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TEENAGERS KILLING THEMSELVES??

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 12 / 339
Date: August 15, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I really wanted to enjoy this game,as I have the first two Persona games as well as Nocturne and Devil Summoner;but Persona 3 goes way past the line of good taste.

To summon your Persona (other self or ego) players will put a gun (called
an Evoker) to their head and pull the trigger.Atlus,this is %110 BULL***T!!

The fact that these characters are teenagers and also that adolescents are among the highest rate of suicide victims,makes me want to vomit,when I think that YOU ARE MAKING MONEY OFF THIS!

There was absolutely no reason to put something so careless,idiotic and in such bad taste in a a game.This was all done in the name of the almighty dollar.Who needs any form of integrity when we can make a quick buck?

It's also not as if this is displayed once in the game,but everytime a character wants to transform into a Persona,we get to see a nice scene of kids blowing their brains out.What class Atlus;I hope you sleep well at night.What a wonderful thing for the youth to be exposed to.No doubt this game will also be played by those under 17.Even those who are of age and older,this is an unhealthy thing to be desensitized with.

To ALL the developers at Atlus and ALL the people that say there is nothing wrong with that aspect of the game;why don't you show this to some families WHO HAVE LOST LOVED ONES TO SUICIDE?Specifically by using a gun!See how "creative","artistic" or "FUN" they think it is.

This game should be recalled and that ignorant,insensitive and immature aspect be removed.I hope these jokers get sued,and whatever money they made from this game gets donated to teen suicide prevention.

GROW UP AMERICA!

A couple of original ideas can't save this failed experiment

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 1 / 2
Date: May 04, 2008
Author: Amazon User

First things first: Persona 2 is one of the greatest RPG's of all time mixing a mature story with interesting characters, amazing music, and fun dungeons. However, Persona 3 mixes a childish story with cliché characters, awful music, and one long and boring dungeon (255 floors of nothing). So, knock off a few points right there.

Next, knock off a few points for the sheer tedious nature of this entire game. You basically are doing the SAME EXACT THING for 40 hours (don't believe the reviewers that say this game takes 60-80 hours or whatever; they must have talked to every single NPC character 10 different times every single day or something). Nothing ever changes. It's just the same grind, with no secrets to find, no new places to explore, and no characters to get attached to. It's as pure a dungeon crawler as a dungeon crawler can be, with a little bit of high school drama thrown in as well.

Yet strangely, it's addicting in spurts. Atlus made a very interesting design choice by removing towns to explore or secrets to find: this way, you only focus on the story and battling. However, the story is boring and filled with annoying characters, and the battling is unbalanced. I don't mind not being able to control anyone but the main character, but why are all the other characters so stupid? They'll always cast the wrong spell at the wrong time no matter what you do. Take a boss battle early in the game where you absolutely MUST kill both bosses at the EXACT SAME TIME or one revives. There is no way to get the other characters to do that. Also, if your character dies, the game ends; pretty frustrating when every single enemy on the last floor uses insta-death spells to your entire party and it usually just kills you. However, as I said, it's addicting to level up for at least the first few hours of the game, and the "character interaction" (i.e. dating) part of the game is pretty fun until you realize how easy it is to make everyone like you. Also, speaking of tedium, the music... ugh... it just makes me cringe. Very questionable and repetetive rap and pop songs.

This game is not without merit, as the cinemas are actually cool (and I usually hate cinemas) and the character design is usually pretty good. There were a few surprisingly plot points that were intriguing and some of the later boss battles are fun. The game goes by quite quickly -- but it leaves you feeling rather unsatisfied. They almost made a great game, but the game just has too many tiny flaws that all come together to make the game unbearable for most of its play-through. As a game, it's a little below mediocre. As a sign of things to hopefully come in the world of RPG's, it's pretty inspiring. Someone else can take the advancements put forth here and put them to good use hopefully.

Great game, just not for me so much...

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 1 / 5
Date: February 01, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Well picked this game up after hearing a lot about it. It really sounded great. It was very different from some of the other RPG's I'd played. It started out pretty good, loved the whole school part of it and the dungeon crawling at night was fun as well. But it really started getting tedious to me. The story was ok, but it really just didnt hook me as much. I just wasnt able to finish it, I just started to get kind of bored playing the game and moved on to something else.

Not what I expected, but still worth playing

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 6 / 11
Date: August 17, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I'm going to rate this game by the major aspects of most games.

Story- while interesting, its slightly generic and when I saw the opening to the game, I expected a dark, enigmatic, and abstract story. But besides the swearing it seems like a childs game, the only time for a while that pulled me into the story was the very beginnning. But the game has its reasons, since you play out every day of school, its not like you can fit a major plot advance or interesting aspect of the story into every school day. But eventually you'll be more pulled into the plot. 7.5/10

Gameplay- they managed to make school as boring and uninteresting as it is in real life. Even though you can develope links between characters and after school activities; it seems like thats all you can do. And raising your characters stats is useful for only understanding another boring aspect of the school life in this game. For instance your academics has to be high enough to read a message next to a classroom, that ends up just being completely useless. You'll find yourself skipping through the schooldays as fast as you can but tartarus is a nice break from school. The combat is turn-based like many of atlus' games, and easy to understand, but is still relatively fast paced. Combat is fairly entertaining when fighting a boss or a hard group of enemies, but not so much when facing weaker ones. So you might end up skipping a lot of battles so that you can advance to the next floor. What happened with me was there might have been a hard battle somewhere, and my party was weakened so I ended up skipping all the battles until the boss so I could get out of there. The use of persona is cool and interesting, especially trying to exploit your enemies weakness with special attacks so that you can knock them down to gain an extra turn or a cartoon style animation in which your party runs in and engages the enemy in a cloud of smoke which usually ends up dealign a lot of damage. The AI is pretty good, but it can let you down sometimes,for instance, I ended up dying on a boss fight because the only person who could heal and had an effective attack kept skipping their turn even though they had plenty of SP to spare. As far as customizing your persona goes, its pretty deep, you can combine persona to create new ones, but if you have the social link that relates to that type of persona it will get stronger depending on what level that link is. All of you persona are automatically registered, and if you feel like you want one back after using it in a fusion, you can buy it. You can gain new persona when you defeat a group of enemies, some cards will show up and you choose one of them, and if your lucky you might get a new persona.
8.5/10

Sound- the voic acting is pretty good, and the soundtrack is ok, if you like japanese music. The opening song is especially good. 7/10

Presentation- the anime cut scenes are always amazing and very entertaining, but there is a serious lack of anime cut scenes in the beginning to middle of the game. The character designs are good, but non characters are very generic. The demons and persona look really cool though. The in-game graphics could use some improvement. 9/10 (because of the anime)

Areas- you probably won't venture anywhere but your dorm, the mall, and the school. Because the backgrounds are also generic. The areas in Tartarus are also very generic and only change when you get to the next block, which could be up to 20 or so floors. And even when you get to a new block it hardly changes except for color. 6.5/10

Replayability- moderate, but the story isn't great enough to keep you playing through the whole game since its 70+ hours long.

THE GOOD- original story, combat is intense and at times challenging. The persona are interesting, the anime is very entertaining and the soundtrack is passable.

THE BAD- almost everything you do at school is unimportant, it takes a while for something interesting to happen plot-wise, it can be hard to evade enemies sometimes and the backgrounds are boring.

BOTTOM LINE: 8/10, a good game and a good addition to the Shin Megami Tensei series, I definetly reccomend it to people familiar to the RPG genre.

It's like going to high school in Japan, only with monsters and ghosts

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: August 27, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Here are the game basics:
1) This is your typical lvel grinding, dungeon crawling RPG fare.
2) Dungeons are randomly generated.
3) You only control your main character.
4) You can only explore the dungeon for a limited amount of time befoer you're booted out.

Sounds pretty lame right? Actually, the game is really fun. By day, your a high school student and EVERYTHING you do deetermines the abilities you learn when your fighting. Making friends, staying awake in class, even the foods you eat all determine how your characters develop.

Once midnight strikes, the level grinding begins. You eventer a big labryrinth called Tartarus. The fighting is very cool and the abilities, summons, fusions, & combo attacks make the game pretty tight and the fight go by very quickly.

This is probably one of the best RPG's I've played on the PS2. If you're a fan of the genre, pick up this game. Oh yeah...and the music totally rocks. That alone is worth picking this game up.

Not a bad addition to the SMT lineup

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: September 03, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I just picked the game up, and haven't gotten very far into it, but just like all the other impressive games in this series, Persona3 is no exception. Visually, Atlus seems to have settled into a more manga-style artistic feel, which suits them well after experimenting with cel-shading in Nocturne and DDS 1 and 2, and then with realistic graphics in Devil Summoner. CG cutscenes are no more as well, they've been replaced with anime-style scenes. The game has a totally different musical style as well, sort of a trendy pop as opposed to the looped instrumentals from their previous games.

There's a bit of a teenage/high-school element to the game, with social interaction between the character and other students and characters playing a key part in the game's progression (even to the point of making the game unnecessarily difficult if this part is neglected). That was a little worrisome at first, but it grew on me pretty quickly, and this game is easily on par with, if not better than, the previous installments in the series. The battle system has also changed again, dropping the realtime element from Devil Summoner, and picking up a fresh translation of the "Press Turns" system from the DDS games. All in all, a very solid game, and well worth the buy.

Pretty big surprise

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: October 13, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I rented this game not knowing if i was really going to get into this game. I ended up really liking it and one of the better games to come out in a while.

I'm not going to give out the plot but i'll gladly tell you what i thought.

Plot/ storyline: Group of teenagers fighting monsters while going to school? Maybe not all that original but it's presented in a nice way.

Music: This is what really made get into the game, nice catchy techno music with vocals. My favorite would be when the moon's reaching out stars. Great vocal techno track and im sure others might like it.

Characters: While the protagonist is the typical you choose what his personality is like blah blah blah, in this day and age i think that just doesn't cut it. The others are pretty unique( Junpei: the lovable goofball, Yukari: Bit of a bratty but caring girl,Mitsuru: She's like the big sister of the team, Akihiko: At first he seems rather gruff but he's a nice man who's fighting to correct his mistakes of his past.

Dungeons: Oh man, now this disappointed me. You fight in only one place practically and the floors get old real fast. It seemed like a chore to come here and level up for the big boss since it was so bland.

Time: This game runs on a time kind of thing,early morning, afternoon, evening etc. I thought it was pretty cool.

Combat: Well....some of the fights can be rather hard, even if you do level up and upgrade your weapons. You also fight with demon like things called well...personas. While thats also pretty cool i had a hard time trying to find a decent one in terms of stats.

Making friends: Yes since your in high school you have the chance to join clubs( the Kendo team, the music club, Student council etc) doing this will also give you the chance to meet with and become freinds with, like real life on some days you can hang out with them after school or(if you make some female friends) you might even get into a relationship with one of them. If was simple and was fun and some of the friends you get to know have some problems, this of course builds character development. Some of these people you kind of feel sorry for and hope for the best. While some needs some good life advice.

Game time: I believe i only have 4 full moons to go until i complete the game. It still seemed short to me though and your only limited to the city, the one dungeon and thats about it.

Overall: Still a great game to keep you busy with for a few weeks( months if your a busy person who doesn't have time to sit down and play this all day) greatly reccomended.

This game gave me "Apathy Syndrome" ... but that's not neccisarily a bad thing!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 7 / 7
Date: November 08, 2007
Author: Amazon User

***Note: While it is understandable that spoiler content is bound to be found within a game review, the reviewer has done his best to avoid doing such. Still however, there are some possible spoilers, especially in the section reviewing the storyline.***

During the 90+ hours that I played Persona 3, I indulged in the game far too much to be considered healthy. Every day that I played it, I woke up, went straight to my console, and played it until the sun went down (or in many cases, the sun came up!) I guess because of this, you could say I was suffering from the "Apathy Syndrome" that keeps being broughout up through-out Persona 3.

That being said, Persona 3 features some of the most addictive and enjoyable game play that Atlus has created thus far. It features a streamlined version of the Shin Megami Tensei 3: Nocturne combat system. It also has a very wacky and amusing "real life" school simulator, and of course, the always compelling fusion system to keep the player determined to create the "ultimate" demon (or Persona, in this case.)

The game play overall is a standard turn based RPG dungeon crawler. Unlike the past few SMT titles however, there are no random encounters. All of the monsters can be seen on the map, and in turn, you can hit them to cause a surprise attack. Vice versa, they can also hit you, and (usually) cause an ambush. This little addition to the "SMT game play" is very much welcomed, as it helps eliminate the much tired cliché of having to wait for a battle when "leveling up" or having to kill off monster after monster when you're just trying to get to a save point. As mentioned above, the combat engine itself is a streamlined version of the "press turn icon system." The player is given one turn, but they can theoretically have unlimited turns by either landing a critical hit or exposing the enemies weakness (which results in an extra turn.) Best of all, the player can execute a massive damage attack where all of the party members assault the enemy if the player manages to land a critical blow or expose the weakness of ALL the enemies in battle (and this works for bosses too!). As one may not suspect, critical hits are very common, and the ability to exploit enemy weaknesses is also very common among most enemies. Suffice to say, the combat in SMT: Persona 3 is arguably the most enjoyable part of the game. It is somewhat easy, but at the same time, it is also very fast paced and action filled.

The only drawback to the improved combat engine however is that aside from the protagonist, all of the party members in the battle party are controlled by AI. They can be "directed" via using tactical commands, but unfortunately, the AI for the party members is surprisingly weak. Even though they are smart enough to heal when someone else is hurt, or exploit enemy weaknesses when they are discovered, they tend to do things that many times, are just plain illogical. An example would be the party member exploiting the weakness of an enemy. Since the whole enemy party consists of the same monster, it would be logical to exploit the rest of their weaknesses in order to end the battle faster. Rather, the party member will just continue to attack the same enemy and blow their extra turn. While this can be avoided with using some tactics, the tactics are somewhat of a nuisance to constantly be turning on and off. Thus, battles can end up taking longer than they should, mainly due to the player having to find ways to compensate for the weak party AI.

There is also a minor problem with the dungeon crawling. While the game does something interesting, and features predominantly only ONE dungeon (but it is a dozy, a 250+ floor tower), the crawling is a tad redundant. The dungeon floors only change appearance after every 20-50 floors. They also use the same monster graphic (aside from bosses), which seems a little lazy on the part of Atlus. On the plus side however, many of the dungeon's floors are randomly generated, which could lead to potential replay value. Still, the random generation sometimes leads to irritatingly huge floors, which can turn a reasonable 20-30 minute exploration into a 2 hour exploration if the player is unfortunate enough to get a string of "bad floors". Thankfully, the game generously allows for numerous save points and teleportation terminals, but some of the terminals are very far spaced out. As a result, it is not advised to play Persona 3 if you do not have very much time on your hands.

Aside from the combat and dungeon crawling, much of the game takes place in the "real world". During the time in the real world, the game flows like the days of the year. The player can only do a certain number of things each day, and they naturally, cannot regain days. So certain things that are missed or not explored will end up being permanently lost until the next "cycle". In order to encourage playing in this "real world" however, the game makes it so that in order to create many of the stronger "Personas" in the game, the player has to create social relationships with many of the games NPCs. Doing so unlocks different personas, based on the personality of an NPC. This approach is also surprisingly interesting, and the player will most likely find themselves trying to budget their time in order to obtain the maximum social relationship with a specific NPC in order to gain a desired persona.

The graphics of the game are decent, although "different" when compared to previous SMT and Persona games. The most shocking part of them is that series "brain" Kazuma Kaneko is absent, thus his trademark artwork and character design is not present. In his place however is an artist who is equally talented, and he does Kazuma justice. In fact, much of the game features wonderful artwork, so the absence of Kaneko is not the most damaging fact (although one would have to wonder if he would have had more influence on the game's story if he did do the artwork.) Aside from Kaneko, the graphics of the game are almost all done in a "dirty" but still detailed 3D style (and some cell shading ), with the exception of the 2D anime style "talking heads" shown during conversations, and the anime cut scenes. The anime scenes are a little disappointing however, as they are drawn in a more "sloppy and wacky" style than the more stylized and consistent drawings found through out the game. Overall, the graphics are not on par with other last generation PS2 games such as FF12, but they get the job done.

The game also features a very eccentric soundtrack, which is somewhat of a mash up of pop music, "pop" music and the classic SMT techno-industrial music that we have come to love. This music however can grow irritating, mainly due to the fact that the songs are over-used throughout the game or the songs are simply just not LONG enough and they turn into redundant loops. By the end of the game, I found the soundtrack to be mostly dull and tired as opposed to fresh and interesting when I first started playing. This was rather a disappointment since most of the previous SMT games seemed to feature more varied (and longer) songs.

Last but not least, Persona 3 is also somewhat disappointing in the storyline department. While the story is for all intents and purposes, GOOD, it is less thought provoking than the previous 3 Persona titles. This can hamper replay value, as someone will most likely "get" the whole story after one play rather than having to replay it to gain more understanding. There also seems to very weak continuity in the game with the previous Persona games, which is disappointing since the game has been stated to take place in the same universe and timeline as the previous Persona games. The game is also decidedly less dark and grim compared to previous Persona titles, which is interesting considering the dark atmosphere of the majority of SMT-related titles that have come out on the PS2.

Also, the pacing of the storyline in Persona 3 is a tad slow. While it is understandable that it is fleshed out over the "year" the game takes place in, some of the conversations and events in the game feel like "filler" or "incomplete" events. Also, many of them are overly-lengthy, which like the dungeon, can lead to obscenely long amounts of time spent reading the text and listening to the voice acting (which is very good!)

All negatives aside, Persona 3 is a gem. It isn't for everyone (and that's come to be expected with SMT titles.) It features lots of fast and fun dungeon battles, plenty of controversial images (wait till you see how the Personas are summoned), tons of voice acting and a very good story. It is disappointing that the game has so many short comings, but it is still one of the definite best RPGs of 2007.

Bought brand new on 12/30/07 at the 19808 Best Buy for $49.99

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: December 30, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Before you purchase this game for the rip-off prices here on Amazon, check your local Best Buy.

The Best Buy nearest to me in Wilmington DE had three copies of the game today, and I bought one of them. So there are still two left, and I'm sure this isn't the only Best Buy in the country with Persona 3 in stock.

A little disappointing, there is light at the end of the tunnel however!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: October 28, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3

I have to say that I have mixed feelings about this game. While I am a big fan of the MegaTen series, this game did come up a little short in some aspects. While I won't go into details that could be construed as spoilers, I will say that there are some elements in this game that are 'recycled' from some of the other MegaTen games, namely Nocturne. The Persona creation system in the game, however, more than made up for what was lacking with originality of some of the content. I can say though, that by the game's completion, you will be very satisfied with the outcome.

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