Shin Megami Tensei: Persona Review - PSP

When Persona first came to America, close to 13 years ago, nobody really knew what to make of it. Role-playing games wouldn’t officially go mainstream until a little while later, and here was an RPG that tossed aside most of the conventions of the genre anyway. Instead of the usual swords-and-sorcery fantasy adventure, it revolved around a bunch of demon-possessed high school kids on a tear across a modern-day city.



13 years later, an updated Persona arrives for the PSP, and a lot of players are going to be in for just as much of a shock. The setting may be a little more familiar now – by now we’ve all seen a few Japanese cartoons about super-powered teenagers called up to save the world – but when it comes to game design, it still lives a long way out in left field.

That’s hardly a bad thing, though. Yes, it makes for a fairly steep learning curve, even for veterans of Persona 3 and Persona 4. But once you learn the ropes, it’s great fun to play through a game that’s this close to being completely unique.

Day Destroys the Night

Persona doesn’t spend very much time introducing itself. A few cinematics teach us everyone’s names before our heroes’ high school winds up besieged by hordes of demons. Some of the “dungeons” that follow are ordinary real-world locations – a hospital, a police station, the tunnels beneath the city – while others take the party into alternate dimensions that seem to be spilling over into their ordinary reality.

Luckily, the good guys have a lot of different options when it’s time to send the demons home. If 3 or 4 was your first Persona, the combat in this game may be hard to get a handle on at first. There are lots of variables involved – it’s not quite as complex as a genuine strategy-RPG, but the formations of both sides determine who can target who, and the heroes can choose to strike with guns, melee weapons, or the supernatural abilities they gain from their Personas -- powerful spirit alter egos. Each enemy’s blend of strengths and weaknesses calls for a different approach.

If that sounds tricky, well, you’ve only heard the half of it. The original Persona does something similar, at a very basic level, to what a later generation encountered in Persona 3, blending traditional dungeon-crawling and new-school social interaction. On a practical level, though, the way it works is very different.

In most battles, you can – and should -- sometimes choose not to fight. It’s possible to “negotiate” your way through random battles, using different characters to navigate a conversation tree (a bit like a BioWare RPG). Successful diplomacy delivers a whole different set of rewards compared to slugging it out the old-fashioned way. Fighting provides experience points to build up your characters, while negotiation nets special monster cards. Those are what you spend in the Velvet Room, a sort of laboratory for creating new Personas with more powerful spells and other abilities.

Night Divides the Day

If this sounds like a dizzying collection of systems to master, well, that’s not far from the mark, at least in the early stages. Persona is a pretty complicated game, and it’s almost certainly more challenging for new players than later installments in the series. Even on the beginning level of difficulty, battles become fairly tough fairly quickly. You’ll have to spend some time on the grind slugging through random encounters, too, if you want to build up a party of characters and Personas that can survive for the long haul.

Visually, the game doesn’t make the best first impression either. The first-person dungeon areas are straight out of something like the old Bard’s Tale or Wizardry games, and the 2D sprite characters in the combat scenes…well, they get the point across, but they aren’t the same kind of showcase for Kazuma Kaneko’s art direction as we’ve seen in games on more advanced hardware.
 
On the other hand, while Persona’s graphics might not be that impressive on a nuts-and-bolts technical level, it definitely manages to create an absorbing atmosphere. Detailed backgrounds build the impression of a modern landscape gone badly wrong, and a well-written script convincingly draws us into that world. An all-new soundtrack does its part as well. Shoji Meguro, the composer for Personas 3 and 4, reworked the music for the handheld remake, and his blend of catchy contemporary pop and creepy ambient sounds is the perfect fit for a game world with this kind of eerie split personality.

The Other Side

Ultimately, it’s worth putting in the time to learn all of Persona’s ins and outs. Mastering the battle system is all the more rewarding because there are so many different ways to win a fight. The demon negotiations may seem weird and haphazard at first, but it’s a surprisingly addictive system once you get a feel for the personalities of different monsters – some of the dialogue reaches inspired heights of weirdness – and the practical payoff for learning to smoothly manipulate them is huge.

There’s no other RPG out there that plays quite like this one, and that naturally makes it tougher to come to grips with than some. It’s no fun to play the same kind of game over and over, though. All these years after the first time it surprised us, Persona still delivers a welcome shock to the system.