With it's engaging story and varied gameplay Persona 3 FES is one of the best RPGs available for the Playstation 2
Persona 3 was originally released in August of 2007 to high critical acclaim. Released less then a year later Persona 3 FES is a re-release of the same game with bonus content as well as a separate expansion called The Answer that takes place shortly after the events of the original game which is called The Journey in FES. Those that purchased Persona 3 when it originally came out can load up their save data upon starting a new game of The Journey and import their various accomplishments from their previous play(s) through. If you played Persona 3 when it came out this might be enough of an incentive to replay the game, otherwise you can dive right into The Answer. Regardless of if you played the original game when it was released or here on the FES release you'll be starting from scratch when you start The Answer. Most players would agree that the option to carry something over from your play through of The Journey would have been nice.
The story for the main game follows a young Japanese high school student whom you must name yourself. Shortly after your arrival in your new home you discover that there is a twenty fifth hour in every day that most people aren't aware of. This extra hour is known as the dark hour and you are one of the few people that remain conscious for it's duration. During the dark hour creatures called Shadows appear and recently have started attacking people leaving them virtually brain dead when the dark hour ends. Not only are you able to stay awake during the dark hour your character is one of the few people gifted with the power to summon an entity called a persona, from which the game takes it's title. You summon your persona by shooting yourself in the head, suicide style, with a gun like device called an evoker. Very quickly you find yourself a member of a team of students known as SEES, or the Specialized Extracurricular Execution Squad. SEES main goal is working to defeat shadows while discovering the origins of the dark hour. If you've played a lot of RPGs then you can probably guess that things escalate and in the end you save the world. While in that respect the core idea behind the story isn't that original Persona 3 has a focus on the people experiencing the events rather then the events themselves. This is achieved by tons and tons of character dialog, all of it well written. This focus on characters makes you feel very connected to the characters you choose to spend your time around and when bad things happen you feel like your a part of the story rather then just an observer. You'll spend much of the game getting to know several of the characters quite well and will come to understand, befriend, and even strike up romantic relationships if you play your cards right.
After completing The Journey the story is continued in The Answer which takes place a month after the conclusion of The Journey. In The Answer you find yourself trapped inside the student dorm you lived in for the duration of The Journey. The Answer serves as a very long epilogue for The Journey during which the characters continue their development while coming to terms with the events that took place at the end of The Journey.
Persona 3's gameplay can be best described as one part turn based combat system, one part randomly generated dungeon crawler, and one part dating/social sim. The events of the game take place over the course of a year during which you live the life of a Japanese high school student. This means that Monday to Saturday you have to go to school while getting Sundays and holidays off. After school and during your days you will encounter side characters you can build relationships with, undertake a number of side quests, and work on building up your social stats (academics, charm, and courage). As you make friends and sign up for school clubs you'll find yourself with a full schedule very quickly. On top of your daytime activities you have the option of going to a dungeon called Tartarus that opens up every night during the dark hour to explore, fight shadows, and build up your party of up to four characters. This is important as once a month a major event will take place that you'll need to be prepared for. Finding a your own preferred balance between school, social life, and shadow slaying is one of Persona 3's more fun aspects. Perhaps the greatest thing about the game is that it makes sure your never doing one thing for too long. While working on relationships with the games various side characters is very fun and rewarding you have to break it up a couple times a week with dungeon diving during the dark hour. Tartartus is a tower with over two hundred fifty floors, most of which have randomly generated layouts each time you visit them. The halls are populated with a wide variety of shadows for you to fight, and loot to find. During a given month there is only so far you can go before you hit a wall that will disappear after the next big plot advancement. So once your finished exploring up to your current limits all you have left to do during the dark hour is fight shadows to build up your characters. While the rest of your party is limited to one persona each your character has the unique ability to use multiple personas. Your main character can hold up to twelve personas at any given time and switch between them once per turn in battle. Since each persona has unique skills, spells, and elemental weaknesses what personas you keep and which you replace becomes a matter of strategy. The further your explore you get access to more personas for your character and on top of that there is a system where you can fuse from two to six of your personas to create even more powerful ones. As mentioned above the game makes sure you don't spend too much time doing one thing. After spending a certain amount of time in Tartarus you and your teammates will get tired and request that you call it a night. While you can continue to explore and fight doing so while fatigued is a risky venture that will likely get you killed. Thus you cannot spend too long exploring and fighting before you have to head back to the social side of the game. The combat and dungeon crawling will continue into The Answer but unfortunately the social sim is dropped for the duration of the expansion. This is unfortunate as the original games strength lied in it's varied gameplay . Basically you'll find that The Answer plays like a perpetual dark hour but with story delivered as you progress through the new dungeon called The Desert of Doors. The Answer is noticeably harder then The Journey on normal difficulty, at times to frustrating levels. While this does stretch out the experience it doesn't really work since you never get much of a respite from combat and exploration except for a few minutes of story and dialog every now and then.
Persona 3 is a long game and I mean long. Even if you keep your dungeon exploring to a minimum your still going to be playing The Journey for at least fifty to seventy hours (I arrived at the end credits at just over one hundred thirty hours). Clocking in around thirty hours The Answer is shorter but with it's loss of such a major chunk of The Journey's gameplay this is a good thing. Once you complete The Journey your able to start a new game plus mode which allows you to carry over the personas you've found/created as well as your main characters level and social stats. Top it off with a hard difficulty mode and if you really want to sink another fifty plus hours into Persona 3 you've got plenty of reasons to do so.
As far as visuals are concerned Persona 3 is both inspired and lacking at the same time. Tartarus is divided up into various sections all of which have their own look and music. However you'll quickly find that Tartarus is just a collection of empty rooms and corridors save for the presence of your enemies and an occasional chest to open. Most of the shadows you find yourself fighting are imaginatively designed but at the same time you'll find the a more powerful version of the same shadow slightly re-skinned or with their colors tweaked a few floors up. Most of the story progression uses the game engine accompanied by character portraits of whoever is talking. It would have been nice for closer and more cinematic camera shots during heated dialog rather then the standard far off camera angle the game uses at all times. That said the character portraits are detailed enough and change throughout dialog to show subtle things like a gentle smile or something as obvious as blushing. Also for a few key moments Persona 3 employs short anime sequences which are always welcome for a brief change when they pop up. Sound wise you'll find Persona 3 to be on the original side featuring heavy use of Japanese pop music. It's all good stuff that you'll likely find stuck in your head when your not playing it and is a nice change from a generic and orchestral score many other games in the genre tend to employ. But the high point for the audio side of Persona 3 would be the voice acting. While much of the game is spent reading dialog many events involving the core characters are fully voice acted, all of which is superbly done. The only complaint I have with the voice acting is that there isn't enough of it, it would have especially been appreciated for the major side characters, all of which have a lot of dialog that would have benefited from some voice over.
Persona 3 isn't perfect, as mentioned Tartarus gets pretty boring to look at very quickly and some voice acting would have been appreciated for the characters with a lot of dialog. On top of that you only have rudimentary control over the other four members of your combat party and they have a tendency to ignore beneficial stat boosting spells completely while sometimes wasting turns trying to inflict status ailments on shadows they should be attacking. Also while your party members seem to know how to use basic healing items they don't seem to understand the idea of revival items and will never use them on one another. There are only a few save points available throughout the game and more often then not you'll be wishing for one in the time between ten minutes of plot progression and the boss in the next room. Finally the thing that most players will fine irksome would be that while if any member of your party gets knocked out you can revive them but the minute the main characters HP his zero it's an instant game over. This instant game over thing is the only major issue that carries over into The Answer and it's supremely annoying to have to re-do sections of the game because of a minor mistake or plain bad luck.
It's worth noting that if you are playing Persona 3 FES on a Playstation 3 that you will very likely run into a minor bug that can corrupt your save data. While saving, particularly in the first save slot, you may get a message stating that saving has failed and that there is no memory card inserted. If this happens simply exit the save screen and then re-save your data. This happens randomly but considering the length of the game it's probable that you will encounter it a number of times. Aside from that the game should run fine on any backwards compatible equipped Playstation 3.
I'll finish things off the way I started this review by saying that if you like console RPGs then you will like Persona 3 FES. The few flaws the game has are nothing compared with it's varied gameplay, superb pacing of events, excellent story and dialog, catchy original soundtrack, replay value and enjoyable length. While the expansion isn't nearly as good as the original game if you haven't played either Persona 3 FES is still the version to get. If you have played or own the original the bonus content added to the original game coupled with the continuation of the story in The Answer should give you ample reason to pick FES up and play it one more time.