Persona 3

Persona 3 is a JRPG (Japanese Role Play Game) that I played quite recently and I have to sadly say, the damn thing has quite an affect on me. I either end up playing it until I emerge from my room like a brain sucking zombie because I haven’t eaten in a vary long time, or I play it for roughly fifteen minutes before snapping my controller in half and locking the game in my closet for a few days.

But enough about my personal issues, Persona 3 is about a team of high schoolers who can use a different sort of personality inside them that comes out when they shoot themselves with invoker guns. No, I’m not kidding. At least three times in a single battle you pull out a gun and shoot your self in the head with a pistol, letting a monster come out the side where the blood and brain matter would have sprayed from. It comes out with a lovely shattering sound to fight creatures called shadows. Shadows come from your school that for one hour at night turns into a giant tower of changing doom, while normal humans turn into coffins so they’re safe and don’t remember a thing.

You play the fairly quiet hero who wares headphones and has blue hair (It’s a JRPG, what do you expect?) who joins the shadow fighting group consisting of your regular JRPG stereo type characters; The cool older girl, the fighting older male, the perverted cocky guy and the daughter seeking revenge. No, that’s not all there is but that’s all you start with and that’s all I’m willing to go through.

This game is played as a cross between those odd Dating games you find on the internet and a regular “chosen one” fantasy game. Magic hurling, sword fighting, every female character succumbing to your manliness a little too easily… blah de fricken blah. If you really want to know what it’s like it’s the same as every other RPG that’s come out of Japan. The system looks a little different; it’s a little more Macob then most fluffy-happy-bunny-bleed-out-your-eyes-because-there-are-so-many-bright-colors-on-the-screen games but it’s the exact same thing.

Oh and it doesn’t end there. The difficulty curve is awful, let me explain. While you try to get to the top of the big… tower thing that houses almost all these shadow baddies you kill a lot of them, and quickly. Probably enough to worry about the little jerks becoming extinct because all of them die so easily (you can choke them with a cordless phone). About five floors after I started playing I began to wonder why it would be this easy. It was rather sad actually, I’m not a big fan of turn based combat to begin with but if it was going to be as easy as whacking the evil glove of littleness twice then I don’t really see the point in fighting them to begin with. Then somewhere around floors ten or fifteen I get to a small floor and my intelligence person (the cool older female, naturally) tells me she senses something big and to be careful. I, excited finally, run out to fight this gigantic shadow. I didn’t think it would be the shadow of instant death. To beat the first boss I had to fight him three times, and it’s the same exact thing for every boss no matter how hard you train your little characters up.

Now, I’m not saying that the game is worse then baby eating and that you shouldn’t go get yourself a copy. Chances are that you already know if you like this game or not. If you like JRPGs, you’ll find this game fun and possibly even challenging, giving a new look on the beaten, dead horse that is all JRPG story lines. If you don’t like them then don’t worry about it. This is not a game that will change your point of view and I certainly think you could do better in the way of cartoony games, like buying the Sly Cooper series.