Persona 3 (PS2)

I've got the US version of this game and it is one of the best RPGs I have ever played. I have also played the previous Persona games as well as Digital Devil Saga games. You are a teenage hero, with no name and silent, like a lot of other Japanese style RPGs. Upon your transfer to a new school your Persona or demon power awakes and the quest to explore tower of Tarturus and solve the riddle of the Dark Hour begins.
You can have up to 4 characters in your party, including a dog, and this is a turn-based RPG, very much like the other Persona games. You can fight as your character or summon demons to fight for you. This is where magic comes into the game. You can win demon cards at the end of battle and fuse them (in the Velvet Room) to make more powerful demons for your character to summon in battle.
The game uses the Tarot cards as the basis for 'Social Links' which you can improve by talking to and spending time with various characters in your school and the various areas you can explore. Such as Maiko, the Hanged Man social link, who is a young girl in primary school who's parents are getting divorced. The more time you spend with her the more you learn about the family life. I loved this aspect of the game. It's entertaining and fun to do, and you really find yourself torn between who to spend time with. You can date girls too.
As you are a teenager you have to go to school. You spent Monday to Saturday at school where you can interact with other students. In you free time you can visit the mall, shrine, stations and your dorm. You even have to pass exams (no that difficult). Also you can join a sport team and a club. All of this helps you discover new social links and increase you existing links.
Unlike the previous Persona games where you could explore large areas of Tokyo and places such as schools and shopping malls become monster filled dungeons, in this game the only monster dungeon is the tower of Tarturus which appears every night at midnight for an hour, called the Dark Hour. Evey month the full moon causes more powerful demons to appear and you have to defeat them.
This game is great. The fusing of demons is addictive as you can see which ones you can get before you at the level to get them. The social link part of the game will take up a lot of your spare in the game, and then you have to fight in Tarturus to keep your levels high so you can defeat bosses. This game has over 30 hours of gameplay, and more like 50 plus if you want higher level demons. It's quirky, unique and great fun. For £24.99 this will keep you entertained for a very long time..

This is probably the most unique rpg I have ever played. being a Final Fantasy and Kingdom hearts kinda girl, I was a little dubious to give this game a try, but it was pushed on me by a friend and so I thought I'd give it a try. And I can honestly say that it was one of the best decisions I made last year XD And a grand welcome into the world of Shin Megami Tensei's rpgs!:D
Persona 3 is just awesome from the first moment you start the game and all the way throughout. You are treated to tense and suspenseful FMVs ( done in anime style, which is just cool!) and cutscenes! And in this game , you are taken on a journey that fills every need in a good story! There is humour, suspense, excitement and tears. You are presented with characters that develop throughout the game and draw you into the story and you feel for each and every one of them and you are always desperate to see what happens next!
The only thing that took some getting used to for me was that certain things happen on specific dates and you need to make sure that you level p your characters in a set amount of time and complete the tasks set to them.. and on top of that, you are playing as a student in a new school, you you can't forget to do your homework!! XD
The social aspect of this game is fantastic. As a student in Japan, you attend class, have the option to go to clubs and form socila links with anyone and everyone and even have a girlfriend! lol And the benefits of partaking in social activities helps level up your "Persona" which is your powers when you go into battles ( kinda like summons in Final Fantasy).
All in all, it's just a really original and fun game and you will be addicted to it! Give it a try. you'll love it!

Despite the advent of the next gen consoles over the last couple of years there's none the less been spate of quality games brought out for the king of the older generation of games stations the PS2. While the likes of God of War II have been highly lauded others, such as Rogue Galaxy, have failed to garner recognition which they deserve. Of the later both the oddest in inception and the most enjoyable to play has been Persona 3. It is one of a series of strange demonic CRPGs created by Japanese developer Koei [Edit: as was pointed out to me this was an Atlus production].

Now anyone who's had anything to do with the genre will tell you that demons in a JRPG are common as a cold in spring time. What makes Persona 3 peculiar is that it isn't a pure RPG, nor yet an action RPG (such as Kingdom Hearts) or a tactical RPG (such as Disgea, one of Koei's [Edit:Atlus] earlier and highly amusing games) rather it fuses a classic turn based JRPG, with elements of tactical team building, and a school life simulation game.

An odd mixture? Without a doubt

Does it work? Definitely.

It's not a perfect game, there are minor flaws which I will discuss below, but it a very fine one.

The strengths of the game are beautiful cell shaded graphics, an interesting plot, combat mechanics which are (for the majority of the game ) nicely challenging and well thought out, interesting and diverse characters and the freshness of the continual changing of pace between demonic combat and school life. It is the way that the last of these is integrated into the mechanics of the rest which is the most interesting thing about Persona 3. The more you develop your contacts through you daily life the more options open up to you with in the combat scenarios.

I've not included the soundtrack amongst the strengths of the game, not because i think it bad, so much as because i'm left uncertain how to think of it at all. It comprises of a selection of specially written Jpop numbers which are mostly either upbeat, or manic depending on what's happening, for much of the time they seem pretty much in keeping with the overall feel of the game, but, I'm just not sure i liked them. Call me curmudgeonly but there were times i felt like simply turning the sound to mute so as not to have them chasing through my head for the next few hours or days.

Games flaws are few, but sufficient for me to dock it a star in rating it, despite how much pleasure i derived over all from playing Persona 3. The first is that towards the end, the combat can become seriously unbalanced in favour of the player by the use of one of the special options open to you. The trouble is it's difficult not to use it once you've found it, because it's quite likely by this point you want to get to the end and see how it all comes out. Which brings me to the more serious problem. This is a long game, a very long game, you can easily spend more than 100 hours on a single play through it. For most of the time this is by no means a problem, but there is a period between the final revelation in the plot and the actual finale of the game which seriously drags. If you've been at all conscientious about fulfilling the quests with which the game presents you, you'll find there maybe as much of 10 hours of play where there's really very little of substance for you to do. These two things along with a couple of minor issue about certain plot elements not being fleshed out to their fullest potential are enough for me to knock off that last star.

So a four star rather than a five star game? Well yes, very reluctantly yes, as I know a great time playing it for the most part. It is fun, it is pretty, it is fresh and different, even to a fairly jaded old games player, yes i got a bit irritated with the music, but at the end of the day i still played it for over 100 hours and now several weeks afterwards am thinking about going back and playing through again from the start.