Shin Megami Tensei is a sprawling video game franchise that started off in the 1980s and has since spawned multi-genre video games, TV and movie anime, concept cafes, and achieved a degree of mainstream popularity, both in Japan and the West, that has eluded other old properties like Phantasy Star Online.
My own journey began with anime and game spin-offs as I half-heartedly tackled a Japanese edition of Persona 4 I bought for the PS Vita while living in Tokyo and then Persona 3 Portable on the PSP.
Persona 3 Portable 
P3 ペルソナ３ 「P3 Persuona 3」
Release Date: April, 2011 (EU)
Genre: RPG
Director: Katsura Hashino
Artist: Shigenori Soejima
Composer: Shoji Meguro
Writer: Yuichiro Tanaka (Script/Story)
Developer: Atlus
To summarise the story, players take on the role of a male or female high schooler who investigates mysterious disappearances and deaths happening around the city of Iwatodai. These incidents occur just after midnight during a moment of time known as the Dark Hour. This is when the real world is warped by negative energy that is emitted by a tower named Tartarus which rises from the site of the city’s high school. From there, monsters named Shadows slink into town to sap the vitality of people and turn them into zombies. Normal people are unaware of what us going on but those with special abilities, “Persona Users” like the main character, are aware that these nightmarish occurrences are happening. The news attributes the spread of lifelessness to a disease called “apathy syndrome” but over the course of the game players will discover the truth behind the buzzwords as they ascend 200+ randomly generated dungeon floors of Tartarus and battle Shadows by summoning Personas, magic-wielding beings that represent an aspect of the character’s personality and relationships with others.
Indeed, this isn’t a solo journey.
The player is joined by a team for the nightly adventures and they are further given help by a range of characters who the player gets to know during daytime jaunts around Iwatodai. These people are important since the relationships developed during the daytime can influence the battle mechanics of the dungeon exploration as they open up new Personas and weapons used to fight the Shadows, thus helping the player to get to the top of Tartarus.
Gameplay is split between visual novel hijinks that are navigated between on an overworld map during the day and 3D dungeon crawling at night. Surprisingly, it was the latter aspect of the game I found dull.
The action of the game takes the form of turn-based battles where the human characters wield weapons and items – implemented at its most simplest by keeping things tight at four slots, one weapon, one piece of armour, one accessory, one pair of shoes – and Persona’s that allow magic attacks to be unleashed on Shadows. Magic is based on an elemental system that pits fire/ice/wind/light/dark against each other in a rock-paper-scissors mechanic.
Click to view slideshow.Once mastered, the battles are easy to breeze through but it still becomes a chore when grinding for experience, money, and items ensues because the décor of Tartarus is an unimaginative spin on hospital corridors until you get to upper levels where eyesores about with chintzy gold wallpaper and disco dancefloors. Likewise, the music is a repetitive rhythm heavy tune with a simple piano melody that drones on.
Keeping things from being boring is the flavour that the characters bring to the fights. Teammates offer fully-voiced in-battle dialogue to cheer you along to victory. The enemy designs are a freaky variety of anthropomorphised household objects to humans in fetish-gear and classical monsters. Anime clips flash across the screen at climactic points. Meanwhile, the camera zips from one combatant to the next as colourful magic runs rampant on the battlefield. If the 3D dungeon environment is dull, the character designs by Shigenori Soejima radiate coolness, drama, and fun so that excitement spikes.
In order to make the combat engrossing, the game encourages you to experiment with your Personas and fuse them together to create new ones to open up more tactics, moves, and spells to tackle tougher foes. Any fear of losing a good Persona is allayed in the way each one can be recorded and pulled from a compendium and the game often offers them after each battle as a prize in a card game. The only thing stopping you from experimenting is the cost.
With so much on offer in terms of upgrades, you can abandon yourself to the weapons-building mechanics in a similar way to Vagrant Story if you have the patience for the grind.
All of this talk of Personas and Shadows puts one in mind of existentialism (some of the Shadows hold masks in a clear allusion). This philosophy underpins the dungeon crawling and provides the meat of the narrative as various characters travel along on a journey of self-actualising a personality in battle and out of it. And this, more than the fighting and magic, is the highlight of the game as you get to know the people of Iwatodai and help them out in the visual novel side of the game as it becomes what is essentially a life management sim for a Japanese high schooler.
The story draws heavily on reality and takes place over four seasons – very Japanese – and an academic year. It features a typical beach scene, a school trip to Kyoto, and various tests and national holidays that break up the story. This offers a more interesting environment and aesthetic than generic fantasy settings.
Although a fictional setting, Iwatodai features everything you would find in a real suburban Japanese city complete with a school, dormitory, shrine, malls filled with eateries and a cinema. Players bounce from place to place as they balance managing the demands on their time. Eating at restaurants with friends, training in kendo, attending art club, studying at a library, all contribute to boosting friendships in and out of school. Meanwhile the player must maintain academic and personal growth to pass tests. Within this is so much flavour text referencing relationships, the occult, and everyday life, that it could be spun off into a game itself. The scale of things to do is off the chart and it allows for multiple playthroughs.
The mainline story features melodramatic twists. There are orphans, murders, and self-sacrificing death as it gets really dark. There are also supernatural/sci-fi turns,. However, the most affecting stories are those of your fellow classmates and city-dwellers who are oblivious to the weird things going on after midnight. Each character lives a normal life and struggles with something far more mundane than magical monsters. A lack of confidence, divorcing parents, a sports injury, or the search for a career path after high school.
The player navigates these real-world concerns just by spending time with the characters at various locations and talking. Dialogue options come up and, depending upon if you hit the right one, you can deepen the intimacy of a relationship and forge a genuine bond. This, in turn, influences the types and strength of Persona you can summon in battle. The sheer variety of things on offer stands in contrast to the combat and meeting characters and getting to know them never becomes tiresome.
Click to view slideshow.
I must admit that initially, I felt suffocated by the responsibility to study, attend school clubs, get to know a huge cast of people, and battle at night.
Each day brought requests for my presence and every hour had to be dedicated to something all while knowing that it came at the expense of exploring other relationships. To keep track of things, I ended up writing a diary. I resented the presence of certain characters – Kazushi, please stop doing Kendo and risking permanently damaging your knee! – but – and maybe this is Stockholm Syndrome talking, building new friendships became addictive for more reasons than just the Persona creation.
An accidental friendship with Yuko blossomed into a serious relationship that netted me the super-strong Odin Persona but what I’ll remember and found most moving (and fun) was the awkward dates and home invites. Likewise, guiding the student council treasurer Chihiro, a shy girl who struggles to talk to boys, through vicious bullying to gaining the self-confidence to challenge a teacher who absconded with money proved quite affecting and acting as a surrogate son for a divorced drunken Buddhist monk offered philosophy and hilarity. These personality quirks also fed into the dungeoneering as the teammates who accomapnied me exhibited the same characteristics and behaviour in AI controlled battles (although I took direct command during boss battles).
A lot of the charm comes, again, from Soejima’s expressive artwork which is fantastic at offering a range of emotions as the player get behind the false masks of the cast, finds out what troubles ails them and lifts various characters from heartbreak to happiness of self-understanding. This is peak 2000s anime design with bright vibrant colours and sharp lines and each of the cast members – save for random thugs – is distinctively drawn so that they remain memorable. When they smile, it’s hard not to smile back and when they cry it’s possible to get emotional to.
I found that dichotomy between dungeon boredom and love for interacting with normal people was echoed in the game’s score where I turned down the music of the Tartarus compositions by Shoji Meguro but absolutely adored his Iwatodai tunes.
For all of the hours of monotonous running around in dungeons, what will stick with me most is the way that I helped people overcome trauma and become stronger. Small human stories that, yes, helped me beat Tartarus, but ones that felt like the most rewarding part of the game.
Overall, this is a strong RPG and I’m glad I played it. The dungeoneering I don’t want to go through again but that first run-through and the relationships made will remain special and I don’t want to lose them. I’m ready to move on to another challenge…
The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky for the PSP!