Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 Portable
by Atlus Video Games
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Product Summary
Brand: AtlusAudio: English (Unknown); English (Subtitled); English (Manual)
Published: 2010-06-30
Release Date: 2010-07-06
Platform: Sony PSP
Model: PS600144
Publisher: Atlus Video Games
Product features:
- Improved playability: one button menu shortcuts, streamlined team equipment changes, incredibly short load times, and other tweaks and enhancements create an ideal pace for portable gaming
- Classic, Persona RPG gameplay in which players construct wieldable physical manifestations of their thoughts through their social interactions, later taking these into team-based battles against Shadow enemies in Tartarus
- Contains almost all the content from the original PS2 Persona 3 game, and elements from Persona 3: FES
- Significant improvements over earlier games including Skill Cards, part-time jobs, and ability to directly control your teammates in battle
- The important new ability to play as a female character, giving the player a whole new perspective on the events of the game and providing a dramatic impact on the game's intricate social dynamics
Video Game Reviews of Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 Portable
Customer Review: Persona 3: still a game that will keep you up till the dark hour and beyond
Summary: 5 Stars
Persona 3 Portable is third version and second update of Persona 3 to hit the stores. If you've bought either one or both of the previous versions and want to know if it's worth buying again, I'd say sure. Make no mistakes; the addition of a female protagonist doesn't drastically change the main storyline (any changes to it are akin to the ones made to the Journey of P3: FES), but that- along with the changes to the core game play- does make it a blast to play or replay. The downgrades made to the game to fit it on the PSP are balanced out by some nice improvements to make P3P more streamlined and polished than ever.
If you haven't played any of the previous versions of P3, you might wonder if it's really worth re-releasing it twice in less than three years. From the description, it sounds like pretty much any other RPG you might find out there. You play as a teenage orphan who moves back to the place where he or she was born only to find it in danger from a group of mysterious enemies called Shadows. Only you, along with a group of dormmates, can save the city with your special power, the power of Persona. Even with its modern setting, the plot sounds a bit cliché, and it is to a certain extent, but its overall charm and presentation make it shine.
Before you get into P3, you should know that it's definitely not a game for everyone. The evokers and personas based on all world religions make the game controversial enough to deserve its M rating even if it is on the lighter side as far as SMT games go (P3 is part of an SMT spin-off series).
It's also a dungeon crawler. The game does a nice job of breaking the game's main dungeon, Tartarus, down into several manageable parts, but it can still be a bit of a slog, even if it is much better than it was before. You still have to climb over 250 floors of this Tower of Demise throughout the course of the year and fight shadows along the way (you can see, attack, and avoid them; there are no random battles in this game). It's still a tad on the bland side design-wise, but the battle system was upgraded a la Persona 4, letting you take direct control of your teammates rather than just the MC. For those who actually appreciated the AI, it's still pretty decent in this version, but there are fewer tactics options to choose from, and at some point, you will have to take control of your party to make up for those losses.
Every ten or fifteen floors, you will have to fight a boss or group of mini-bosses. While you had to marathon through each little group of floors in the original P3 before you could reach a point to record your progress and teleport back to the entrance, in P3P, you can warp out of the labyrinth at any floor and resume from where you left off by checking the main gate. Your party doesn't get tired (a state where they weren't as effective in battle and would return to the dorms when you got back to the entrance in P3 and P3: FES) until you leave Tartarus either, so you can stay as long as you want now and even climb as far as you can in a given month in one go.
In addition, P3 is a Japanese RPG in every sense of the word, complete with anime-style graphics, a setting in modern-day Japan, and Japanese honorifics to hammer in the point that yes, this game takes place outside of the US. While you climb the Tartarus by night, you spend your days as a normal Japanese high school student. You have to study, make friends, and work to become braver and more charming by playing through the social sim portion of the game.
This is where P3's main draw comes into play: while the main story and goal are as linear as they are in most JRPGs, you get total freedom over what you want to do with your character for a year of their life. You can go to Tartarus whenever you want to and hang out with any of the 19 different people you can forge social links with at your leisure. While some of the characters involved in each link stay the same for both the male and female protagonist, many of them are unique to one gender, and several change in tone depending on which protagonist you choose. Just a note: the female's route has social links for all of the main characters, which develop them a bit better, and they are spread out a bit more evenly than the one's in the male's route, making them easier to max. While the female route is touted as being for "advanced players only", it seems geared for beginning players who might be a bit overwhelmed with the game system as well as P3 vets.
These social links also factor into the RPG elements of the game. Your character is unique in that he or she can switch between multiple personas, which you get by either exploring Tartarus or fusing the ones you have together to make stronger ones. Your social links give extra experience to fused personas of the same arcana, letting them level up and learn new skills without going into battle. These new personas can also inherit skills from their "parents", and yes, it's still a bit of a pain to get the exact skills you want to carry over during fusion. Fortunately, if you get these personas to a high enough level, they drop Skill Cards that let you teach a specific skill of theirs to any persona you want. This is new to this version of P3, and believe me: it makes fusion less of a hassle than it was before.
The other changes made to the game are meant to make it fit on the PSP. Unfortunately, this means that all of the original's anime cut-scenes are now gone, and you don't get to see full sized character models outside of Tartarus. You use a cursor to move around Iwatodai, which makes getting from place to place shorter and less tedious, so it's a decent trade-off there. Event scenes are now told visual novel-style with just character portraits, 2D backgrounds, and sound effects to convey the plot. It works for the most part once you get used to it, but some scenes aren't quite as effective as they were in the earlier versions. All of the original voice acting is still there, though, which is great for the most part (many of the main characters have excellent voice actors) but can be a bit... less so in others. It's still the same Persona 3 experience as before, just made to have more reasonable loading times.
Speaking of things taking less time, P3P gives you the option of installing some of the game's data onto your memory stick to reduce load times. Take my advice and make the space for it, especially if you have firmware above version 6.20 installed.
Overall, Persona 3 Portable is a great game and addition the PSP's library. The updates and new female protagonist make it a worthwhile purchase for any Persona 3 veteran, as long as they don't expect a major plot overhaul, and those same changes make it more accessible to newcomers to the series than ever. If you're an RPG-lover with a PSP who doesn't mind some of the game's quirks, then you shouldn't miss this version of Persona 3.
Description of Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 Portable
One of the greatest RPGs of all time in the palm of your hands! Featuring the unprecedented addition of a new female player-controlled protagonist who offers players a fresh new perspective for one of gaming?s most inventive narratives, in addition to numerous additional improvements and enhancements, SMT: Persona 3 Portable promises to bring one of the highest?rated RPGs of all time to PSP(PlayStation Portable) system in its grandest iteration yet!
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