RP3

I feel it's about time I let my readers know about my new game of the moment: Persona 3 for PlayStation 2.

Recommended to me by Scoregasm's resident unashamed Persona fangirl Dawn, this is the first Persona game I have played - my first MegaTen game in fact.

It can be described as a hybrid Random Dungeon/Dating Sim RPG. By day you are a normal Japanese high school junior. You can choose to spend your time studying, relaxing, making friends and shopping. But every night at midnight, time stands still for all but a select few people for one hour (the Dark Hour). During this time your school transforms into a giant towering randomly generated dungeon populated with mind-eating shadow monsters. It's your job to climb this tower and kill the monsters that guard its mysteries.

It all sounds rather disjointed, until you consider the series' titular summons. During the Dark Hour you can summon your Persona (a demonic "manefestation of your character" - essentially your Magic and Tech attacks) by shooting yourself in the head with a device that looks like a gun but isn't one. There are a huge number of possible Personae, which can be won from battles or custom-made through fusing others together, and each Persona is distinguished by its Tarot Arcana. Similarly, during the day, each one of your Social Links (your friendships and romances) is aligned to a specific Arcana. Level up your Social Links, and your corresponding Personae can grow stronger, or gain generous experience bonuses when created through fusion.

Combat during the Dark Hour constitutes possibly the most elegant RPG battle system ever devised. Rather than having full control over your party's actions, you only directly control the player character, and on his turn are able to give orders to the other three partymembers which switch their AI rules predictably. Another game which I am not so fond of tried something similar with its Gambits system, but suffered from its completely incompatible real-time pretentions (a real-time Action RPG battle system in which you spend most of your time sitting and waiting) and clumsy, overcomplicated UI. P3 gets it right by placing it in a traditional turn-based setting, giving you direct decisive control over one character (who has by far the most tactical options available to himself anyway), and allowing you to select between sensible pre-set AI rules rather than constructing them from scratch, move by move. The traditional rock-paper-scissors elemental balance is present (and complex, though not confusing), with attacks against weaknesses (or just the odd physical critical hit) knocking enemies or teammates down to miss a turn. If all enemies are down at once and the player character isn't incapacitated in any way, you can perform an All-out Attack, which interrupts the turn order to deal heavy physical damage to all the enemies at once.

As you level up, you can last for longer periods of time in the tower. Fight too much and you end up tired and eventually sick, which puts you out of shadow-slaying action for a full night, or just makes you really bad at it. After each two tower bosses you hit a barrier and can't move up any further floors. But once a full moon, a special event boss will appear to move the story forward and unlock the next set of random floors.

On the Dating Sim side of things, P3 could make a competent game in the genre even without the excellent RPG dungeon crawling. Three statistics - Academics, Charm and Courage - determine who will and won't want to socialise with you, and can be levelled up through various optional activities which generally cost time and move you on to the next stage of the day. Otherwise you can choose to improve your present Social Links by spending time with your friends. As you move through the Japanese academic year practically each day offers something new, be it exams, sporting events, trips on holiday or newly available Social Links.

Presentation-wise, P3 still excels. From its appealing character design to its stylish anime cutscenes, and from its mostly-good dub cast to its wonderfully unorthodox pop/rock/hip-hop soundtrack. Below, as an example, is the unreasonably cool intro movie.

I am presently 40 hours in, and nothing has started to drag even slightly. Combat is as fresh as it was at the beginning (if not fresher, what with its constant variation of tactical challenges), and the social sim sections are still entertaining and meaningful.

There are only two things holding me back from hailing it as the finest RPG ever made. First, I've not finished it yet - in fact according to the in-game calendar I'm not even half way through. Second, the impending release of Persona 3: FES, the extended and improved (neither of these terms should be used lightly regarding P3) version, which I will undoubtedly buy the second it lands on this country's shelves.

If you haven't played this marvellous game, either buy it now or wait for FES (unless it's already out in your territory, in which case just buy it now). But you have to buy it. There's no two ways about it.