I'm having a tremendous amount of fun with this game, which is unusual for a random-dungeon crawl; those have to compete against Nethack and NOTHING will ever win that comparison.

And, to be blunt, if the dungeon crawl was all that P3 was offering, I'd have quit by now. As usual, random dungeons aren't actually that interesting - you wander a little deeper, you kill some easy enemies, every so often you run into something you can't handle because you've been lulled half to sleep and it whomps you, at which point you discover you haven't saved it for 20 floors. Joyous, right?

P3's real shine is that the dungeon crawling is mostly secondary to a highly-abstracted Japanese school life. Your main character has to save the world with the help of his friends yadda yadda, sure. But he's also got to attend school six days a week, and since all the dungeon-adventuring takes place in a magical "dark hour" in between midnight and midnight, sometimes you've got to back off the studying marathon because being fatigued will get you killed on your next dungeon romp.
Where the game shines is in the various Personas - think of them as the stereotypical "summons", except your character gets a metric ton of them and a lot of the mechanics of the game is retrieving, fusing, and augmenting Personas. Your combat stats are inherently tied up in your Persona, and you can swap them in mid-battle, so it's entirely possible to get into a situation where you're thinking "I can swap to the other persona to cast that healing spell on my party, but it's vulnerable to lightning and the boss might one-shot me, but if I don't cast the spell then the boss might kill half my party on the next turn..." It's surprisingly deep.

On top of that, it's inherently tied in to the school-sim part of the game. Personas are associated with various Tarot cards, which are in turn associated with... practically everyone you run across. Getting to know people better creates a "social link" that augments your Personas when you create them. At high levels of friendship, this can be 4-5 levels of extra experience for your Persona, and that translates to a lot of extra power for your character. The system also feeds back on itself - if you have a Persona that matches the person you're talking with, you get more "points" for your conversation choices and the like.

On top of all that, you've got a few basic "school" stats - charm, academics, and courage. You'll need certain stats up to a certain level before certain people will even give you the time of day, and a few other things depend on them as well. (Easy example - your academics stat will have a direct influence on how well you do on your exams.)

So the real challenge of the game is schedule management. You have to get the stats up sufficiently to be able to do certain things in the game. You need to talk to people to establish social links, and keep talking to them to increase the level of those links, and if you ignore people for too long, they'll get annoyed and then you've got to spend time apologizing before you get to level that link again. (Not really a problem for most characters, but the potential girlfriends - and there's a few of them - are a lot more picky; with them, every time you do something with another girl, the countdown timer for "see her before X or she gets mad" goes down, so there's a real incentive to max out one before moving on to the next). You'll have characters calling you and wanting you to spend your Sunday hanging out, and they'll get ticked if you cancel on them (say, if your girlfriend calls you the next night and asks for the same Sunday).

You've got limited time (generally, two "somethings" a day - one afterschool and one evening - but the school characters aren't available in the evening, and most of the stores are closed). You've got limited money, which you can spend on various stat-boosting activities, better equipment, girl-bribe items, and the like - but stuff is expensive, and you'll find yourself using your consumables a lot more than most RPGs. And the clock is ticking - you get a monthly visit from a boss on the full moon, and if you haven't hit the dungeon at least two or three times to get stronger, that boss will hand you your ass. And yeah, you gotta sleep sometime.

I've got a couple nitpicks, but I'll save them for later. Long post is long as it is.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 12:10 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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