Thoughts on Persona 3 FES: The Answer
This weekend, I finished the "expansion" campaign to Persona 3 FES, subtitled "The Answer."

It takes place on March 31st, a few days after the conclusion of the original campaign ("The Journey"). The original characters (well, those that survived from the original group) have been packing up the dormitory and are preparing to leave the next day, after having one last going-their-separate-ways party. Unfortunately, moving day never arrives, as the group finds themselves trapped in the dormitory in a magical time-loop that keeps repeating March 31st over and over again. Oh, and they get attacked by a robot, Metis, of a similar make and model as Aigis, but apparently manufactured with the "emotion upgrade" pre-installed and turned to "annoying kid sister" levels.

What they learn is that a place called "The Abyss of Time" - a counterpart to Tartarus - did not fade away when Tartarus did. And now it's stocked with a ton of shadows and a mysterious dark figure, and has connected (very deliberately) with a previously unknown basement in the dormitory building. Naturally, the secret to breaking out of the Groundhog Day style time loop will require them delving deep into the Abyss of Time, kicking a lot of shadow butt, and emoting in some anime-style cut-scenes.

Gameplay Commentary

This weird plot setup removes a lot of elements from the previous game:

#1 - Time ceases to be a factor in exploring. Nobody ever gets tired (that I could tell) in the dungeon explorations of the "Abyss of Time" (the counterpart to Tartarus that has opened up beneath the dorms - for a very particular reason). While it sounds liberating, I found that it really made the game less interesting. You are pretty much wandering through randomly-generated dungeons all the friggin' time, without the other activities of the day to break things up.

#2 - There are no social links - as you are stuck in the dorm rooms with your old companions (and Metis), so there's not really any new relationships to be had. Unsurprisingly, though, the theme of the expansion is on relationships - and friendship. And foreshadows in the beginning a bloody battle royale coming up between these stalwart companions...

#3 - There's really no place to GO other than the Abyss of Time, the Velvet Room (Aigis can now go there), and (eventually) certain shops in Paulownia mall in the past.

There are some other changes to make the game more challenging than the original. There is no longer the ability to register Personas, so a fusion or a discard removes the Persona forever (or until you find / fuse a new version). On the other hand, you are no longer restricted from the top-level personas (or beyond!) by social link. You no longer get nihil weapons that you can fuse with personas to create new weaponry.

In the dungeon, most of the shadows are similar to those found in the original campaign - the bizarrely abstract entities based upon the major arcana of the Tarot. But they do have some nasty additions, particularly with the bosses and red-level shadows. For one thing, many of the tougher shadows no longer have weaknesses, making it harder to get free attacks (or all-out attacks) in. They also combine shadows with complimentory abilities (and opposite weaknesses) - so half of the enemies may be weak to frost attacks, but the other half are actually healed (or reflect) frost attacks.

The bosses are frequently encountered in groups with nasty combos. For example, one boss encounter consisted of three enemies: One with powerful attacks that targeted the entire party, one with the power to put up an "attack mirror" style effect which reflected physical attack damage back on the attacker, and a third opponent who had the ability to cast "enrage" on the party to force them to make blind physical attacks (and kill themselves on the attack mirror effect).

Story Commentary

While it is a lot more challenging than the original, the gameplay changes make The Answer little more than a traditional dungeon crawl. With a linear story tacked on at certain stages.

At least the story is interesting - "The Answer" as suggested in the title is supposed to be about Aigis's quest for an answer in herself as to the meaning of life - particularly for her, as "life" in a man-made machine is questionable at best.

Aigis is sort of a Frankenstein's monster with a (potentially) happier ending - one who was accepted by members of humanity rather than rejected. She's less filled with homicidal tendencies and self-loathing, but she mounts cannons on her arms. Definitely an improvement over Frankenstein's creation. Her story is closer to Pinocchio territory. But she is still a very angsty construction, who at the beginning of the game wishes for a return to her original, emotionless, purely mechanical state. Her self-will has brought her grief, and she seeks to put an end to it. The crisis snaps her out of it, and she finds herself a new "guest" of the Velvet Room. Igor and Elizabeth challenge her to make the same discovery as their previous guest - to discover her own answer to the meaning of her unique existance.

But I suspect that part of the title came from the ending of the original campaign, "The Journey." After the final boss was destroyed and the game gave you a chance to explore a (potentially) lengthy denoument, the conclusion left me saying, "WTF?!?!?" If I was a character in the game, a big blue question-mark would have appeared over my head. In a way, this expansion was the answer to explain the ending of the original release.

And it takes its own sweet time getting around to it.

For people like me who are a little thick, it does this by hitting us over the head with the whole Christ allegory thing. But I like to think of it being more of a case of it being presented very weakly in the original campaign.

One thing I did appreciate was the focus at the beginning of the expansion on practical needs: Trapped in the dormitory, the day-old sushi from the party wouldn't last long. Part of the group immediately begins a search for supplies necessary for survival. Once the connection to the Paulownia Mall of the past is established, this minor subplot is resolved. I guess Mitsuru can grab cash from an off-screen ATM or something so they can live on Ding-Dongs (or weird Japanese junk food) from the drugstore.

The Paulownia Mall thing kinda annoyed me - there was so much that could have been explored with a doorway into a limited area in the past, but it was really just an matter of "convenience." I would have liked them to have left messages for their past selves or silly things like that. There was so much wasted potential for some really interesting time paradoxes. Could Mitsuru have contacted her father and warned him about a particular upcoming betrayal?

Overall Thoughts

While I felt the storyline was a satisfying conclusion to the two campaigns, the problem was that there (A) just wasn't enough of it, and (B) was little-to-no player choice in how it unfolds. While the dungeon crawls and evolution of your personas were well under your personal control, the story was simply a series of fixed cutscenes and some dialog options doled out at certain milestones. Most of it was cryptic and incomplete - an obvious case of story being spread too thin across the campaign.

The dungeon crawling had already gotten old in The Journey, and while they made it more challenging in this expansion, outside of the boss fights it still felt like a repeat of the same grinding done before. Same monsters, same cards, same items... only this time, without the daytime activities to break up the grind as soon as it becomes monotonous. Fortunately, the boss fights were far more interesting from a mechanics perspective. The arena fights near the end were challenging, and gave me the pleasure of beating the crap out of the other principle characters in the game.

I praised Persona 3 - the original campaign - for its bold outside-the-box expansions on gameplay and stryline. The expansion - while interesting and challenging - expands on the most boring and pedestrian aspects of the original. I can understand the desire for a "cheap and dirty" expansion - particularly when the "complete" FES edition only costs $30 new at retail. And parts of it were a lot of fun, and I did enjoy the new story and expansion on the events of the original. It just felt like I had to plow through an awful lot of filler to get there.

Labels: Mainstream Games, Roleplaying Games

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