Years ago I would return home from school and spend the rest of my free time by my lonesome in front of a TV or monitor, playing games. Hacking dungeons. Fighting bosses. Saving worlds.
What a fucking waste.
It's not often that a game united in play, narrative and purpose has any kind of real message or lesson. However Persona 3 has an important message, one I wish a game would've told me years ago.
Persona 3 is telling you to get a life.
Much of the game is spent in a tower called Tartarus with randomly generated floors and enemies to encounter. The goal is ultimately to reach the top, and you have less then a year of game time to do so. To get more powerful, you take Persona, the creatures that inhabit your mind and soul and preform your actions, and fuse them together to make more powerful Personas. To do this you're hanging out in the Velvet Room, the Persona fusion area, looking for the best combination of the disparate creatures and freaks of your Persona collection. You come upon a decent fusion, but then you notice the Arcana the new creation belongs to. You stop right then and there and call it all off. There's a way to make this creation even more powerful, and it requires you to get out of the dungeon and get on with your real life.
For this isn't an ordinary dungeon hack, where you only go back to town for healing and new items and equipment. Instead, you're living out your life as a Japanese High School student. The dungeon hacking is just another aspect of your busy schedule that includes daily classes, cramming for exams, wooing cute girls, and hanging out with your buddies. Dungeon hacking is fun, sure, but meeting other people and building friendships is a lot of fun too. The twist in Persona 3 is that they are never mutually exclusive.
Everyone you can hang out with and befriend is tied to an Arcana--a tarot card. The classmate who loves ramen and is hot for teacher, for example, is Magician. You can spend an afternoon with him psyching him up to ask the teacher out, and when it's over your rank with Magician, known as an S. Link, levels up. When you fuse a new Persona with the Arcana of Magician, the S. Link determines how much bonus experience points the Persona will start with, leveling it up to be way more powerful from the start. Depending on the responses and actions you take with your friends, you will have either an easy or a hard time getting S. Link ranks up. Not so much a "right" or "wrong" answer in the moral sense; most multiple choice responses call for you to understand what that character wants to hear or want you to do. In order to advance S. Links, you must be in tune to your friends' M.O. and, depending on the situation, even be manipulative in order to get closer to them.
When you're done for the day, you can go back to Tartarus and dungeon hack away, although you really only have to do it once or twice a month. The game rewards you for not spending all your time in Tartarus by making your party members get tired after a period of time in the tower, and giving the protagonist super-human "Great" status for spending days outside the tower. It sets a reasonable time limit to Tartarus explorations and keeps you in the day to day pacing of the game. And although the life sim might seem boring, it manages to stay pretty varied most of the time, since different days of the week have certain S. Link friends available and unavailable, and there's often a unique event or two in a week. You are not simply fighting bosses, watching a cut-scene and fighting the next boss for the next cut-scene. It is left to you to build friendships and fuse Personas and fight your way up the tower however you choose to do it.
Hand in hand, dungeon hacking and life sim combine in the narrative, which despite being largely telegraphed manages to be powerful nonetheless, due to the fact that you achieve friendships with the characters in this game through your own efforts, and not by a linear script that holds your hand. Friendship gives you strength and this strength becomes a tangible power in battles. This is a rare game that reinforces the very concept of the story by playing it.
It's making me want to leave the TV and make some real friends of my own.
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