I'm not going to finish Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 FES. I just hit the 51 hour mark and I'm done with it. I'm burnt out and I don't want to play anymore. I've lost all my motivators for playing, and the game has been reduced to a stat-a-thon. Seriously, I don't care about any of the characters. I don't care about the storyline. And, I don't care about the Personas. The combat is fun and challenging (and is the best part of the game) but its mind numbing sameness has failed to keep me motivated. And worst of all is the fact that the game simply will not allow me to play how I want to play.
The player is forced to live life as a series of days (that sounds like a "duh" statement, but let me explain). Every day presents you with opportunities. During the weekdays you go to school and you're often presented with a chance to increase your Charm by answering an academic question properly. After school you're presented with an opportunity to increase a Social Link, which will help you create more an better Personas that are connected to that Social Link. After that you're presented with an opportunity to either raise another stat, or, if you wish, you can go to Tartarus to engage in battle with the Shadows there. These opportunities are rigid. You cannot skip school. You cannot increase a Social Link unless it's the proper time of day. You cannot visit Tartarus whenever you want. And, if you stay in Tartarus too long, your characters get Sick and stop fighting.
I have to ask: What are the game designers trying to achieve by limiting you in this way? I can't come up with a satisfactory answer. And this rigid structure is probably what made me abandon the game. Sometimes I'm not in the mood to fight and level up, but if I don't take advantage of the opportunity when it presents itself then I may not be powerful enough to beat the next boss (who will come at a set time, there's an ever present countdown in the upper right corner of the screen that says how many days you have until you face the next boss). So, unlike Final Fantasy, where I can spend as long as I want grinding my characters, in Persona 3 I'm forced to stop grinding them.
I can understand why some people would like that aspect of Persona 3. I can see how it would motivate people to try to get the most out of every opportunity that presents itself. But, like I hinted at before, sometimes I'm not in the mood. Sometimes I want to increase a relationship as far as it will go. Sometimes I want to increase a stat just enough to achieve some certain milestone. And sometimes I just want to grind in combat for hours and hours and hours until my characters are so overpowered that they can take down bosses as if they were regular foes.
Allow me to illustrate with an example. On the door of the Home-Economics room there's a note that is written in a different language. My character can't read it, but if his academics were higher then he could. So, level up academics, right? Wrong! You only get a certain amount of time to level up academics, and if you optimize your game play for academics then you'll probably get wiped out by one of the bosses you must face. I can't play Person 3 for 8 hours a day, so I was literally forced to wait 5 days (real days, in the real world) until I had leveled up my academics enough to translate the note (and see that the note was completely irrelevant and STUPID). In a nutshell, this is what's wrong with the game: Persona 3 will not let you play how you want to play, you must play the game how the designers intended.
So, after 51 hours of playing I still feel like the game would be more fun if it just let me HAVE FUN. But, no! You must play the game the way we want you to play it. You cannot pursue a relationship fully in one sitting. You cannot level up your characters to a desired milestone in one sitting. You cannot increase your stats or earn money whenever you want, you must wait for the opportunity to present itself. I've grown tired of being pigeonholed and I've grown tired of waiting. What a shame, because the game could be really fun, if only it just allowed me to have fun in my own way.
Moving on, there's no open world in Persona. And because it's missing the game takes on a menu-driven feel. There's nothing like the feeling you get once you've unlocked all the islands and towns in Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest. Persona 3 never gives you that feeling. In favor of a world map you're given a glorified menu and you just choose what location you'd like to go to next. Literally, you have about six places you can visit; hope you don't get bored with them!
The menu-based aspect of the world is carried over in the stat-leveling as well. Basically, the opportunities you're presented with can be taken advantage of by first picking a location, and second picking an activity that will level-up a certain stat. I lost count of how many times I saw the animation of my character as he sat in the Cafe, alone, drinking coffee so that I he could increase his Charm. That's all there is to it. They should have just presented me with a REAL menu and it would have been just as satisfying; just let me choose "Level up > Academics," or "Level up > Chariot Social Link." The little cut-scenes that come with leveling up have failed to motivate me, and it just seems boring now.
There is a complete lack of side quests. Not that you need side quests to have an interesting game, but, because of the strict day-to-day structure of the game, there wouldn't be any time that you COULD go on a side quest. After all, you have to go to school. What a drag! Seriously! When I want to be forced to go somewhere I don't like, I'll just stop playing the game and live my life.
There's a ton of Personas. I have a lot of them already; too many for me to keep track of. And my compendium says that I've only discovered 30% of the Personas. I'll never use them all. But, maybe it was unrealistic for me to think that I would. I really love looking at the art design for all the Personas, but, I'm worn out trying to figure out how to get better Personas. There's cards and Personas that you can use to level up your weapons. There's cards that level up your Personas. There's a ton of crap that the game throws at you and not enough guidance to tell you what will really make you more powerful. So, not only are you given the feeling that you're playing a glorfied menu, there's also no way to be sure that you're leveling up efficiently unless you have a spreadsheet or two open while you play.
When exploring Tartarus I get the distinct feeling that I'm playing a random dungeon generator. The experience isn't crafted, it just an algorithm that generates random floors for me to explore. It is, indeed, the only aspect of the game that is exploratory, but even if you find something you like, it won't be there next time. Because it's random, it's never saved. So, if a certain floor give you triple experience, it won't be like that next time. The exploration becomes empty and becomes merely grind; very pure grind. Once again, I have soured on the game to the point where I feel like I should just be able to enter a battle through a menu and choose "Enter Battle > Level 4," or "Enter Battle > Level 2 Boss." It's that linear in the progression, and the exploration falls completely flat.
There's a lot that's good about the game. The combat is fun; finding the specific weaknesses of each type of enemy and exploiting it is fun. Getting experience and leveling up in battle is fun. The voice acting is top notch. The music is quite good. But none of this is enough to keep me going. I look at the game now and it just feels like I would have to work at it too hard to get an enjoyable experience. And, I'm only about half-way through the game. The game just isn't keeping me going until the end. That says something. It bored me.
Persona 3 gets an unofficial score of 2 stars: I didn't like it.
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