*NEW*
5/11: Persona 3 Portable (PSP)
Total: 10 games
Persona 3 is such weird game for me to look back on. It's one of those games where half the time I was having a good time, and the other time I was hating it and wished it would end already. Obviously I managed to beat it regardless of those bits I didn't like, but I don't think I would ever want to play it again either.
First off, let's talk about the gameplay. The majority of the game, you're either talking with people & progressing the story (which I'll talk about more below) or you're doing combat. The combat portion is a lot of run around in a dungeon, kill Shadows (the baddies), and continue doing that until you can't get any higher in the dungeon. In order to do well in the battles, you need to figure out the Shadow's weakness. Once you figure that out, if you use it against them, you get a free turn and the Shadow goes down. Do that to all the Shadows on screen, and you get the option for an "All Out Attack" which causes a lot of damage to them, usually killing them. The Shadows can also exploit your party's weakness which gets them a free turn, so the battles are a balance of knowing what weaknesses everyone has and trying to exploit the Shadows before they do the same to you. You can equip different Personas which change up what spells you can use and what weaknesses you have, but you do need to be careful of your other party members, as you can't change theirs at all. This is an interesting concept to me, but the problem is that it's suuuuper slow. Most of the Shadow's weaknesses involve using a certain elemental spell, but every time you cast a spell you need to sit through a long animation. Once I had a Persona that could cast all the different elemental spells, a lot of battles I won the first turn but it would take forever since I had to sit through all of these animations. That combined with the crazy amount of floors that you have to go though made the combat very tiring very fast. At least I didn't need to grind much (as I was playing on Easy) but I still just wanted to skip it and go back to the story bits.
And speaking of story, in Persona 3, at midnight a big tower appears with Shadows in them. During that time, everyone other than Persona users sleep in these coffins and are unaware of all this happening. Your job is to go into the tower with your band of friends, defeat the Shadows, and find a way to get rid of the tower. At first I thought this sounded interesting, but it really doesn't develop too much more than that. At least, not in a way that interested me. You learn about people who want to stop you and where the tower came from in the first time, but most of the time it's going into the tower until you reach a block and then not much usually happens until the next section opens up. At least the characters were mostly interesting (big exception being Junpei who is annoying but also has a lot of screen time ugh), and honestly that was probably the biggest reason why I stuck through the game. I often looked forward to when I could raise some Social Links (kind of link side stories for the characters), so if that wasn't there I think I would of dropped this long ago. That being said, I couldn't help thinking the whole time that Persona 4 had better characters and story. I guess that's good that Atlus was able to improve on that, but it didn't help while playing Persona 3.
Another aspect of the game is being able to capture Personas and combining them into better ones... but honestly there's not a whole lot I can say about it. It's interesting, but I never understood how to combine them very well and get certain skills on certain Personas (like the game wants you to do for certain side quests). Plus for a large portion of the game I was able to stick with one persona (who had no weaknesses), and I just stuck a bunch of good spells on him and nearly maxed his stats so he was better than any Persona I could make anyway.
So uh... As I'm typing this up, it almost sounds like I hated the game
I think I probably would of liked this game more if I hadn't played Persona 4. They have the same combat system, but Persona 4 had a much more interesting story and it felt like it dished out a story nugget more frequently than Persona 3. So it's not like I wouldn't recommend this to anyone, but you definitely want to make sure that you're fine with a ton of combat.
