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Beyond its undeniable stylistic allure, Persona 3 is no more than a collection of cursorily designed
mini-games ineptly grafted onto a shoddy dungeon crawler. I found every moment playing this game to be unbelievably boring, and I attribute this not only to its
shallowness and lack of difficulty, but also to the unreasonable amount of time
wasted on loading screens and redundant conversations. Celebrated by journlolists and animu kids as a "breath of fresh
air", or even as some kind of a savior to an overall lackluster and fast degenerating genre, Persona 3 serves at
best as a reminder that JRPG fans are better off getting into SRPGs instead.
To unlock stronger personas you have to grind through multiple characters whining about their easily remediable,
adolescent crises. During these conversations, which soon become therapy sessions, the friend poses a question all
the while betraying hints of melodrama or a want of inspiration or encouragement, at which point you are supposed to
select the response that you believe will afford the most points. This is 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, so in theory they are definitely not a bad idea.
However the issue remains that these conversations waste several minutes in every simulated day for a brief
moment of decision-making that plotwise has little effect.
While the battle system shares similarities with 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 actions. Whenever you exploit an enemy's weakness, that enemy is downed and you are rewarded with an
extra turn. Once all enemies are downed an all-out attack becomes available in which, as the name implies, everyone attacks
at once for massive damage.
And this is literally how every battle plays out:
Scan for weakness > exploit > all-out attack > repeat
But there is an even more exceptionally broken strategy: Once all enemies have been downed, you can forfeit the all-out
attack and leave all of them stunned. Because their subsequent turns are spent on getting back up, this strategy
effectively gives you a free full round of turns. And this simple move overshadows everything, with the
strong tactical aspect that battles in the previous MegaTen entries were known for simply disappearing.
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 one is treated like a
tutorial.
But there's more. The designers made the allies AI-controlled, probably to increase the immersion, but they did it so hamfistedly that they instead
ended up increasing only frustration. Although allies do have generalized commands they will obey, they aren't the
least bit reliable. Once an ally has downed an enemy, for instance, they will not continue on with the rest unless
specifically commanded to do so, something which has to be done at the start of every round. Furthermore, gone from older
Persona entries is persona management between characters (with the exception of the protagonist). Meaning each ally has a
set persona which cannot be switched and, reminiscent of Avatar Tuner, these allies have a
set weakness that can be exploited by the enemy. But worst of all is that your allies will acquire only a limited number
of skills, and even fewer actually useful ones, rendering them even more useless. The allies, basically,
at the height of their utility are a sort of punching bag which allow you 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 is now relegated to an effortless, card-swapping mini-game.
Compounding all the already unforgivable mistakes, and no doubt in order to drag out the length of the game and deter
criticisms of its ludicrous ease, Persona 3 adopts an extremely absurd pacing setup wherein the player sinks a
significant amount of time watching loading screens and pointless straitjacket dialogue scenes. Since days are split up
into multiple parts (i.e. morning, afternoon, lunch time, etc.), the game is interspersed with loading screens that
transition between these periods while notifying the player. Encountering these multiple times a
day seriously challenged my desire to even continue playing the game. On top of that, either during lunchtime or at
night, one or more friends call you up and pester you to spend time with them in the near future, and always
with the same invitations with the exact same script. This is only to remind you that, yes, you have social
obligations, and yes, people are annoying. Even before and
in-between classes you'll have to subject yourself to brief conversations that really contribute nothing.
And though I had initially thought I would be free from these constant interruptions while dungeon crawling, I soon
discovered that this aspect of the game had also received the general nerfing treatment.
Every floor in Tartarus, the sole dungeon in the game, is randomly generated, and sections within the tower are
visually differentiated 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 number of color swaps. The developers simply
failed to recognize that these uninspired enemy designs, as commonplace as they have been for years, were never
excusable to begin with.
Once you complete several floors, a magical barrier obstructs further progression until the plot has advanced to a
pre-determined day. I found this to contribute to two major problems. First, the idea of disorientating the player
within a dungeon is ruined when the game, along with the lack of difficulty (the dungeon is not the least bit intimidating)
and the ease of accessing teleportation devices, arbitrarily prevents deeper exploration.
Second, until the day arrives when the game removes the barrier, several real-time hours often have to be wasted in
school and daily activities. And, to top it all off, you are required to take the train and walk to every activity
every single day. And this barrier is encountered just about after every boss, making it a very frequent occurrence.
Although Persona 3 shamelessly wastes countless hours of your time in all sorts of ways, this barrier business
is by far the biggest detriment to the game's flow.
So until the prescribed day arrives you have to return to the mundanities of evening events, where you can opt to raise
the protagonist's charm, courage and academic stats by visiting coffee shops, karaoke, arcades, and so on. These
engagements consist of no more than the protagonist entering the place of interest, doing the appropriate activity for
a few seconds, and then a text notifying you that the relevant stat has risen. These stats, rather than enriching
the experience, are wholly vapid and again waste several minutes daily. Maxing them out opens up new social links, but
this yet again requires you to invest several more hours in these relationships. It just isn't worth it, and while
skipping all daily events certainly shortens the downtime, this comes at the expense of acquiring stronger
personas. And even then, you'd still have to endure all the loading screens and pointless dialogue.
Either way, it is infuriating. Persona 3 is far too suffocating and unmindful of my precious time
even to be considered playable.
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