Retreview: Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3

What a mouthful!

I must confess, Persona 3 is my first foray into the Shin Megami Tensei series. I'm choosing to play it on PSVita (which makes it P3Portable technically) though as my first play through it is, for all intensive purposes, the original Persona 3.

In Brief: 
Persona 3 was released originally on the PS2 in 2006. A jRPG, Persona 3 it made the headlines as a game where you shoot yourself in the head to summon a powerful Persona that will fight for you. This is true, but aside from that one odd design choice Persona 3 is a near perfect dichotomy of two games.

By day you're a high school student, talking with friends and forming relationships. By night you're fighting "shadows" that threaten to harm the day-to-day life of the citizens of Iwatodai.

This, ultimately is what Persona 3 is about.

Enjoyment:
I always like it when I can't put a game down. Doesn't matter what system it's on, a good game is like a good book.

You find yourself daydreaming about it. You can't wait to finish what you're doing to get right back into it. You just want to get through one more part. Persona 2 has been like that.

I consider myself a seasoned RPG player. I spent a long time with such games on the SNES and Playstation and it's part of the reason why I haven't played one in a long time.

It's a pretty stale format. Add to that generally uninteresting storylines or the predictability that comes with being derivative and there hasn't been a real reason for me to revisit the genre in a long time.

I'm loyal to Square for the joys they brought me in Final Fantasy 6 through 10 but I haven't purchased anything from their flagship line in years.

Somehow, Persona 3 cut through all of that and got me hooked again.

The game thrives on choice. You must choose when you pick your battles, who you hang out with and how your character will grow. Perhaps more so than any recent RPG I've played do I feel the weight of consequence in this game.

Summarised, your choices in the real world change how effective you are in the Shadow World. So who my friends are and how strong your "Social Links" are effect your own battle prowess.

But you can't be friends with everyone. Get close to a girl and you may find another one doesn't want to know you. Or spend too much time with Swim Club and your Student Council responsibilities will suffer.

It sounds mundane - we've all been to school - but somehow it's not. The characters are real enough that you want to know more about them and the tedium of actually going to school is kept brief enough to be interesting.

I also felt it captured the feeling of going to high school extremely well, in addition to the awkward time that high school was. Talking to girls was always a bit nerve racking and in Persona 3 it's still the same. The reward is different but you're hoping that you get it right.

This is all tied together by Tartarus, an immense tower reached in the shadow world. A randomly generated dungeon you ascend and take the fight to the shadows themselves.

The turn based fighting system is pretty cut and dry from most other games of the genre. It has it slight tweaks but turn based fighting is pretty much the same everywhere.

This part isn't what I'd call fun but there are people out there who love this sort of thing. If you like turn based fighting, levelling up to get better stuff and doing it over and over again then this half of the game is for you.

Overall the parts of the game that I enjoyed the most were advancing the storyline, getting to know the world and the characters and weighing up my choices knowing they have a consequence.

So many games now give you an illusion of choice but if you spend enough time at the game those choices are pointless. You can work past them by being stronger or faster or smarter. Not so in P3. You can only join one club, have one girlfriend and you can't fight all the time. This management makes the game thrilling in itself.

Accessibility:
Persona 3 has been re-released twice, once as P3:FES which had a number of modifications to the game and P3Portable which is what I was playing. So copies of it are available quite easily if you ferret it out online.


This game is also available for download on the PS Network Store. You can get it for your PSP or your Vita or so if you want to play it get a hold of it. It's also on special this month from the US PSN is you have an account so I definitely recommend picking it up if you enjoy RPGs or dating simulations or both.

Time:
So.... there are over 250 levels to the Tartarus tower. Once I found this out my heart fell a little in my chest. I don't think I'll ever get to the top, I just don't have the time.

But then again I'm 70 floors in now and that would have seemed like a bridge too far if I'd known before I picked the game up.

I think you'd probably comfortably invest 50-60 hours into this game and not be close to 100%. I know for a fact a friend of a friend has done that after 8 playthroughs. I do not know how much time he put into it but I salute you, o time-gifted, devoted gamer you must be.

I've put in about 25-30 hours now, I'm thoroughly enjoying the character development of my in-game friends and I'm curious about how I'm going to stop the shadow threat.

In Closing:
I'll keep climbing the tower, it's a chore now but I have to keep going to stop the enemy. Really I just want to know more about the people I sit next to in class but the shadow threat never rests.

I think this is a game I'll finish my first playthrough of and come back to play as the girl down the line. But I don't know where I'll find the time.

If you have a few hours spare give this game a go, you'll know pretty much instantly whether it's for you. Be prepared to put 50 hours into it if you want to see it through. You may not have played a game like this before but I bet you haven't forgotten what it was like to be a teenager.

This game gets that. Sometimes you feel like you're the only one you can rely on but P3 makes you acknowledge that even when you can't do it all yourself it's not so hard to ask others for help.

Retrespective: The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask

The more I think about it, the better this game gets. 

There's always been ranting and raving about how good Ocarina of Time was, and how Majora's just wasn't the return to Hyrule everyone wanted after OoT the first time.

I was there, like rioting in the streets Zelda fans wanted more Ocarina that game was so great. Hyrule was what we wanted, even though we'd been there done that.

Ocarina of Time has a special place in my heart. It was the first Zelda I played. I was at school at the time, my brother and I were best mates and my dad was on leave form work.

We were all up at 7am every morning hunting Skulltulas and completing temples. 

I'm close with my brother still and we share a lot of game-isms but my dad has long since moved on. He's not a kid anymore, though I know he also remembers OoT fondly, as well as the hundreds of hours piffin' shells and dropping bananas we spent on Mario Kart 64.

Majora's Mask came along and it was just so... different. I remember tracking it in N64 mags at the time... "3 days to beat the game!?" What the hell was that all about? OoT had taken us 3 straight weeks, sunrise to sunset to 100%, how DARE they put a timer on my game.

But more details slowly surfaced. They were using the same character models, the races were all in there, it was almost all the same gear.

Except for the masks. For anyone who missed it the game's about the masks. You wear them and people treat you differently. Some are just for fun, some get a new response out of someone who you need to talk to. 

You could transform into a graceful Zora, a careening Goron or a (slightly emo looking) Deku Scrub. A GIANT! A DEITY! You had it all.

The world is dark; the skull kid has called down the moon to smite the innocent. Only Link can save them, and through the manipulation of time you in fact have an infinite amount of tries to stop the calamity. 

Think back though; this game truly sidestepped the formula that so weighs down the Zelda universe now. Dungeon crawling, gear gathering, instrument fingering gameplay aside, no game has done since what MM did then. Not Zelda, not anything. 

It's truly unique and I miss it, the game gets better every day I think about it. I miss what Zelda was to a boy of 13, a warm place where you could defeat the moon if you had to!

Majora's Mask never changes though, every 3 days you set the clock back and the world is the same. I've changed though, everyone has and Majora's feels like it got left behind, a frozen 3 day loop in my mind.

Retreview: System Shock 2

System Shock 2 is many things. It's 13 years old now, a teenager. It's the spiritual predecessor to Bioshock. It was described as "[one of the] twin barrels of modern FPS innovation," by Sid Shuman of GamePro, the other of course being Deus Ex. It is also the subject of the first Retreview.

Eating things.

We had our ONE THOUSANDTH page view over night, good work everyone and I hope you've enjoyed it all so far.

We've been running for just over a month now and I've been considering what would make it worthwhile to go back and play some of these old games. I mean, there are a LOT of games out there, hundreds of new ones come out each year, on different platforms and for different audiences.

Looshkin, the manliest Barbarian of all time!

Hello again!


I realise that recently I mentioned that I would be posting vlog entries in this blog, however being the silly person I am, I forgot to record my first adventures back into Diablo II...so we're back to text, my apologies!

I'm Not Dead!

Hey guys just a little update to prove I'm not dead! I'm still here and I'm ready to game xD

My Gaming/Let's Play Channel

Shocked

Hello!

I've been mentally scarred by System Shock 2. I attribute the crash of my harddrive to my computer having mercy for my mental state and shuttign down all attempts to play that game.

Thuaners, I'll play it again soon and Log 3 will hopefully be successful.