Superb SMT game with a lot to offer
You start off with a silent protagonist who befriends fellow high school students, who try to find out what the goal of the 'shadows' are.
It's a decent high school caper, with simple storylines of first love, heartbreak, revenge and redemption, but the amidst the simple nuances, Persona 3 FES is a simple and straightforward game when compared to other titles in the SMT series.
Your main dungeon, called Tartarus consists of 260 plus floors to explore, divided into 6 blocks. A Caveat though, you cannot blast your way through all the blocks since there is a time frame you need to abide to. Since the game starts in April, you can only reach the top of a certain block, and have to wait until the next full moon for the story to proceed, hence making the game longer than it actually should be.
The social link aspect of this game is great. What it does is that your Main character has to establish relationships with NPCs and a few team members in order to get their Arcana. In this game, arcana is an amalgamation of a set group of Personas (devils for SMT vets) which is their alignment.
It can take up to 2-3 playthroughs if you want to get all the Arcanas to max (up to level 10), and in order to interact, you can only develop relationships, and acquire points with characters during certain days of the week.
To be honest, the entire fraternizing with NPCs got me hooked to this game. Developing in game relationships with the npcs, and trying to develop relationships with girls was interesting. Most amusing was that you can court/date 2 or 3 girls at the same time (there are 5 in total), but if you mess up dating 2 or 3 girls simultaneously, you can literally be dumped (broken social link), but you can amend your mistakes (very simple really, all you need to do is choose the correct answers, if you do not, you'll have to wait a whole week).
New game plus, you carry over all cash, acquired personas, equipment on MC and inventory, items from maxing out social links (social links do not carry over, you have to start them over from scratch which is quite a hassle, and lengthens the game).
In conclusion, this is a superb game. I've acquired just a bit over 97 percent of all personas (the most in any SMT game for me), and when I played this game, I played it once for 20 hours straight from 0800 to 1800 the following day. I was that hooked.