Shin Megami Tensai: Persona3 Portable (!) is actually two games. As part of the Shin Megami Tensai series, it’s a dungeon crawler populated with demons from a wide range of cultures who can be recruited to fight, breed, and hand over powerful spells and items used in the turn-based combat system. As part of the Persona sub-series, dungeons are a small part of an otherwise normal world populated with characters you can befriend, date, or leave for dead – but there is only so much time, and too many possibilities. Unlike many other RPGs, Persona makes you pick and choose what you want to spend your time on. Your social life enhances demons of a certain alignment (represented by the tarot’s Major Arcana), and capturing demons of a certain Arcana in turn makes it easier to connect with friends of the corresponding alignment.
Persona 3 Portable
Written by:zach
That's an interesting point – considering how the protagonist is basically a blank slate for the player's choices, it's interesting to see P3's ending as the player relinquishing control of the world.
Makes me wonder how that idea ties into The Answer scenario from Persona 3: FES, which gets rid of all the social stuff to focus ENTIRELY on the monster slaying bits (and is, consequently, nowhere near as fun as the original scenario). Like a hardcore player desperate to inject a little more life into their game, refusing to accept that it's over.
yeah i'm a sucker for games that try to explain the player's involvement – like Assassin's Creed, or the first Baiten Kaitos game. I think Persona is very subtle about it to the point where it may not even be intentional… I was surprisingly involved in my PC's life, and the ending was cathartic because it did such a great job of separating me from my PC.
I played Portable and I'm not sure what FES/ The Answer is? but yeah just like social without monster slaying would be a little grating, monster slaying without the social would be repetitive and boring (and is what keeps me from finishing the grindy SMT games like Strange Journey) – the balance between the social and the dungeons is really what makes P3 such a fun game.