Persona 3 strays from the traditional turn-based rpg formula, which for me is always a worrisome adventure. It's not that I don't want to see the genre evolve, surely. As long as the battle system remains strategic and in control, there's good character development (skills and story), and there's at least an attempt at telling a tale no matter who juvenile or epic, I'm certainly open to change. For my tastes, Persona 3's fact sheet reads like a recipe for disaster. There's only one main area to explore, teammates are not controllable in battle, time spent in dungeons is limited, and you spend a lot of time just talking to people in high school and around town. But almost inexplicably, this is one of my favorite rpgs on the PS2.

The story begins with your character transferring to this new high school. Following a really twisted animated cutscene, he is greeted at the front door by his new dorm mate who is holding what appears to be a gun. You soon find that the group of students staying at this dorm is a part of school "club" that hunt shadows (monsters). With a world mechanic similar to the movie Dark City, there's an extra hour every night between 12:00 midnight and 12:01am, The Dark Hour. During the Dark Hour, nearly everyone in the world turns into coffins while shadows come out and spread their terror. There are certain people with the gift to remain awake during this Dark Hour, including your group, which is charged with defeating the source of these shadows.

The ability to fight against these shadows comes from more than just brute strength and use of weapons. You and your group are able to unleash your inner persona to help out in fights. Your character is an extraordinary case in that you can evoke many different personas instead of just one. According to story, the personas are very difficult to summon and only people with incredible will and courage can do it without the aid of an evoker. The evoker is a magical weapon (gun) that helps fully realize your inner persona by figuratively killing your outer being. This can be mistranslated in screen shots and videos you may have seen where the students appear to be committing suicide in battle by shooting themselves in the head. It certainly was chilling to see it happen the first few times until I understood that it was metaphorical.

So, the source of the shadows is a tower called Tartarus. This multi-floored tower only appears during the Dark Hour, and every night the floors have a different layout. The tower is where you'll spend nearly every minute of your fighting time. It's a far departure from most games where the goal is to travel the world and constantly encounter new areas. All the floors look the same, just with different types of shadows, layouts, and treasures.

Fighting in the tower isn't all there is to the game though, so now's a good time to talk about how the game flows. Persona 3 takes place within one calendar year starting in spring and continuing until December. In a move that puts the "role playing" back into "role playing games", every day is simulated from morning until the Dark Hour. Most of the time the actions you take are entirely up to the choices you make during the day.

During the school year, every day starts with attending class. You may sometimes be active in your participation in class, other times it just advances straight to the afternoon at the end of the school day. In the afternoon and evening, you have the opportunity to go and talk to just about anyone you want. When you're off from school, you have a little more time to work on relationships, such as playing an MMO online with a friend or going to the movies. Building relationships is a huge part of the game, not just for the satisfaction of having created these relationship, but because strong relationships help create stronger personas. Creating these bonds is actually the only way to have personas be higher level than your character's level.

Spending time with someone, whether it's on the school's practice fields or having a cup of coffee together, usually advances to nighttime. During the evening hours, the school and most shops are closed, leaving little to do other than hit karaoke or coffee shops for a boost to some key stats. Increasing these personal stats (not fighting stats) like intelligence and courage eventually leads to new conversations opening and the start of new relationships. So, they are also important not to ignore.

Unlike a lot of games where a few questions are asked to you throughout the game and your input doesn't matter, the relationship-building portion of this game is heavily dependant on your responses. So, more like Knights of the Old Republic, there's a lot of dialog between you and the other characters instead of just story and filler. You even have to manage your time well. With a limited schedule each day and a fixed time for the year, you need to make decisions on when to sleep versus when to fight or study. If you fight too long or study too late, you can get tired or even sick, which directly translates to a loss of performance when fighting.

The only downside to this setup is that you belong to a group, but don't control that group. You only control the main character, in both the real world and in combat during the Dark Hour. I only say that's a downside, because I do like the strategy involved in micromanaging a full group. In a way, you do still manage a group, it just happens to be a group of personas, which you can level and combine to form new personas.

Combat is turn based and menu driven with regular attack commands and magic in the form of personas. The Shin Megami Tensei tradition of elemental weakness is back, but handled slightly different this time around. If you manage to knock down an enemy, either through elemental weakness, a critical, or knockdown skill, then you get to take another turn immediately. If you manage to knockdown all enemies on the board, then you get to unleash a team attack at no extra cost. It's just a slight variation on the press turn system.

You have minor control over what actions you want your teammates to perform such as don't use SP or focus on support, and these commands will grow over time as your relationships develop. The AI is pretty smart for the most part if left to their own desires, except for the fact that they make terrible use of extra turns. If they hit the weakness of an enemy, they will usually attack that enemy again, which relieves them of the knockdown status. It would be much smarter of course to go for another enemy's weakness instead.

Another departure from most rpgs is that your time spent battling through the tower (dungeon) is limited. There are gates on most floors that can teleport you back to the entrance where you are free to heal and work on your personas, and there are special teleports on some floors that allow you to return to the tower without starting at the 1st floor every time. I guess in order to keep you from completing the tower in one shot without focusing on the rest of your everyday life; they had to impose a limit. This limit comes in the form of tiredness, which I mentioned briefly before. When you or a teammate gets tired, their performance in battle decreases, and if you leave to go to the ground floor to heal, they will leave your party and return to the dorm.

The tower can get a little monotonous, but it fits perfectly with the continuum of the story line. You can gather quests to complete in the tower, which have great rewards, and that goes a long way to helping you press forward. There are special shadows to fight and many bosses that take well-formed strategy to conquer.

The graphics and sounds are just as wonderful as the rest of the package. The art style is typical of all the other PS2 SMT games we've seen. The animated cutscenes are amazing, and lend so much to drawing you into the story. The writing is superb, and the voice work is great as well.

Some of the game mechanics that I've talked about didn't sound appealing to me before I played the game, but in practice, it's one of the most engaging rpgs I've ever played. It's a tremendous value, and new copies come with a 52-page art book. Persona 3 goes at the top of my list for Atlus rpgs, and one of the best PS2 rpgs to date.