is a goofy long-haired man named Itkusuki. Others who have this potential are in a group called Strega, who use The Dark Hour to carry out assassinations and use The Dark Hour as a cover-up. The protagonist becomes a member of SEES when he moves into the dorm and discovers that he has "the potential" while being attacked by shadows during a full moon which is when the shadows from Tartarus attack civilians. Your goal is to erase the Dark Hour by defeating these shadows while maintaining a social life and keeping your grades up at day. Yeah, I guess the Buffy the Vampire Slayer comparisons are pretty apt.
As far as the day-to-day activities are concerned, I think this game is much better at time management than 4 and 5. Instead of going to Tartarus during the day as you would go to the TV dimension or a palace/Mementos, you go to Tartarus at night. This game's mechanic for "tiring out the protagonist" isn't forbidding you to do anything else after exploring the other world but making you more vulnerable in Tartarus. Even though being tired is hair-raising, I prefer it to the way 4 and 5 carry about dividing time between the natural world and the other world. You can still do three different things throughout the day, making raising your stats much more manageable.
While being cool in concept, Tartarus is a bit of a slog. It's this giant winding tower with randomly generated rooms. The objective is to find the stairs in each room to go higher and higher, and it remains that way for 250+ floors. I like the Tartarus theme (it sounds like something from Techno Animal or another industrial hip hop artist), and it has a creepy, warped nature to it across every section. However, there is little to no variety at any point in the game. The first floor of Tartarus has the same design, objective, and goals as the last level of Tartarus. Tartarus isn't optional either, there isn't a deadline like 4 and 5, but you need to do it to grind levels, especially later in the game. I thought getting to the highest floor I could get to was enough, but I struggled on some full moon bosses whenever I didn't grind.
Every 10th to 15th floor of Tartarus, a floor boss keeps you from going onward. These are pretty easy if you can find a weak spot initially, but some floor bosses are bad motherfuckers who should not be approached lightly. I'll use this as a way to air the one major grievance I have about this game: you cannot control your partner's actions during combat. Sure, you can command something in the proximity of what they do in the tactics menu, but it only goes so far. Full Assault may or may not involve any of the partners consistently hitting them with a physical attack or a Persona ability, which makes a big difference considering some enemies absorb or block different kinds of attacks. Commanding them with the heal/support option also doesn't mean that they won't try to attack the enemy at first and fuck something up when I commanded them not to attack (I'm looking at you, Yukari). Essentially, you cannot rely on partners to do anything you want, but you're going to have to anyway because you'll run out of SP quickly, and SP items are scarce. This torrent of disobedience will put you in a spiral of frustration, especially with the floor bosses who do not fuck around. Grinding, building strong personas, and saving the game often is the way to survive in this game which can sometimes be an exercise in withstanding tedium.
During the day, after the school day, six days a week, you can choose to level up your stats or build your social links. Both coincide as you need to level up your stats to start some of the social links, and you need the social links to level up personas. These social links are found throughout the game map, with the mall being my favorite location because of its theme and the hub for stacking up weapons and items. Like the other games, you can date any female social links (except for the little girl at the shrine, obviously). Still, this game takes in-game adultery more seriously, as dating more than one girl at a time can lead to another social link with a girl souring to the point of no return. Somehow, I romanced four different girls and got away with it. There wasn't even a funny cutscene at the end involving them finding out. Huh, funny how that works.
Some social links level up naturally, like the Fool social link, which includes all of your partners in SEES. Initially, your partners reminded me of ones from Persona 5. You have the dumb comic-relief best friend (Junpei/Ryuji), the fashionable, attractive girl with a bit of an attitude (Yukari/Ann), the stern, but passionate straight man (Akihiko/Yusuke), the sheltered over-achiever (Mitsuru/Makoto), and the shy, petite support member (Fuuka/Futaba). One of my favorite aspects of 4 and 5 were the chemistry and banter between all of the playable characters as they seemed like natural friends, which in turn gave the game a bit of levity and comic relief. Because of Persona 3's pacing, their relationships do not blossom until much later in the game. There are moments where these characters play off of each other, but they are few and far between, probably to maintain the bleak tone of the story.
As far as the individual SEES members are concerned, some are great while others vary in quality. I hated Junpei at first because it seemed like the game wanted him to be the comic-relief friend like Ryuji, but he just came across as a douchy dipshit. As the game progresses, I end up liking him more than Ryuji because he becomes delightful and well-rounded after his romantic subplot with Chidori . He's also the best support player in battle. Yukari was my initial dating choice because I thought she was cute, but her nagging attitude grated on me as the game progressed. She's arguably the best at bantering with the other characters, though. Akihiko is cool, confident as hell, and isn't a total sperg-lord like Yusuke. Mitsuru is like a less exciting version of Makoto, and her spamming of Marin Karin during battle pissed me off. Fuuka is forgettable, Koromaru is a dog (a good dog at that), and Ken essentially serves as a plot point during mid-game. The less said about Shinji, the better for the game, and if you're reading this after playing Persona 3, you know why. Do not become tempted to use him too much in battle. My girl of choice in this game and my favorite character overall is Aigis, not only because she's a unique character, but because she possibly has the best character arc not only in the game but in the entire series. She's a humanoid robot designed by the Kirijo group specifically to fight shadows, so it's no wonder why she's a valuable asset to SEES in combat. Her position in SEES in terms of the narrative is about as flat and...well, robotic as you could imagine. The only quirk she possesses is a borderline creepy commitment to protecting the protagonist, to the point where she watches him sleep every night. As the game progresses, Aigis keeps her redeeming qualities while steadily becoming more human-like, fitting in better with the teenage characters. Her steady transformation into speaking and acting more like a human is so smooth that the instance where the boys meet her on the beach will feel like a whole lifetime ago. In a game with dynamic characters, her arc is the most dynamic. I also find her quirks much more endearing and interesting than the more irritating one from the other SEES girls.
The other social links in the game also vary in quality. Half of the other social links are fine, but some are downright insufferable. I liked the Hermit one where you find out your homeroom teacher is playing an MMORPG with you on the weekends, and then she becomes flustered, ashamed, and enraged when she finds out that it was you she was talking to AND that she has developed a crush on you. Kenji needed to be smacked around, Tanaka is a greedy, aggressive piece of shit, and I hated the authoritarian hall monitor. Still, the worst one of them all is fucking Nozomi. Holy shit. In real life, as a player of this game, I felt embarrassed to be around this character while ranking up his social link even though I was playing this game alone in my living room with no one else around. He's an arrogant, snobby, pretentious fat cocksucker with no redeeming characteristics at all with one hell of an anger streak. He refers to you as your "little brother" as he starts to like you as if you were having a hard enough time trying to stomach this kid. You're saving the world and sleeping with half of the female cast of this game, and he's stuffing his fat face with his fifth bowl of large ramen—what a condescending shithead. You then learn that he's also a thief and a doomsday cultist, to make matters worse. When you max out his social link, he doesn't understand a damn thing even after he's confronted for his actions and wets himself in fear. You get the option to say that he's "irreplaceable," but I chose this option thinking that it said that he was "irrevocable" because that would've made more sense.
The player will become familiar with every social link the game offers because there isn't much else in the game in terms of exposition. Besides ascending through Tartarus on a nightly basis, the dark hour only offers intrigue every full moon. This monthly event is when SEES fights an immense shadow that coincides with a specific type of arcana. These are the sections reminiscent of an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as many teenagers fight the unspeakable oddities of a paranormal world in their town at night after school. These full moon bosses are the reason for spending so many hours fighting shadows in Tartarus because these arcane behemoths will test the skills of any player. The Hanged Man boss especially resonates with me because I had the most challenging time with his Sister Mary shields. If the player dies during one of these bosses, they'll have to go back to earlier in the day because there are no save points. This penalty means they'll have to sit through the exposition they already saw each time. Of all the times the game finally offers some exposition, a point without the ability to save is the most egregious. As I stated before, these bosses only occur every full moon, which is roughly once a month. The lenient amount of time gives the player ample opportunity to prepare in Tartarus, but it also means that the only real source of exposition for most of the game happens only once each month. Persona 3 has a very languid pace that turns some people off. I don't mind doing everyday activities without any substantial interruption, but there were times that I admittedly wanted the game to move quicker. Some of the full moon encounters didn't even satisfy my need for exposition, making me yearn for more to happen.
The pacing of the game kicks into high gear around November. The player still has to do all of the things during the day that they've become used to, but there is way more going on in the game's narrative to break up the usual affairs. Once you defeat the last big shadow, it is revealed that Itkusuki misleads you and the rest of SEES into defeating the big shadows not to conquer the dark hour but to bring all of these shadows together to form a being called Nyx and bring forth the end of all life on Earth. Itkusuki dies while trying to sacrifice you to it but takes Mirsuru's father along with him. In the next month of December, a new kid named Ryoji arrives at school. He becomes acquainted with the members of SEES except for Aigis, who seems very wary of his presence. After Aigis tries to fight Ryoji, the game reveals that he is the personified version of the arcana Death, the missing arcana in the equation to make Nyx. He is also the grown version of Pharos, the kid visiting the protagonist throughout the game. His being is also carried inside of the protagonist. They have to choose to kill Ryoji to prolong the inevitable and become oblivious to the Dark Hour and any memories involving it or take on a seemingly impossible foe at the end of January. If you choose to let Ryoji live, he turns into the persona Thanatos, and you have a month to prepare to fight Nyx. January is only one month, but it feels like the longest month in the game. There is a lingering melancholy in the air as everyone is dreading what seems inevitable, so they try to stay strong and appreciate each other before the time comes. This moment is when the SEES members seem like genuine friends instead of associates. Once you fight Nyx, the end of the world still seems like it's coming no matter what SEES does until the protagonist seals Nyx away, not defeating it, but prolonging its return. Months later, the protagonist sheds his human form in Aigis's arms as he becomes a martyr to protect people from Nyx until the time comes again that it will destroy humanity. The final month in the game is easily the most poignant moment. After so many months of hunting large shadows, seeming like it didn't add up to anything, something with enormous stakes finally makes the player feel the same sense of weighted dread as the characters do. The player will go day by day doing what they've been doing for the whole game, but a looming sense of melancholy and dread adds a certain sense of impact to it. Once the final month culminates into the game's falling action with the final boss and the ending, it is emotionally heavy, and maybe a tear will run down your cheek.
Persona 3 is great but flawed, and those are two adjectives that don't usually mesh together concisely but seem necessary in this case. I can't excuse the game for not allowing you to control your partners in battle. It always resulted in a highly frustrating and unnecessary obstacle that I felt I had to overcome with every boss in this game. The characters aren't consistently pleasant or well-developed like in the other games, and the pacing leaves a lot to be desired. However, I can see that the pacing led up to something fantastic that will resonate with me longer than most video games I've played. Persona 5's ending was bittersweet, but the end of this game was an emotional punch in the gut that left many questions unanswered. However, it doesn't mean that I wasn't satisfied with what was presented to me as those questions I had unanswered leave this game ever-present in my mind long after I've completed it, and that's what good art should do.
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