Think back to the last time you played Uno – it doesn’t matter whether it was the XBL version or the old-fashioned card version — and try to remember when the game shifted from friendly to contentious.  Uno games always shift from friendly to contentious, no matter who is playing. Odds are, whatever the moment is that you are picturing, it probably involved the “Skip” card.

If you are somehow unfamiliar with the rules of Uno (say, perhaps, you were born as a fully grown clone), all you need to know is that the “Skip” card does just what it says: it skips the player directly after whoever played it.  The first time someone gets skipped, everyone probably has a good laugh, and the skipee jokingly plans their vengeance. Once a few more Skips are played, people start to get a little more tense; the card has become a weapon of direct aggression.  Eventually, someone will at some point in the game, through whatever cruel trick of chance or fate, end up getting skipped multiple times in a row.  At this point, if this player has any sort of human spirit within them, they will explode in righteous anger.

Understandably so.

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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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