Persona 3 Portable combines a beautiful story with great gameplay, the winning formula for any role-playing game.

User Rating: 10 | Persona 3 Portable PSP
Persona 3 Portable is an enhanced port of the PS2 version of Persona 3. And when I say enhanced, I mean practically doubled in content. There's a whole new female protagonist with an adventure of her own, to go with the male protagonist who is also selectable here. The general story for the female protagonist may be the same as the male protagonist's, but the Social Links have been changed. When a lot of ports are just smacking a game into new consoles, Persona 3 Portable deserves praise here.

The game's main story is that creatures called Shadows appear during the Dark Hour, a 25th hour in which everyone except certain special people transmorgifies into coffins and have no recollection of it when they turn back into humans. These Shadows stir up truble by sucking out the transmorgified peoples' minds and causing Apathy Syndrome in them, in which they basically turn into zombies - unable to talk comprehensibly and unable to do anything except just stand there. The people who do not transmorgify and are able to remember also have the ability to use Personas, basically (from what I could gather) scary magic creature pieces of their mind and soul, to battle Shadows. The protagonist and other students of Gekkoukan High School who can use Personas form an organization called SEES to combat the Shadows and erase the Dark Hour from the planet.

The game's story and character moments are pretty moving at some points, especially the ending which I won't spoil. Like any good RPG should, it makes you care about the characters. All the characters are likeable.

Social Links are basically lots of side stories. Your class fellows, the people in shops and malls, you can form bonds with them and find out their stories, and the level of these Social Links gives you extra power when you create new Personas. When you max out a Social Link, i.e. make an unbreakable bond with a character, you get the ability to create the 'ultimate' Persona of the Arcana related to that character.

The gameplay is very good. In Tartarus, the 'dungeon' of this game, you move around, can give your party orders to split up, explores, make defeating Shadows their priority, etc. In battles, you can attack, use skills with your Persona, analyse enemies to find out their weakness, and use items. You can change your Persona, but are allowed to do that only once per turn. You can give orders to your teammates using the Tactics option: to focus on healing and supporting the party, to go all-out against enemies, to conserve SP, or you can control them directly by choosing the 'Direct Commands' option. The battle AI is good though sometimes you may decide to control your teammates directly if they keep making stupid choices. You won't have to do it very often though.

Tartarus is huge, and exploration takes a long time. You can complete side quests given to you by Elizabeth, who is the person who fuses Personas for you to create new ones. However, sometimes, repeatedly engaging Shadows may become tiresome and you may choose to run past them. For me, the reason was that I didn't want to listen to the battle music again. The battle music isn't bad, and during boss battles it is very good, but it does get tiresome if you repeatedly engage Shadows and listen to the same track over and over again, since there is only one track for regular battles. The music in the opening and during the daytime events, however, is very good. The voice acting is outstanding.

The graphics are good. The animations in battles are excellent and the 2D visuals such as character sprites are great. The anime cutscenes and free roaming from the PS2 version have been replaced with 2D images and a cursor over a 2D location. While most gamers were obviously disappointed by this, I felt that this change suits the portability of the game.

At times, I hated Persona 3 Portable. It took me almost a year to finish the male protagonist's story alone (though admittedly for some months in-between I did not play at all due to real life), because Tartarus was huge, and some in-game days there was absolutely nothing to do except wake up and go straight to bed (probably my fault for not making enough social links). It's definitely not a perfect game, since no game is. That said, when it was over, all I felt about the game was good things. It takes just over 40 hours to beat the game's story mode once, which is the perfect length for an RPG. The story is brilliant, emotion-filled and moving. Persona 3 Portable combines a beautiful story with great gameplay, the winning formula for any role-playing game. For any PSP owner with even a mild liking for RPGs, this game is a must-own.