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Quick Review: Shin Megami Tensei Persona 3 Portable

We're adding a new feature to Aggrogate. Many games are very time-consuming to completely play through, and it's not fair to offer a concrete verdict on a game without giving it the full run-through. Unfortunately, we're a bit short-handed and there are only so many hours in the day. If we waited to finish every single game before offering an opinion, we'd never get a review done.

Because of that, we're going to start offering Quick Reviews. Quick Reviews aren't full playthrough-and-write-up evaluations of games, but instead shorter reviews of whatever part of the game we can get through in a reasonable time. Any Quick Review will get at least five hours' worth of gameplay before even starting the write-up, and we'll be sure to note exactly where we stand in the game and how much we played by the time we publish the piece here.

Don't consider Quick Reviews to be full, comprehensive reviews, because they're not based on the full and total experience of the game. Instead, look at them as a general evaluation of what you can expect from a game from putting enough time into it to get a feel for the mechanics, design, and overall quality.

[At the time of publication, I played over 22 hours of the game and beat the fifth full moon event. Yeah, this game is long.]

Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 is the RPG that just won't die. After great success on the PS2, it got re-released with extra content as Persona 3: FES. Now Atlus has ported the original game to the PSP as Persona 3 Portable, and it offers the same great experience it offered 3 years ago. What the game loses in flashiness from the original version, it makes up for in convenience and polish.

If you've played Persona 3, then you've played this game. Of course, if you've played Persona 3, you probably loved it and would totally dig a portable version. The best parts from Persona 3 are kept intact in this game: the random dungeon-crawling, the demon collection, the social link system, the side quests, everything is still there. This time, you can play a female protagonist instead of a male protagonist, which alters the social parts of the game. Besides that, the core game is still there and still satisfying. Unfortunately, only the original campaign is in this version of the game; Persona 3 FES's "The Answer" campaign is absent. Of course, the original game's story was much stronger than ""The Answer," so it's not a huge loss.

Atlus shaved and tweaked several of the mechanics, and these changes are mostly welcome. The best addition to the game is the ability to directly control your allies. If you hated the unpredictable AI settings of your party members in the original Persona, you can simply turn those AI functions off and manually issue commands. Of course, if you prefer the first game's mechanics, you can still let them do their own thing with vague "Attack" and "Support" directions.

Instead of wandering around the world during the daytime, you use a very basic point-and-click interface and a quick travel menu to go around the different locations and meet your friends. The process is much, much faster than the original Persona's wandering, tedious navigation. Unfortunately, while Atlus was trimming off the daytime faffing about, they managed to chop out the great anime cutscenes from the PS2 versions. Instead, they're replaced by a combination of static images and in-engine game animation. It's not a huge loss and doesn't come up too often, but it's very noticeable when the big events you remember as punctuated by memorable anime clips whoosh by as underwhelming slide shows.

Despite the truncated cutscenes and lack of FES content, Persona 3 Portable is a must-have game for any JRPG fan. Even if you've already played it on the PS2, it's a convenient portable format that can kill a lot of time. In fact, until someone releases Shadow Hearts and Shadow Hearts Covenant on the PSP, Persona 3 Portable is easily the best JRPG on the platform (not counting Playstation Originals). If you're not already sick of Persona 3 after its two PS2 releases, get this game. And, if you order it from Amazon, you can still get Junpei's hat!