The VGZ blog

P3P can be interpreted in two different ways. Persona 3 Portable, as in a portable version of the PS2 game that started a revive in the Persona series, or Persona 3 Perfect, as in a perfected version of Persona 3. P3P is the most complete and fulfilling version of Persona 3 that has been released. While it loses a bit of its luster by being put onto the PSP, it retains the feeling P3 originally brought, but in a fresh new chocolate coating. Milk chocolate, because P3P doesn’t feel nearly as dark as it used to.

You’re probably saying to yourself, “But Bear, why would I want to play P3P when I’ve already played and beaten P3 and P3:FES?” I’ll let you know right now, that your idea was actually in Atlus’s heads when they made this game, so they’ve gone out of their way to make Persona 3, a game I’ve already bought twice, have even more content then previous versions and making it feel like a completely fresh new experience. In P3P this time around, you can choose to be either a male protagonist, or a female protagonist. Now, you’re probably saying, “So what? Pokemon lets me do that and it never feels any different. So does Mass Effect and Knights of the Old Republic.” And your concern, again, was duly noted.

The theme of P3P is the Butterfly Effect. The Butterfly Effect is the theory that stepping on a butterfly could completely alter the course of history. If you’re still unsure what that entails, read The Sound of Thunder, or watch that Ashton Kutcher movie. Moving on, the idea is to see how drastically the events change in P3P simply be the change of your gender. And boy, does it change quite a bit. While the general overall story doesn’t change, how your team treats you, what social links you get, and how a lot of the major events go down. While, again, it doesn’t change the big overall story, the small things make the game feel complete fresh. Atlus even tried to experiment with the idea of social links changing events in the story. Maxing out a certain social link before a certain date in the game changes a major plot point for the entire game. For those who’ve already played P3 here’s a hint: October isn’t nearly as sad.

Along with the inclusion of the female main character, what other things are different? Many things, to be exact. More alternate costumes for both the male and female party members, new social links, a new area called Vision Quest, a few new Personas, change in overworld style, new music, new optional boss, and a new Velvet Room assistant for the female main character. However, all of this falls into the shadow of the biggest and most important change to Persona 3, bigger than the female protagonist. The fixed battle system. Words cannot express how big of a deal this is. Let me put it this way: the thing that kept killing Persona 3 in the P3 vs P4 debates was its battle system. See, in the original versions of Persona 3, you couldn’t control your party members; you could only give them general orders like “Heal” or “Full Assault.” In Persona 4, you were given the ability to control each of your party members. Finally, Persona 3 is able to live up to its younger brother and take that battle system complete with new co-op attacks similar to follow ups in P4. The new battle system takes a lot of P3’s original difficulty and kicks it out the window making it hit everything on the way down, then dropping the kitchen, bathroom, and your neighbor’s sinks all on top of it. Remember the Sleeping Table, P3 vets? The new battle system allows you to bend him over, and make him call you mommy or daddy. That’s how big of a deal it is.

Party members can now save your ass too.

For those new to Persona 3, allow me to give you the run down. You are a transfer student that arrives in Tatsumi Port Island. Your dorm gets attacked by things called Shadows, and you and your fellow students band together to stop it. Afterward, your dorm buddies inform you of their organization, SEES, and how they’ve been fighting the Shadows for a while now. You join and are, almost unanimously, appointed the leader. You then begin exploring your school at night, which becomes a giant tower and hive to the Shadows during a period called The Dark Hour, a time that happens during midnight each night, but only a few people can experience it. You travel the tower, beat bosses, and meet fellow Persona users, both good and bad, and try to destroy the Dark Hour. While that’s a general overview, the complete story is a bit more complicated, and one of the most original and intriguing RPG storylines I’ve had the pleasure to read in a very long time.

Gameplay is split up into two parts. The overall idea is that you are balancing both school and your SEES responsibilities. So each day you go to school, you learn, and you hang out with friends. This is the first part, Social Links. Social Links are the bonds you form with friends in and outside of school. Social Links give you extra power when fusing Personas. This is essential, since after you max out a Social Link, each link has ten parts, you are rewarded with the ability to fuse one special Persona associated with their Arcana. Personas range from being silly little things like Pixies and Slimes, to mythological deities such as Thor and Cu Culanin, or even higher to the beings we know as Satan and Lucifer. These are essential in the second part of the game, Tartarus, the tower your school becomes during the Dark Hour. Tartarus is a basic dungeon crawler: you go in, you run around, beat enemies, go to a new floor, repeat until you reach a barricade and can’t advance. Battle use an updated Press Turn system, from Nocturne and Digital Devil Saga. By exploiting enemy weaknesses, you gain an extra turn. However, this time you don’t pick your whole parties actions at once, and if you use a weakness and knock an enemy down, and then do it again to another enemy, you get yet another turn. This gives you the idea for the general strategy of “Knock everyone down.” After knocking everyone to the ground, your team can perform an All Out Attack which deals usually enough massive damage to kill all enemies.

Having more friends means you don't have to spend time with this guy.

The gameplay is the most beautiful part of both Persona 3 and 4. I continuously applaud the games for allowing you to basically choose your own pace. If you want to do battles and grind, you can go do that almost whenever you want. If you wish to read some story, you can go do social links and learn more about your friends. How many games really give you that choice? Very few, the only ones coming to my head being Zelda and Okami. You want to do the main quest? Go ahead. Want to do sidequests or just go fight random enemies for the hell of it? Go right ahead. Face it, doing anything for sixty hours is going to eventually get old. Persona 3 an 4 found a way to keep your interest in the game for those sixty hours, and in such a simple formula.

The story to Persona 3 is second to none. While I absolutely loved Persona 4, the general story I felt was lacking compared to Persona 3. Not to say it wasn’t good, in fact it was pretty incredible. Persona 3’s was just better. The thing throwing Persona 4 so far ahead of it was the improved battle system and small fixes, like not having to listen to that chant after each social link. But with Persona 3’s improvements, it takes itself and puts it right there with Persona 4, only a few small problems holding it back. The story to P3 grabs you in and refuses to let go until you’ve finished your duty. Now that your party members can now also be social links, it feels like your actually friends instead of just team mates that have to work together because of their common power.

Maybe common isn't a good term, since your Personas are so much more stronger than everyone else's. That's Loki, by the way.

The sound to P3P is lacking. Granted, it is the PSP after all, so I shouldn’t be expecting something ear blowing. A lot of the sounds from P3 are brought back, but in a lower sound quality. The music, as I said in my last article about improvements that could be made to the series, gets repetitive. Listening to the same tracks over and over for sixty hours is a kind of torture in the Middle East I’m pretty sure. Another problem is the voice acting. A lot of the voices are still very well done, such as Vic Mignogna with Junpei. However, along with him, we have the terrible voice actor that plays Fuuka. I’m going to give the actor the benefit of the doubt and think that it’s the script and recording people’s fault for asking her voice to be the way it was, but Fuuka’s voice is almost painful to listen to. Worse yet, you have to listen to it frequently in fights as she tells you how many enemies are on your screen and tell you that you’ve knocked an enemy down because she’s under the firm suspicion that you’re blind.

Graphics got a hard kick in the groin with the transition over to the PSP. For starters, everything taking place outside of the main dungeon is done in a text format. You get character portraits, and menu items. When traveling around the school, you get little sprite versions of people that you can click on with the cursor, but it doesn’t feel the same as actually walking around the school. The graphics in the dungeon take a dive from the PS2 version as well. Jaggies everywhere! The backgrounds in the fights are also not nearly as detailed as they used to be. These are small things that, after a while, you get used to and stop caring about. And the tradeoff of the graphics for even more game content, well, I can live with that.

Persona 3 Portable is the third time I’ve bought the same damn game. But I will tell you this, I felt my moneys worth while playing through it. P3P has more content than you can shake a stick at. However, fans of The Answer from FES will be disappointed to know that it is not included. Personally, I don’t really care, but for those who did like it, you’ll have to stick with the version on PS2. For the rest of us, P3P is the perfect version of Persona 3. It is perfect for people who haven’t tried P3 yet, and for people who already have. Due to its heavy Japanese style and influence, on the other hand, many people may feel put off by it. They’ll especially be confused when they find out they have to go to school on Saturday.

BURN!

You will like this game if:

• You love the Persona series
• You want a fresh new RPG with some of the best pacing in video game history
• You wish to harness the power of Lucifer and use him to absolutely demolish everything in your path
• You loved Persona 4, but haven’t played Persona 3
• You really want to be a teenage girl
• You love dark stories

You will NOT like this game if:

• You don’t enjoy turn-based RPGs
• You are easily offended in religious matters
• You are a “Hardcore” Shin Megami Tensei fanboy that hates Persona because it’s not SMT enough for you. No, seriously, get over it. It’s called a spin-off for a reason.
• You don’t like dark storylines.