Taking into account everyone's advice, hopefully as well as I could have!
Relaxed version:
[PS2] Persona 3
Rating: *
Beyond its allure of Japanese culture and “pop-art”, Persona 3 is no more than a collection of cursorily designed simulations. I found every moment while playing this game to be unbelievably perfunctory, and I attribute this to not only its shallowness but also the unreasonable amount of time wasted on loading screens and redundant conversations. Celebrated by journalists and gamers like as a breath of fresh air, or even a savior to a quite lackluster genre, at best Persona 3 serves as an ephemeral reminder that JRPGs of this generation should perhaps try and be role-playing games.
To unlock stronger personas, I had to grind through multiple characters whining about their easily remediable, adolescent crises. During these conversations, which soon became therapy sessions, the friend would pose a question, all the while betraying hints of melodrama or a want of inspiration or encouragement, and then I would select the response that I believed would afford the most points. This was mostly done with little difficulty. While these decisions do not affect the direction and outcome of the story, as I would have preferred, it is a rarity for JRPGs even to have choices at all! However the issue remains that these conversations waste several minutes in every simulated day for a brief moment of decision-making that have little weight in the plot.
New to the Persona series, characters summon their respective personas by firing an Evoker at their head. So throughout battles, Japanese teenagers are resolving their aforementioned crises by emulating suicide. It seems JRPG developers are now compensating terrible design with not only tediously protracted plots, but also shock value!
While the battle system shares its similarities with Shin Megami Tensei III: NOCTURNE’s Press Turn System, in which the player is punished or rewarded accordingly for their actions, Persona 3 disappointingly simplifies it by only rewarding the player for their good ones. Whenever an enemy's weakness is exploited the enemy is downed and the player is rewarded with an extra turn. Once all enemies are downed an all-out attack is available in which, as the name implies, everyone attacks at once for massive damage.
And this is literally the objective of every battle:
scan for weakness > exploit > all-out attack > repeat
But there is an exceptionally more broken strategy: Once all the enemies are downed, I could forfeit the all-out attack and leave all the enemies stunned. Because the enemies’ subsequent turns are spent on getting up, this strategy effectively gives me a free full round of turns. For a purported strategy game, everything is overshadowed by this simple tactic; strategic battles that previous MegaTen entries were known for simply disappear.
Despite all this, the developers still decided to assign Fuuka a supportive role in all battles. Her role consists of constantly exclaiming motivational cheers and battle information, such as how many enemies are present/left/downed, with the most unbearable shrillness. As if battles couldn’t be any more embarrassing every battle is treated like a tutorial. I don’t feel as though I need to have my hand held during every adversity.
The game’s designers made the allies AI-controlled, probably to increase the immersion factor, yet this ends up only creating frustration. Although they do have generalized commands they will obey they aren't the least bit reliable because I found they were bereft of forethought. For example, once an ally has downed one enemy they will not continue to down them all unless they had been commanded to do so, which I had to do at the start of every battle. This was baffling: why would I have to command my allies to undertake the sole existing offensive strategy in this game? Furthermore, gone from older Persona entries, with the exception of the protagonist, is persona management between characters. Meaning each ally has a set persona which cannot be switched and, reminiscent of Digital Devil Saga: Avatar Tuner, these allies have a set weakness that can also be exploited by the enemy. But worst of all there are only a limited number of skills, and even much less useful ones, that your allies will acquire, rendering them even more useless. My allies, at the height of their utility, were a sort of punching bag which allow me to preserve the protagonist’s health.
It should be noted that absent from Persona 3 are the traditional demon conversations. The method of acquiring new personas has been relegated to an effortless, card-swapping mini-game.
If only to deter criticisms of its ludicrous ease, Persona 3 integrates a very, very artificial pacing where a significant amount of time is not actually spent playing. Since days are split up into multiple parts of the day (i.e. morning, afternoon, lunch time, after school, night, dark hour, &c), the game is interspersed with loading screens that transition between these periods while appropriately notifying the player. Encountering these multiple times a day challenges my desire to even continue playing the game. To make matters worse, a friend, often more than one, would pester me with same invitations with literally the same script, either during lunchtime or at night via telephone, to spend the with them some time in the near future. This is only to remind me that, yes, I have social obligations, and yes, people are annoying. Even before and in-between classes I'd have to subject myself to brief conversations that really contributed nothing. Where I had initially thought I would be free from these constant interruptions while dungeon crawling, I soon discovered this too would retain a similar abruptness and redundancy.
As the sole dungeon in the game, every floor in Tartarus is randomly generated and sections within the tower are visually separated by no more than a few minor details. Moreover, the enemy designs are among the laziest I've ever seen in a JRPG in recent memory. Enemies I encountered while climbing Tartarus were: a cube, a table, a hand, a snake, a bird, several variations of shadows, and so on, all with a tremendous amount of color swaps. JRPG developers fail to recognize that these uninspired enemy designs, as commonplace as they have been for years, were never excusable to begin with.
Once I completed several floors, a magical barrier obstructed further progression until the plot had advanced on a pre-determined day. I found this to contribute to two major problems. First, the concept of disorientating the player within a dungeon is ruined when the game, along with the lack of difficulty and the ease of accessing teleportation devices, arbitrarily prevents deeper exploration. This dungeon was not the least bit intimidating. Second, until the particular day arrived wherein the plot would remove the barrier, several real time hours had to be wasted in school and daily activities. And requiring me to take the train and walk to every activity every day felt superfluous real quickly. This barrier would be encountered just about after every boss making this hindrance a very frequent experience. Although Persona 3 had already shamelessly wasted several hours of my time, this was by far the biggest detriment to the flow of the game.
Until that day arrived, I had to return to the mundanities of evening events. I could opt to raise the protagonist’s charm, courage, and academic stats by visiting coffee shops, karaoke, arcades, and so on. These engagements are no more than the protagonist entering the place of interest, doing the appropriate activity for a few seconds, and then a text notifying me that the protagonist’s personal stat has risen. These personal stats rather than being an enriching experience are wholly vapid and again waste several minutes daily. When I maxed out these stats new social links were available, but this would yet again require me to invest several more hours in these relationships. It just wasn't worth it and while skipping all my daily events certainly shortens the downtime it would be at the expense of acquiring stronger personas. Even then, I would not be entirely successful because of all the loading screens and needless dialogue I would have to go through.
Either way, it was an infuriating conclusion. This game was far too suffocating and unmindful of my precious time to be considered playable.
Persona 3 certainly tries to be novel, but the gratuitous frills and shallow design, the same enduring faults of the modern JRPG, vitiates the experience.