For those who haven’t played, let me break it down for you. The game starts, as all Japanese roleplaying games should start, with an anime. Images of a bustling town with normal people is juxtaposed with what appears to be a young woman trying to commit suicide. Throughout the scene, you can practically feel the claustrophobia and despair. In the end, however, she just can’t do it, and this scene in quickly abandoned to show us a emo kid on a subway. He arrives at his destination, steps off the train, and the clock strikes midnight. Suddenly, everything is green and quiet, a sickly pale covers the land, and everywhere there are coffins, upright and ominous.

Yes, you have my attention. Turns out the hero, a transfer student, has arrived to his new home during the Dark Hour, an extra hour of the day that only a few people can experience, during which evil shadows roam the mean streets and eat souls. Being able to stay awake during this time also grants you the ability to summon personas, a mythological or iconic figure such as Hermes or Angel or Susano-o that comes from within the depths of your soul and allows you to use magic spells and devastating attacks. Of course, the only way to call this creature is to put something that looks very much like a gun to your head and pull the trigger. Needless to say, let’s hope that the school board doesn’t hear about this.

So our protagonist finds himself in a predicament. He is a bit of a chosen one, able to use every persona in existence, and is constantly haunted by outworldly denizens. For some unresolved reason, he becomes the leader of SEES, a small cadre of students who will need therapy in five years, and regularly leads them on expeditions into Tartarus, a tower that appeared during the Dark Hour that is home to thousands of shadows. While still remaining a normal high school student during the other 24 hours of the day.

This is probably the highest selling point for me, the dichotomy between normal life and hidden life, the complete and total change of gameplay between exploring the dungeon and going to school, while there is still a very real connection between the two. You spend half the time going to classes, joining clubs, hanging out with friends, doing karaoke, studying, dating chicks and basically doing all the crap you’d do in real life...if only you weren’t so awkward. It’s standard Japanese social game fare, a lot of inconceivable social situations and lying to people to get your way, but the writing and the characters are decidedly better than most, and you’re giving an incentive to make nice with everybody in the damn town.

See, whenever you make a new friend, or get to know a friend a little better, you develop a new social link. Each persona is attached to a certain social link, and whenever you create a persona of that type, it gets bonus experience. Maxing a social link also gives you access to the ultimate persona of that type. So, you’re given a gameplay incentive to actually talk to the NPCs besides mildly hoping they’ll give you a potion. Of course, a lot of work went into creating interesting NPCs to meet, like Kenji, your schoolmate who crushes on a teacher and somehow actually manages to talk her into bed. Or Kaz, who promised his little nephew that if he became the best athlete in Japan, the nephew would go to rehab, I mean, physical therapy. Like I said, inconceivable social situations.

Of course, your nightlife is decidedly not anything like high school. As mentioned, at night your high school becomes this dark imposing tower in which all shadows seem to converge. Of course, being intrepid students you decide that it’s only right to risk life and limb climbing the damn thing. So, the other half of the game requires exploring an everchanging dungeon, moving steadily upward and fighting all manner of weird beasties.

It’s a good thing the combat is the best I’ve seen in a long while. It’s pretty standard, with some obvious exceptions. You can only control the hero, the rest of the character act on their own. Of course, there were worries, but the NPCs actually seem to know what they are doing. If they know an enemy’s weakness, they will try to exploit it. If you are on the edge of death, they will heal you. If they have taken a serious beating, they will ask to leave the battle. They seem to be legitimate fighters, not the retarded wombats you usually get in roleplaying games. Also, most enemies have a weakness of some kind, something that hurts them more than anything else. Funny thing, when you hit them with an attack of this sort, they topple, and you get an extra attack. You can even chain these attacks to knock down all enemies, and then have everyone beat the crap out of them in an all-out attack. So, if your timing is right and you’ve got the resources (i.e., a persona who can cast those spells), you can end pretty much any random battle in seven seconds, a very charming feature.

In terms of customization, the bulk of your time will be collecting personas, catching them all, if you will. After combat, there’s a random chance you’ll acquire a new persona, but the true power comes from combining your current personas into something new and shiny. Pretty much every persona can be combined with any other to make a brand new one, inheriting the previous personas’ skills and abilities. Also, the more intimate your social connections, the more powerful personas of that type are, granting them bonus XP the second they are born “from the sea of your soul.” You can also combined three or more personas to make a persona that’s even more powerful. It’s an extremely involving system, but they hold your hand every step of the way, telling you exactly what you’ll get from each supposed combo before you actually do it, leaving you to figure out exactly what you want to create. FES also adds weapon fusion, which allows you to turn your persona into weapons, making me think that the personas I heartlessly collect like some Jungian pokemon trainer can’t be too happy about the arrangement, as I constantly shuffle them around and force them to make sweet iconic love to Slime. Still, an interesting system that does away with the usual errors of “hundred of dudes” arrangements by providing leveling support and giving each guy some actual usefulness.

The gameplay time is intense. School starts in April, game ends in January, and you’ve got to live life one day at a time until then. With over 300 floors to explore in Tartarus as well, and over 190 personas to collect, we’re talking an huge amount of game, not even including the additional content from Chapter 2. The depths of the player guides on Gamefaqs only speaks to how much game they squeezed onto one PS2 disc. In terms of dollar to hour value, Persona 3 FES wins.

Listen, it’s enchanting, okay? It’s the most in-depth, original, tight roleplaying game that I’ve ever played. I’m intrigued by every character I met, I’m engrossed in trying to create and use a powerful persona, I’m diligent in climbing Tartarus, and constantly struggling with everyday life to find time to make-believe everyday life of some emo high school student. Sure, it has its faults, including the frustrating “you die you’re done” policy and occasionally too-long cutscenes, but in truth I like these kids, I like their life, as dangerous and depressing it is (school six days a week!), and I really appreciate Atlus providing such a good, damn game.

I like it so much, I’m not even going to write a sardonic one sentence finisher. Good work gents.

Final Score: 8/10

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