If you don't wanna read without pictures, just watch the video and go to bed. For those who came for Persona 3, continue.


I just needed an excuse to post that video, honestly. But sincerely, I am really very impressed and enamored by Persona 3. Me playing it all started with Dale North's review of Persona 4, which finally broke my long held stance that I wasn't missing out by not playing those games. Until I read it, I didn't know what everyone was going crazy about it for. But the next day, yesterday in fact, I found myself in the local Gamestop, and one of my old friends was working. He innocently asked if I was looking for anything specific, and that turned into a 10 minute long search by him to find the store's one remaining copy of Persona 3: FES. His determination to get that damned thing made me feel bad enough to kill any miserliness about my spending and so I took it home with me.

First of all, let me say, I haven't played very far into the game, maybe 10 hours at best, It's almost the full moon and I don't know what's going to happen, but this game has some personality to it. I use that word loosely because when I say personality, somebody could really take it to mean that it's too into itself, and 'why the hell did they have to make it so you shoot yourself in the head to summon your persona, it's just a gimmick', but they'd have to be retarded for even thinking that. When you peel away all the extra layers of style and gimmicky coolness that surrounds the game's youth oriented characters, it really has a living realistic world at work that draws you in. Things didn't entirely click for me until I was introduced to the daunting tower Tartarus, which is the only real dungeon to the game. Having to balance that and School/relationships is really one of my favorite experiences in video games this year.

After I passed that mark, I was constantly smiling to myself for lack of a better way to express how the game was growing on me. I would find myself saying such things as, 'man I really should go to bed early so I can feel better in school tomorrow' and, 'I hope she likes me, I hope she calls me before I go to bed tonight' and it be because I both cared about my character AND because it affected my battle stats. This is the exact manner of gameplay that I have dreamed about creating when I had fantasies of being a game creator. It doesn't even matter that I didn't get to do it my way, I'm still having a blast, and I'm feeling this way for doing stupid stuff that I've done in real life with dread and boredom! BRILLIANT!!

This was a last minute blog, so I apologize for the lack of pictures to keep your minds from wandering, but seriously I have to tell you, if you like RPGs, but think they're all the same, go play this one, I can't explain to you why, you just have to PLAY IT.


And JIZZ. IN. YOUR PANTS.