Heretic-Gamer

Coming out of beating Persona 3: FES a week ago, I’ve moved on to playing Final Fantasy IV: The After. But I can’t really just move on without mentioning my final thoughts on a game I spent over 80 hours with.

I can basically sum up Persona 3: FES as follows: Great style does not make up for the uninteresting, slow, underdeveloped story and characters. So many things about the game’s presentation are great. The music, the colorful world, the French scattered randomly about, the sunny, rainbow-filled locals, not to mention the fact that you shoot yourself in the head in order to use skills in battles.

A special note should be made to the game’s final three months. At this point, after perhaps 40 to 50 hours of dragging story, the plot actually starts to go somewhere. Unfortunately at this point, it is too little and too late. The plot and characters still do not make it to a satisfactory level, albeit getting very close, and so, while the game finishes stronger than what precedes it, the game’s story ends weak.

One final shout-out must go to the final month of the game. During this period, the game takes the other half of the soundtrack that is just “OK,” and rearranges all these songs into awesome remixes. Like, I put off finishing the game just to hear these songs, awesome.

All in all, I can still easily say that one should try at least one of the Persona games, just for how refreshing and different they are from a standard RPG. With that in mind, however, I would recommend playing Persona 4 over Persona 3: FES without any regrets. Just think about playing through it on Easy!

Final Score: B-