Persona 3 is a must play for every RPG-gamer. You need to be a little open-minded, as this game does not follow the standard city-dungeon-new city-new dungeon-... formula. Actually, it is more a role-playing-game than any other, it simulates about a complete school year at a high-school, including classes, exams and social life. Only at night, you meet with friends to go exploring the dark secrets of your school and the city, this is when the game turns to more classical dungeon exploration which reminded me a little of the .Hack series. You can only control your own character, but you can issue some commands to the others (like concentrate on healing, save magic points, fight with brute force, etc.). Special attacks are performed by so-called personas, demonic manifestations of aspects of the collective human psyche. This kind of Pokemon-for-adults concept was always what made the Persona series stand out, in this game it is even darker because you perform a summoning by shooting yourself in the head with a special gun called 'evoker', blasting out a fragment of your soul that will manifest as a persona and perform a special action (attack, raising attributes, healing, etc.). So in every battle, you'll see your characters shooting themselves countless times, which is really intense and macabre. I will not say anything about the plot here, but expect it to be dark, really weird and going David Lynch all the time. Being about 60% social sim, 10% character setup with persona fusion and 30% dungeon crawler, Persona 3 is something new and should be added to every RPG-gamer's collection.
Review of Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3
