What can I say about the Persona series… quite a lot
actually and while I will try to limit myself I will say that this post will be
quite information intensive. I will restrict myself and focus primarily on
Persona 3 but there are a lot of features which are consistent within the
series.
The story of Persona 3 is a complex one and is fairly
difficult to explain but I’ll do my best without spoiling any important plot
points. You play as “insert any other name than your own here you unoriginal
people” and you are on your way to your school dorms. You are a new transfer student
and are temporarily staying in these mixed dorms until your placement within
the school is sorted. After a whole bunch of interesting story points and
character introductions you discover that there is a secret hour hidden within
each day in which only a select few people can experience. In this hour
everyone is asleep and turn into coffins. After learning about these cool
demon things called shadows you find out that you have a power called persona
which allows you to fight them. Oh yeh, the way in which you summon these
personas is by shooting yourself in the head. With a group of students (yes
this is a Japanese world in which everything happens in high school) called
SEES you are tasked with exploring a building called Tartarus in order to find
out what the dark hour is and where the shadows come from. Simple enough to
understand right? Oh and you have to balance all of this with your high school
life.
So all the games in the Persona series have similar elements in
the combat style but to talk about all of the differences, similarities, pros and
cons of each combat style would take forever; so for the sake of your sanity
(and mine) I will restrict myself to strictly talking about Persona 3. There
are a few different levels of combat within the game, as with most RPGs, so to
make things a bit easier to critique I will break them down and look
individually.
Turn based combat. Saying you either love it or hate it
doesn’t really cover the response to this gameplay style since in the right
environment everybody will love it, yes I’m looking at you Pokémon. I am a big
fan of turn based combat and so I won’t deny that I enjoy the combat
system a little more than most. However I also think it makes me look a little more
critically at games featuring it since I have so many other games to compare them to; both good and bad. So
first off I would like to say that the layout of the game is beautiful, there
is an element of simplicity to the “UI” that makes it easy to jump into but
still maintains enough depth to keep it interesting for seasoned players. You
have your standard choices for turn based battles like “Attack”, “Skill” and “Item”
which all have fairly obvious uses; I should probably add that Attack is a
character move whereas Skill is a Persona move. The character AI is also very smooth, making it straight forward to wail on low
level enemies and get your respective behind handed to you by bosses; this is
pretty much key when having turn based combat since nobody likes making a
couple of choices which leads to them either winning or losing every time.
There is also a tactics button, this was very much a premise
for the Final Fantasy XIII combat system….Oh what? Final Fantasy did something
that wasn’t original? Surely not… but yes. The tactics button does the exact
same thing as the “Paradigm shift” but guess what, it works! I think it’s safe
to say that XIII’s combat system (along with story, characters, design and its
very existence) were not well received. That isn’t to say that the individual
components aren’t great in their own environment, in my opinion it was the
overall composition that was the problem.
So looking at the tactics system in a (in my opinion) better environment
I really enjoy it and can clearly see how well it solves the problem of player
control. Ok, so before talking about how it’s a great fix I should probably
define the problem: one of the biggest
complaints about turn based combat is that it is very repetitive and takes a
long time to do a simple and obvious action. How do
player tactics solve this? Easy, by removing your need to explicitly control
other party members. Not convinced? Well by doing this the number of actions
you have to command is drastically reduced to practically one a turn while
still giving you control of the flow and focus of the battle. Setting tactics
like “Support/heal” or “Act Freely” give a clear indication of what you would
like them to do without having to tell your useless party member to heal
themselves every 4 seconds. It also allows you to select a target creature for
each member to focus on which stops you from saying “WHY DID YOU RUN HEAD FIRST INTO DEATH YOU
STUPID BASEBALL CAP WEARING (insert swear of your choice here)”. So looking at
the tactics system I would say that it is a successful addition to the overall
combat and works in a really interesting way.
So moving on to the main focus of combat in the game and
surprisingly enough the source of the title, Personas. These are the “Pokémon” of Persona,
you run around during the Dark Hour, fight enemies and collect them as your
personas. So what makes them different from Pokémon? Instead of “little Japanese
electric mice” you have “claw wielding ninja cat-girl wizards” and if that
description alone isn’t enough to make you want the game then I’ll sell the
idea a little more. In the game as you battle more and more enemies you can
collect different personas with different attributes and classes. For example:
you could collect a fire attributed persona and so you would be stronger
against fire type attacks, this is a standard in RPG’s usually with armour
instead of creatures. Where Persona really shines is that alongside this
interesting take on attributes there is also class specialization. Each
individual persona is divided into different “classes” or categories which
through “Social links” you can specialise in like the “Magician” or “Emperor”
classes. This adds a whole new element of strategising your collection of
personas to cater to your specialization or even changing your specialization
to fit your collection; that is the beauty of the personas, they are relevant
in every section of the game.
Quite possibly the most interesting feature of the personas
is the ability to fuse them together, this is what really makes it different
from other collection games like Pokémon since it really does provide a new
focus. Firstly I would like to say that, as with most other things in the game,
persona fusion is not necessary and you CAN play through in a traditional style
of level up your personas and make them super strong through hours of grinding
but fusion provides another option. Fusion changes the focus from levelling up
to collecting a variety of personas and using them to create new and more
powerful personas.
Overall each persona is different enough and interesting
enough to justify an individual focus through levelling but the sheer amount of
personas available, through more than one method, is the difference from having
good collection and great collection.
Finally the strange part of the game… Social links. Have
trouble making friends? Well you are gonna suck at this game since the best way
to level up and become stronger is to have lots of friends. So the idea of the
persona is that it is a manifestation of your psyche, so it’s only logical that
the stronger your mental state is the stronger your persona is. This (to me) is
an incredibly interesting feature which essentially adds a narrative to stat
building; things like joining clubs or the student council all add to the stats
of your character since you are in different social environments with new people.
Each social link has a different class, for example joining
the student council and making friends there levels up the “Emperor” class
where as the standard friendships in your dorm add to the “Fool” class. I think
this is really cool because it means that your abilities and strengths will
very much lie in who you want to be friends with and the choices you make with
those people.
Also this is an opportunity for lonely gamers hidden in a
dark room to see what it’s like to make friends, an invaluable resource for
people like me…
So overall this is an amazing game that I recommend everyone
try playing. Actually, I recommend you try and play any game in the series
since they are quite similar and progressively get better. To sum the whole
thing up it is a high school Jrpg that could be defined as a Final fantasy Pokémon
dating sim with elements of traditional anime story arcs. I really cannot
explain how much I love this game and I will continue to play each game in the
Persona Series.
Dave
Amber Glass Broadcast
Amber Glass Broadcast
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