February 3rd, 2009 by Joel Haddock
The Shin Megami Tensei series of games is one with a large popular following in Japan, multiple titles under its umbrella, and a rich in-game history. I knew absolutely none of this when I first picked up Persona 3 in 2007. The “3″ in the title, of course, indicated that there were at least upwards of 2 games prior to it in the series, but I had been informed that I could jump into P3 without any prior experience with the series. This, it turns out, was completely true. The Persona games tend to be fairly standalone titles, a la Final Fantasy, and while you may miss some subtle (or not so subtle) nods to the older titles, you can easily play them as their own entity.
Persona 3, on the whole, was a great game. It was not without its flaws, however, and some of them could be amazingly frustrating. An “expanded edition” of P3 came out shortly after I had beaten it called Persona 3: FES. FES was said to contain many, many hours of additional content and expansion to the story, but having just sunk 60-odd hours into P3, I was not quite ready to jump back in. As the months passed, and I geared myself up to tackle FES, Atlus announced that Persona 4 would be coming out soon. More importantly, it would be coming out on the PlayStation 2 and not the PS3, which meant I was actually going to be able to play it on launch day. Thoughts of FES were pushed aside as I eagerly anticipated the next installment.
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One of the nice things about games is that, unlike in real life, you can usually pretend that the world revolves around you. I mean, I have tried on occasion in real life to take the view that I am the most important person in the world, but damn if the world doesn’t agree with me.