My seventh completed game of 2011 is Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 from Atlus
When a game is highly regarded by many critics as being one of the last, best role-playing games on a platform, you have to eventually take notice and wonder why it is deemed to be so. Although at the time of its release I was an avid gamer, my sights were certainly more focused on the next generation of console games, so Persona was not even a blip on my radar. Thanks to some great people I met at The Gamer Scene I was eventually convinced it would be worthwhile to dig out my PS2, track down a copy and experience what so many people were raving about.
For the unschooled, the game sees you take control of a teenage protagonist, who spends half of his time battling shadowy demons in a nightmarish tower, and the other half battling raging hormones and the conflicting interests of friends, teachers and admirers. Although able to wield weapons, your true strength comes from summoning personas (personae?) to fight for you, as they have a variety of magical abilities. Spending time forging relationships in the real world allows you to create and strengthen new and interesting personas, but the game opens with the notion that you have exactly one year before the world and everything in it, will come to an end, so the allocation of the time you spend in the game is always a fraught decision.
The turn-based combat is exciting, and requires some real strategy to master – as you switch personas your strengths and weakness change, but you also have to take into account the actions of your team, who are not fully controllable (a bit like in FFXIII). Another thing I really enjoyed about the game was the voice acting, it really brought to life the personalities of each of the characters and by the time I completed it I felt a certain melancholy in having to depart from their world. I am really glad I made the effort to add this to the list of my gaming accomplishments, I understand completely why some people hold it in such regard and I’m already looking forward to trying Catherine, the next title from Atlus.
I’ll leave you with a parting shot from the end of the game, a fragment of dialogue which pretty much summated my Persona 3 experience and brought a tear to my eye when it was delivered (yes, I am a big Jessie when it comes to these things). “You don’t have to save the world to find meaning in life. Sometimes, all you need is something simple, like someone to take care of.”
