BATTLE SYSTEM INTERACTION ORIGINALITY STORY MUSIC & SOUND VISUALS CHALLENGE Medium COMPLETION TIME 20-40 Hours OVERALL 1.0/5 Rating definitions

   The Sony Playstation, like other videogame systems before it, had a bit of a rough start getting off the ground, especially in terms of RPGs, with the system's selection of titles eventually saved by the likes of Final Fantasy VII. In light of Camelot Software Planning's failed conspiracy to ruin the system with Beyond the Beyond, Atlus endeavored to ride the tide to glory and knock off its own RPG offering for the Sony Playstation in 1996--but ended up surpassing BtB in terms of abysmal quality with Persona, which contributes yet more to my rather disastrous experience with the Megami Tensei series.

   The random encounters in Persona aren't your typical turn-based fare, to begin. When a battle starts, you can input individual commands for your characters, change their formation, negotiate with the enemy for monster cards, view the stats of the enemies (which don't show until you've defeated a particular type of enemy you encounter), set to auto-battle, and, of course, escape. Speaking of negotiation, each character has a variety of options to converse with the enemy, which, when successful, can net your party monster cards, which they can fuse at Velvet Rooms for Personas, granting your characters stat changes and magic use in battle. If you have monster cards of certain enemies you encounter, moreover, you can speak with them to release them from the battle, lessening the degree of fighting.

"...he also has a really, really ugly face!"

   Okay, then! Now that I've gotten all that out of the way, let me explain the battle system's countless shortcomings. For one, battles are very slow, with even the most trivial fights taking an eternity. Switching Personas in battle also consumes a character's turn. The formation system is flawed, as well, since moving a character around consumes his/her turn, with many skills depending upon a character's location on your party's side of the field. Finally, the escape option doesn't always work against normal enemies, and, given the unpredictability of turn order, foes can beat characters low on HP to healing. Funtastic!

   The fun doesn't end there, though. Interaction is truly painful, with the menu system, instead of having a traditional point-and-click setup, instead settling for a very annoying ring menu system that takes a lot of getting used to. The placement of save points in the game is also horrendous, with the player possibly having to go for well over an hour at times without being able to save. Fusing cards at Velvet Rooms, moreover, forces players to endure long, annoying fusion sequences they can't skip, and you can only change equipped Personas at these facilities. The 3-D dungeons themselves aren't too bad, though, with the occasional overhead room where the player can move the hero's character sprite, although the overhead town map annoyingly has the same movement controls as the 3-D areas. In the end, nothing comes very easy in Persona in terms of interaction; it's all like pulling teeth, but unlike a dentist, you're not getting paid to do any of this; you paid for it.

   Persona is pretty unique, though, but creativity unfortunately comes at the expense of the game. The game does borrow the idea of fusion, many monsters, and the moon system from the main Shin Megami Tensei games, though in the end, originality is one place where Persona doesn't entirely fall flat on its face.

Developers, stop making all RPG heroes teenagers!

   Back to the tripe, the plot can't really save the game. It centers around a group of high school teens performing some sort of ritual and summoning a little girl's ghost, after which strange events happen in their town, Lunarvale, and the mentioned teens must stop a man named Guido from executing his dark ambitions. The story is just too weird and confusing for my tastes (and maybe most anyone else's, at that), and the heroes themselves scream as though they came straight out of a teen sitcom, with the likes of a rich kid and a token black guy playing part. Poor pacing, given the hours spent in dungeons, also harms the plot. In the end, Persona can hardly find salvation in its story.

   The music doesn't really redeem the game, either. For instance, the jarring battle music sounds a lot like the theme of the Mortal Kombat movie, and is just one of many disastrous attempts at a soundtrack made by the composer, who seemed to think that cramming enough notes into a song would eventually make it sound good. Much of the soundtrack is atmospheric, as well. There are a few passable pieces, though, such as the Velvet Room theme, but most everything else is awful and unmemorable. The voice acting in battle doesn't really help the aurals, either, with characters lamely shouting out the name of the game when using their magic. Overall, you'll probably want to hit the mute button or have other music playing if you (hopefully don't) play Persona.

   Even given the opportunity to utilize the Playstation's sexy new visual technology, Atlus fell flat on its face and churned out more mediocrity. For one, the 3-D dungeons are dull and pixelated, as are the rooms in dungeons where your characters' sprites are wandering about. The battle visuals aren't any better, with your characters and the enemy, all containing a bit of pixelation, fighting upon a diagonal slab resembling the terrain of the encounter against a weird vortex background. The worst part of the graphics, though, is the truly hideous town map. The only saving grace is the okay character art and the few FMVs. Still, Persona is definitely an eyesore.

   Despite all the flaws in combat, Persona's difficulty is middling, and the game itself can take as little as twenty hours to complete; however, depending upon the player's choices sometime into the game, playing time can escalate to forty hours.

   In the end, unfortunately, I'm afraid I must deem Persona unfit for human consumption, what with a needlessly sluggish, soporific battle system, unintuitive menus and controls, a lame story with characters that'd be more at home in Saved by the Bell than an RPG, some of the worst music ever to show up in a game, and sub-par graphics. If you're in the mood for a good (and at least playable) Megami Tensei game, pick up Digital Devil Saga instead. Otherwise, don't even approach this offering with a shotgun; trust me, the shotgun will thank you later.