Hooked on Persona 3
Between playing games and doing programming and further design on Frayed Knights, I feel like I need another weekend to recover from my weekend.

What's funny is that once upon a time, I remember complaining about there not being enough games released during the year. I'd rejoice each year at Christmas time, in expectation of some high-profile releases finally making their way into the store.Now - I'm probably still playing last year's games. Or a game from 2002.

At least the leading time-sink this weekend was an expanded version of last year's award-winning RPG, Persona 3 FES. This expanded version came out in 2008 (in the United States, at least), so I feel ever-so-slightly less retro. For a change.

Persona 3 has a little bit of a weird effect on my brain when I play it too long. While "grinding" for money and experience points is still alive and well in this game, there is also a significant mechanic where you are effectively grinding for emotional relationships with people.

Since there are only so many opportunities to spend time with people, you have to narrow down your relationships in a weird give-and-take with the powers that you desire. In many cases, I favor a friend with time in an effort to improve my ratings with a particular arcana of persona. But I find the opposite to be true, too - I've found that I limit my development along certain lines because I favor certain characters in the game, and want to see how their storyline evolves.

The most interesting thing to me - as an indie - is how much game they've packed into relatively limited content. You revisit the same locations constantly, but under different circumstances. You repeat similar actions every day, but there are enough differences and new things to discover that it feels fun. You aren't exploring geography, as you do in most RPGs - instead, you are exploring time, context, character, and plot. Granted, the randomly generated dungeon isn't exactly thrilling, but otherwise it is a very clever way of making the most out of limited content resources.

I'm 30 hours into the game, and I doubt I'm halfway through the original campaign.

I also like the directions the plot is going. Just when things started getting a little boring, they thrown in a new wrinkle. In this case, your team isn't the only group of humans who are alert during the hidden "dark hour" of time at midnight. And the others have found ways to take advantage of this pocket of time to their own, less altruistic purposes...

And lest anybody get too concerned - I'm still playing Wizardry 8. I'm convincing myself that I'm in the home stretch...

Labels: Mainstream Games, Roleplaying Games

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