My top 10 Favorite J-RPG's #8

8) Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 (PS2, PSP)

            Up until five or six months ago, I had only been peripherally aware of the Shin Megami Tensei (SMT,)series. Then one day on a random trip to Gamestop I spotted the remake of the Persona 1 for the PSP really cheap used and picked it up. Now, while the random encounter rate was annoyingly high and the maze like qualities of several of the buildings sort of pissed me off, I really enjoyed the game world, mythology, and persona system. It’s uniqueness is what kept me playing.

Fast Forward a month or two and I’m totally addicted to Persona 3 portable for the PSP. Seriously, I carried that thing around everywhere to play it in my spare time. It keeps what I like about the first game, improves it and adds on a whole bunch of new elements that just work great. This time around you see enemies in the map screen and the battle go by faster and more enjoyably.

The way you gather and develop personas have changed from the previous games: first you can win persona tarot(ish) cards at the end of battles and fuse them to make complex, powerful personas. Determining what persona you make and how powerful it is depends on the levels of Social Links. This time relying on developing social links between  the hero and the other characters in this game. This means you need to spend time talking to certain characters, and build up personal attributes like charm or academics. It really pulls you in and makes the daily life of the protagonist genuinely interesting.

The graphics are stylish and fun and the story is engaging, albeit dark. You play as a transfer student who has the rare ability to be conscious during a hidden 13^th hour in the day called the dark hour, a time where monsters called shadows wreak havoc. At the school is a team of students who are aware of the “dark hour” and have figured out how to awaken “Personas” to fight for them using a gun-like object they fire at their heads. You join them on investigating the dark hour and trying stop the shadows. That’s about as much as I can saw without spoilers, so you’ll have to take my word for it, it’s really good and really fun.