Persona 3 FES is kind of a hard game to review for me. I feel like it's almost impossible to convey it's greatness to you in text form. It's just something you have to experience for yourself. That said, I'm gonna at least try to convince you to do so in my first ever review here on Giant Bomb!
In Persona 3, you take the role of a nameless hero who recently transfered to the Japanese city of Iwatodai after his parents died in an accident because of reasons. He is, of course, totally unaware of his very special role in the events to come. After a cozy greeting into his new dorm, he takes off for his first day and Gekkoukan High School accompanied by a dorm-mate named Yukari. Yukari is part of a group known as SEES (Specialized Extracurricular Execution Squad), who are tasked with the duty of eliminating beings known only as Shadows and investigating a tower called Tartarus, both of which only show up during a time called the Dark Hour; a hidden hour that happens during 12:00 A.M, and occurs only to select people. Naturally, you quickly become their leader and you all go on an adventure full of monsters, freaks, and robot girls. It's an unforgettable journey topped off by an unforgettable ending that I won't go much further into in fear of spoiling something, but trust me, what started off as something seemingly sort of basic, developed into what I would call one of entertainments finest stories ever told. And man, that ending.
As far as gameplay is concerned, you balance life and dungeon crawling. The life aspects range from studying for and taking exams in school, hanging out with your friends and watching the games many Social Link stories play out, buying stuff from Mr. Tanaka on TV, buying new equipment for you and your party to use in dungeons, among other things. Social Links are the game's main draw outside of dungeons. Basically, each relationship you have with someone has a level bar starting at 1 and ending at 10. Every time you hang out with a person, the Social Link level might increase. Each level has it's own " cutscene. " These Social Links provide some extremely well written stories, ranging from really funny, to really depressing. There's a bunch of them to do, but you won't be able to do all of them on your first playthrough without a guide since your journey ends in one year (no, really, you have an in game calendar that ticks down with every day gone by) , and you also have to take time out of your year to run around in the dungeon to level up, study for exams if you want, among other things. Also, completing a Social Link will provide you with an item to fuse a special Persona, which I'll talk about in greater detail soon
The game's main dungeon that you will be returning to regularly throughout the entire game is known as Tartarus. Crawling around the blood stained floors of Tartarus are Shadows. To fight one, simply walk up and bump into it (if you hit it with your weapon, you'll get the first move, though). The combat system itself involves you trying to exploit your enemies weaknesses with your Personas magic, and should you knock all of them down (you knock them down by hitting them with an element they're weak against), you can do an All Out Attack, which deals a lot of damage. Enemies can also knock you down, though, if they hit your weakness, which is determined by your currently equipped Persona's weakness, so watch out. They cannot, however, perform All Out Attacks. Also, you can only control the main character in combat. The others do as they wish for the most part, which sounds annoying, but I personally never really had a problem with it. They healed when they were supposed to and were smart about enemies weaknesses.
Now, let's talk about some damn Personas. Personas are your main way of attacking. You can hold so many at a time, and you can fuse/register ones you don't want anymore to make new ones, or store them in the compendium to buy later. Think kinda like Pokemon. They even have elemental weaknesses and resistances, and their own skills which they learn by leveling up, and you can also pass on skills to other Personas when fusing. You get new Personas by either choosing the right card at the end of battles in a little mini game, or by fusing at least two other Personas together. The main character is the only one who can have more than one Persona, all other party members in the game only have one. You can fuse super special Personas by maxing Social Links which give you the items required. Only one in particular is really necessary (it seems to be the only way to kill one of the super bosses really), but they're all kinda cool.
Final Comments:
Well, this has been my probably crappy first review of one of my favorite games of all time. There's plenty of aspects to the game that I didn't even cover in this review, but I want you guys to have some stuff left to discover by yourself, aside from the story. Persona 3 FES is one of the most enjoyable times I've ever had playing games, and I highly recommend it to RPG fans, or game fans in general looking for something a little different. It took me about 100 hours on my first playthrough, and after you beat the game you unlock a New Game Plus which allows you to bring over the protagonists level, and some other stuff. So yeah, there's a lot to do in this game and you can get it for cheap now making it an amazing deal. The music, by the way, is fantastic.