Ben Reed
05-13-2008, 09:16 PM
Fun little jRPG for PS2.
You are a scene-kid-looking Japanese high school student who transfers to a new school that just so happens to turn into a demonic tower full of invasive monsters late at night. Together with your wacky high-school chums, you don all measure of sharp, pointy objects and summon monsters from your subconscious to climb this evil tower and beat the shit out of the monsters within for fun, profit, and the Japanese way.
Persona 3: FES is basically the stand-alone "expansion pack" for the original Persona 3. Certain exploits/bugs are fixed, a new bonus "campaign" is included, and new items and events are added to the original "campaign".
The main hooks of this game are as follows:
- High school. Despite the monster-slaying, dungeon-crawling adventures to be had after midnight, your wimpy-looking little hero will spend most of his time going to school like any other wimpy-looking Japanese kid. During this day, you get the opportunity to hang out with friends, go on dates, waste your life playing a video game (but only on the weekends), and in doing so you boost your Courage, Charm, or Academics, which further increases your ability to win friends and influence people.
The reason you should care about this is that your social networking during the day has a direct impact on your dragonslaying ability late at night. In addition to getting boosts to your emo-goth Pokemon (see below), if you or your high-school chums who go demonslaying with you are having a bad day, it will impact their performance in the big evil tower (they'll miss more attacks, be more susceptible to debuffs, that kind of thing). As a result, you have to carefully weigh how you spend your time outside the dungeon so as not only to pump up your Personas, but also to go into the dungeon refreshed and able to survive. There are also unavoidable boss encounters every time the full moon appears, so if you don't use the months between each moon wisely to buff your skinny emo ass up, you may find yourself pretty gimp against a big-ass monster with gigantic floppy fat-lady tits. (There are several monsters like that, actually.)
Fun fact: The Japanese have school on Saturday. That's fucked up, man.
- Your characters' in-battle abilities and attributes are determined by the titular Persona -- basically like emo-goth Pokemon, that you can tweak and combine together to make bigger, more powerful emo-goth Pokemon. The supporting characters each only have one Persona with predefined strengths and weaknesses, but your main character has the unique ability to change his Persona at will to suit different battles, and he can even do so in the middle of a fight. You basically play the party role of the hybrid-class-from-hell, switching from healer to nuker to buffer to whatever as the situation changes. You offset your party members' weaknesses, they offset yours, and if you use them correctly, you can basically run train on every monster you come across.
The IMPORTANT thing about these Pokemon is that leveling them up isn't nearly tied so much to dungeon progress as it is to progress in the high-school events outside of the dungeon. By winning friends and influencing people, you gain special items, the ability to create unique Personas, and significant experience buffs when you create Personas associated with the random jackass you've been flattering for weeks.
Fun fact: Narcissus will make you question your heterosexuality.
- In battle, you do not directly control all the actions of your party members as you do in similar Japanese console RPGs. You only have direct control over your main character, and you control your other party members indirectly through the assignment of AI tactics.
This sounds a lot gayer than it actually is; the AI generally has good sense once you figure out the task priorities of the various tactics (highly generalized versions of the Gambits from Final Fantasy XII, really). You have stuff like "Act Freely", where the characters basically just attack as they will and stop to heal/use items when somebody gets critically low on HP. You also have tactics like "Heal/Support", which will make the selected character heal more aggressively, topping people off to help guard against huge nukes from bosses. The most useful one for general battles is "Knock Down", which allows you to exploit the knock-down system described below:
Fun fact: Akihiko, use Zio, you fucking asshole. If I see Sonic Punch one more fucking time...
- This is the part I like best about Persona 3's battle system. In battle, all your party members and all your enemies have unique weaknesses to elemental attacks and different types of weapon attack. A fire-based enemy is weak against ice but gets healed by fire spells, and the same holds true for a fire-based party member on your team. Whenever a character or enemy is struck by a spell/ability they're weak against, they take bonus damage and get knocked on their ass, making them waste a turn to get back on their feet. In addition, any enemy or character that scores a knockdown gets an immediate extra turn to act again as they wish.
Obviously, this system is incredibly gay when the enemy exploits it, but if you can exploit it well, you can basically lock down enemies with the proper use of abilities that they're weak against. Whenever you knock down all enemies in a battle (including bosses), your entire party gets an optional free attack on all enemies, complete with a comical cartoon dust cloud as you and all your friends run in to gang-curbstomp the subdued monsters.
Fun fact: Motherfucking Intrepid Knight healed to full from 20% HP when he reflected four Garu spells off my party's magic barrier. Good times...
CLIFF'S NOTES:
- Power up your Pokemon by going to high school
- Hit the enemy's weak point for massive damage
- Put your attractive female friends in humiliating skimpy outfits
- You can date the android chick in this version -- if you want the machines to enslave us all
I hereby award this game the Benjamin Reed seal of approval. Go steal it from the Internet or something.
You are a scene-kid-looking Japanese high school student who transfers to a new school that just so happens to turn into a demonic tower full of invasive monsters late at night. Together with your wacky high-school chums, you don all measure of sharp, pointy objects and summon monsters from your subconscious to climb this evil tower and beat the shit out of the monsters within for fun, profit, and the Japanese way.
Persona 3: FES is basically the stand-alone "expansion pack" for the original Persona 3. Certain exploits/bugs are fixed, a new bonus "campaign" is included, and new items and events are added to the original "campaign".
The main hooks of this game are as follows:
- High school. Despite the monster-slaying, dungeon-crawling adventures to be had after midnight, your wimpy-looking little hero will spend most of his time going to school like any other wimpy-looking Japanese kid. During this day, you get the opportunity to hang out with friends, go on dates, waste your life playing a video game (but only on the weekends), and in doing so you boost your Courage, Charm, or Academics, which further increases your ability to win friends and influence people.
The reason you should care about this is that your social networking during the day has a direct impact on your dragonslaying ability late at night. In addition to getting boosts to your emo-goth Pokemon (see below), if you or your high-school chums who go demonslaying with you are having a bad day, it will impact their performance in the big evil tower (they'll miss more attacks, be more susceptible to debuffs, that kind of thing). As a result, you have to carefully weigh how you spend your time outside the dungeon so as not only to pump up your Personas, but also to go into the dungeon refreshed and able to survive. There are also unavoidable boss encounters every time the full moon appears, so if you don't use the months between each moon wisely to buff your skinny emo ass up, you may find yourself pretty gimp against a big-ass monster with gigantic floppy fat-lady tits. (There are several monsters like that, actually.)
Fun fact: The Japanese have school on Saturday. That's fucked up, man.
- Your characters' in-battle abilities and attributes are determined by the titular Persona -- basically like emo-goth Pokemon, that you can tweak and combine together to make bigger, more powerful emo-goth Pokemon. The supporting characters each only have one Persona with predefined strengths and weaknesses, but your main character has the unique ability to change his Persona at will to suit different battles, and he can even do so in the middle of a fight. You basically play the party role of the hybrid-class-from-hell, switching from healer to nuker to buffer to whatever as the situation changes. You offset your party members' weaknesses, they offset yours, and if you use them correctly, you can basically run train on every monster you come across.
The IMPORTANT thing about these Pokemon is that leveling them up isn't nearly tied so much to dungeon progress as it is to progress in the high-school events outside of the dungeon. By winning friends and influencing people, you gain special items, the ability to create unique Personas, and significant experience buffs when you create Personas associated with the random jackass you've been flattering for weeks.
Fun fact: Narcissus will make you question your heterosexuality.
- In battle, you do not directly control all the actions of your party members as you do in similar Japanese console RPGs. You only have direct control over your main character, and you control your other party members indirectly through the assignment of AI tactics.
This sounds a lot gayer than it actually is; the AI generally has good sense once you figure out the task priorities of the various tactics (highly generalized versions of the Gambits from Final Fantasy XII, really). You have stuff like "Act Freely", where the characters basically just attack as they will and stop to heal/use items when somebody gets critically low on HP. You also have tactics like "Heal/Support", which will make the selected character heal more aggressively, topping people off to help guard against huge nukes from bosses. The most useful one for general battles is "Knock Down", which allows you to exploit the knock-down system described below:
Fun fact: Akihiko, use Zio, you fucking asshole. If I see Sonic Punch one more fucking time...
- This is the part I like best about Persona 3's battle system. In battle, all your party members and all your enemies have unique weaknesses to elemental attacks and different types of weapon attack. A fire-based enemy is weak against ice but gets healed by fire spells, and the same holds true for a fire-based party member on your team. Whenever a character or enemy is struck by a spell/ability they're weak against, they take bonus damage and get knocked on their ass, making them waste a turn to get back on their feet. In addition, any enemy or character that scores a knockdown gets an immediate extra turn to act again as they wish.
Obviously, this system is incredibly gay when the enemy exploits it, but if you can exploit it well, you can basically lock down enemies with the proper use of abilities that they're weak against. Whenever you knock down all enemies in a battle (including bosses), your entire party gets an optional free attack on all enemies, complete with a comical cartoon dust cloud as you and all your friends run in to gang-curbstomp the subdued monsters.
Fun fact: Motherfucking Intrepid Knight healed to full from 20% HP when he reflected four Garu spells off my party's magic barrier. Good times...
CLIFF'S NOTES:
- Power up your Pokemon by going to high school
- Hit the enemy's weak point for massive damage
- Put your attractive female friends in humiliating skimpy outfits
- You can date the android chick in this version -- if you want the machines to enslave us all
I hereby award this game the Benjamin Reed seal of approval. Go steal it from the Internet or something.