P3P- One of the best of its genre.
Persona 3P is a PSP game released by Atlus and is part of it's Megami Tensei series, a JRPG series that is growing in popularity. To be precise, it’s part of the subseries of “Persona” games, although this should be obvious. Hopefully, I got this all correct. As a newcomer to this series looking at the series history can be a bit confusing. All you really need to know is that you absolutely do not need to play the other games in the Persona series as the stories are unconnected save for a few unimportant references.
The story follows a Japanese highschool student who is transferred to a new school. Over the course of the story, the character unlocks a power deep within himself and develops bonds with friends that only deepen his abilities. The cast of characters is very memorable with even minor characters sticking out. There are a few people that I really didn’t care for, but even they did not drag the story down any. The plot can seem a bit simple at the beginning and even near the end of the middle, but the ending portion is handled excellently. At the end I even got a little teary, but maybe I’m just a wimp. Still, I can’t think of any other RPG in quite some time that has tried to be moving and not ended up seeming hokey.
Persona 3P is not the kind of RPG that falls back on the story and drags its gameplay along. The gameplay is a mix of a Pokemon style battles, dungeon crawling, and visual novel. It works much better than it sounds, and this is coming from someone who hates Pokemon! The “Pokemon”, actually called “Personas”, are an assortment of demons, angels, gods and mythic creatures, which you can combine to create different Personas with new abilities. Unlike Pokemon, you have multiple party members in battle, however their Personas are set and cannot be changed by you. There is also an interesting down system. Whenever an enemy’s weakness is struck it falls down. If all enemies fall down your party gets a deadly group attack opportunity. This really fleshes out the system and allows a lot of strategy
Persona 3P does have weaknesses. One that is really felt is the mediocre graphics. Throughout much of the game it is 2D. This would be fine, but the sprites are quite weak. Luckily the portraits are of high quality and can make up for a lot. I realize that asking for 3D would probably be too much, however the sprites and backdrops really could have been better. The large dungeon you climb throughout the game is 3D, as are the battles. The floors have a few different themes to avoid getting stale, but this doesn’t really work very well at all. The battles are very nice looking and it is fun to see new personas you’ve obtained in battle, but there is a sense of pallet swap between a lot of the enemies.
Overall, I highly suggest checking P3P out. I enjoyed it immensely despite the nagging faults. If you are looking for a challenge this game may be the ticket, but those new to RPGs may struggle. I didn’t find grinding necessary very often, but I’ve heard others have. I hope this review has helped, constructive criticism is welcome.
