Flashback 14th — Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3

On the 14th of every month in 2013, Joseph offers a look back at one
of the games he’s previously reviewed for Damage Control.  This month: Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3

Yeah, I’m opening up this can of worms again.  I’d always intended to do this, even before I came up with the idea of the Flashback 14th series.  In fact, this particular column was the reason for this series in the first place.  (Well, this and another column.  I’ll reveal the other one in December.  Feel free to speculate below.)

So.  Persona 3.  I think the biggest problem with my review for it was that I’d come up with an angle I thought was going to be interesting, but it locked me into a certain course and I would’ve been unable to alter it without restarting.  I probably should’ve scrapped it and started over, since it was rightly pointed out that I only focused on the negative.

And I still stand behind the negatives that I pointed out.  Some of them are minor but can be an annoyance.  I can understand, plot-wise, why the main character’s death in battle causes the game to end, but from a gameplay angle, there is no reason whatsoever to make it so that you can resurrect everyone in battle except for the main character.  If it was a case of, the main character collapses into a black hole when he dies and sucks the entire Earth in, then sure, I should try to keep him alive as much as possible.  But if that was the case, I would think that everyone with him would enter into battle with resurrection items at the ready to bring him back to life before he has the chance to collapse.

I don’t think it’s any big secret that I’m not a fan of this concept.  It seems almost punishing to not only be given zero control over other party members, but to be taken immediately to a game over screen if the one character I do have control over dies, even if someone else should’ve been fully capable of using an item or a spell to bring him back.  Or her.  In fact, it’s distressing that even Square-Enix has jumped on the bandwagon, having made Lightning the load-bearing protagonist of Final Fantasy XIII.  But I digress.

So I’ve been sick for a little while.  I’m relishing the thought of reusing the images from my first Persona 3 review

In Persona 3, the player can only control the main character in battle, and the upside of this was that with less player control, it felt like the group worked together like a well-oiled machine.  They usually used attacks that exploited weak spots, although Junpei loved to use up his HP using physical skills, to the point where he’d have almost nothing left and would have to be constantly healed.  Rather than having to think ahead and wonder if I should have Junpei use one of his awesome moves or if I should have Koromaru use some of his magic, instead I watched as the characters made their decisions for me and generally ended fights in a similar manner as what I would’ve done in each situation, sometimes making better decisions than I feel I could’ve.  In the long run, it probably saved me some time and energy and I almost never found myself tearing my hair out in frustration.

Persona 3 was my first exposure to the Press Turn system and although I would finish other Shin Megami Tensei games before this one, it was a novel enough approach when I first encountered it.  At its core, it’s a reward system: if you manage to find an enemy’s weakness, you get another turn.  Some games in the series limit the total amount of turns you can take before it’s the enemy’s turn for battle.  The only limit Persona 3 imposes on the extra turns that can be earned in battle is that if there are four enemies, you can be granted up to four extra turns per party member, depending on if they hit an enemy’s weakness or score a critical hit.  If there is only one enemy, then only one extra turn can be granted.

Of course, it can punish the player if they’re not careful, since the same rules that apply to enemies also apply to party members.  Fortunately, enemies in the game can be seen and therefore snuck up on and struck.  This earns a Player Advantage, which grants an extra round in battle.  The careful player will find it impossible for the enemy to do the same (and gaining an Enemy Advantage, which could be bad for you).  It’s a well-thought out system and breathes life into the otherwise stagnant concept of turn-based battles.

Also, is it just me or am I the only one who actually liked the main battle theme?

For a Dark Hour, everything looks so bright and pretty

The majority of the rest of the game takes place during and after school as the main character attempts to live the facade of a normal life while hiding from everyone the fact that he saves the world a lot.  This isn’t all that easy to pull off, but it’s the heart of a lot of young adult fiction.  If Animorphs (and related media) has taught me anything, it’s that the younger you are, the better the chance that you’ll be the hero.  And since the young protagonist is a staple of Japanese RPGs…

The main characters’ daily interactions with his peers can raise some of his inner stats, and that can garner him extra benefits that may translate into more opportunities to deepen his relationship with people.  The stronger these relationships get, the more powerful the Personas he can create are.  And he’ll need each and every one of them.  As in much of the Shin Megami Tensei series, demons can be used in battle in lieu of actually knowing how to use magic.  And as the game progresses, more powerful demons will need to be used, naturally.  In the case of Persona 3, each main character has their own single Persona, but the main character is a wild card and can use a large number of various Personas.

One of the big things in the game was the dialogue choices, but some of them seem to matter more than others.  Yep, I’m about to bring up Operation Babe Hunt again, but since I went on and on about it the last time, I don’t feel it’s really necessary to harp on it again.  Along with load-bearing protagonists, “But thou must” situations in a game are another thing that I’m not a fan of.  These date back at least as far as the original Dragon Quest, but were annoying back then, too.  I hate being given a choice and then finding out that I didn’t actually have a choice afterwards.  “I’m sorry you feel as if you don’t want to drink this glass of bleach I’m offering you, but it’s written into the script that you have to.  Thanks anyway for making your concerns known.”

If your period is so bad that blood is flowing out of your eyes, then you’re beyond help

It’s interesting that the most significant choice I was given was literally whether or not I wanted to play the ending sequence or finish the game early.  This is an actual choice in the game.  Answering one way causes the end credits to come early and answering the other way opens up the final portion of Tartarus.  It’s obvious what choice should be made, but the game isn’t set up to ignore the wrong answer this time.

There is a question for which all answers are right except for one.  “Sign your name.”  Okay, it’s not really a question, but the way it’s said in the game, it gives the impression that this is your character.  It’s only your character if you don’t mind being an actor rather than a role player.  I believe that when I gave the character a name very similar to my own, that this was the wrongest answer I could’ve given.  If I’d have named him anything else and treated him not as a representation of me in the game, in other words, if I’d have treated this like every other JRPG and not been tricked into thinking of the protagonist as me, then I think I wouldn’t have minded scenes like the babe hunt as much.

I’d like to compare it to the character naming screens of Final Fantasy VII.  Whenever a character is introduced, they always introduce themselves and then the game pauses and tells you to “Please enter a name.”  Not your name, just a name.  Whichever character you lend your name to is the character you presumably have the most power fantasies about.  A substantial portion of the Final Fantasy VII fandom probably named Cloud after themselves.  They wanted to pretend to be Cloud but at the end of the day, they (hopefully) knew that they weren’t Cloud.

There is, at first glance, seemingly little known about the protagonist of Persona 3 except a little bit of background.  But as the game wore on, it was quite clear that it was expected he be played in a certain way.  Despite being a silent protagonist, he was not a player surrogate like the Light Warriors in Final Fantasy were.

Jenga…Jenga…J..J..J..Jenga.

You take a block from the bottom and you put it on top.  You take a block from the middle and you put it on top.  That’s how you build the tower; you just don’t stop. You gotta build
that tower putting blocks on top. And it teeters and it totters, as you
build it on up; it weebles and it wobbles, but you don’t give up.

It’s probably a compliment to the large and compelling story that it required the protagonist to be (and behave) a certain way, but I still say that Operation Babe Hunt could’ve been skipped entirely if the player didn’t want to accompany Junpei on his fool quest, and then still end with the same hilarious outcome: with the main character still unintentionally succeeding where Junpei failed.  However, it’s just one part of an overall decent story that started me seriously thinking about my own inevitable death.

If you look at it in one way, Persona 3 long overstays its welcome, taking anywhere between 125 and 150 hours to finish.  All of the content is contained on one disc, so much of the game will be experienced over and over and over again as you walk the hallways of school, leave to go to town, return to the dorm, and so on.  If you look at it another way, Persona 3 is a triumph in interactive storytelling.  It took Final Fantasy IX four discs to tell a 50 hour story on the original PlayStation console.  Atlus managed to cram 150 hours into one PlayStation 2 disc.  The story is also best experienced in small chunks at a time, occasionally binged if you need your Shin Megami Tensei fix desperately.  But the bottom line is that if super long RPGs aren’t your thing or you want to actually do more than play one game continuously over the majority of a year, then I recommend shorter games like Portal and whatever indie RPGs you can find on Xbox Live.  If you don’t mind devoting a lot of your schedule to deepening your relationship with one single game, then Persona 3 is a pretty decent choice.  (Although Persona 4 is just that little bit better, but that’s a story for another time.)