I finally got around to some of my gaming backlog, and I’ve been playing Persona 3 for a few days now. My girlfriend played it and loved it, but from what I saw I wasn’t sure if I would (I’m not a big fan of random dungeon crawling, which P3 has lots of).

But so far it’s really fun. The dungeons (all in one giant-ass tower) aren’t the most exciting visually, but the battle system is fast-paced and fun. The Persona games have always been known to be difficult, and this is definitely not one of those RPGs you can just breeze through because it’s quite easy to die in just random battles.  I thought only being able to control your main character and the rest being handled by AI would be weird, but it works out really well.

The other half of the game is kind of like a dating sim in that you form relationships (both romantic and just friendly) with classmates at your high school and other people around town. The relationships you form do tie into your battles though in that the personas you can create (the things that allow you to use any abilities in battle) benefit from having higher social links. Each social link you form is tied to a type of persona, of which their are a LOT. The game takes place over a year and part of the challenge is trying to juggle your social life, your personal traits (courage, charm and academics) and then  battling it out in the creepy tower at night, during what’s called the “Dark Hour”. It’s definitely different than really any RPG that’s come stateside to date, and I’m enjoying it a lot.

Of course I’m pretty late to the party on this one, so this is all nothing new to most people. But there’s my impressions anyway. Oh and there’s an anime coming next year called Persona 3, and it’s going to take place some years after the events of the game. The trailer looks promising, so I’m looking forward to that. You can watch the short clip of it below.