Special Edition of Persona 3 FES Worth Playing Over

By Connect2Mason reporter Daniel Sims

The only games I’ve taken the time to play through more than once are ones that are short, sweet, and entertaining enough to warrant experiencing again. Persona 3 took me four months to finish. The additions made to it change the original game enough and add more than enough additional content to make what was already possibly the best RPG of 2007 worth replaying.

Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 FES (for “Festival”) is a special edition version of last year’s role-playing game from Atlas that adds dozens of hours of content to an already huge game. For $30 you get the whole original game altered with new extras and various changes here and there as well as an extra epilogue chapter.

Last summer’s Persona 3 was an RPG that combined classic dungeon-crawling with a text-based adventure to create one of the most fully-featured and varied RPGs around if not also one of the most hardcore. Players controlled a self-named transfer student in modern Japan who over the course of a year socialized at high school by day, and by night fought demons in a labyrinthine tower using spirits called “Personas.”

On one end of the game, Persona 3 featured a very balanced combat system and challenges that rewarded strategy far more than levels and stats. Players directly controlled only the main character while his friends ran on AI that for once could be trusted and added another layer to the game’s strategy.

On the other end, socializing with Persona 3’s characters not only provided a compelling storyline that was unique for the genre, but affected players’ ability fight the game’s enemies, establishing a firm bond between that story and Persona 3’s gameplay. The result was somewhat of a social experience where characters actually felt like they were worth caring about throughout a 70 plus-hour game that never lots its pace.

FES is a double-dip that’s actually worth going through in its entirety. Most of the changes and additions are little things that checker the main game here and there. The positions, actions, and dialogue of some characters have been changed. New items and Personas have been added and extra side stories were put in. One can tell that Atlas took time in restructuring the flow of the game to accommodate everything new.

The biggest extras are the inclusion of a hard difficulty mode and a whole new adventure that serves as sort of a new epilogue. Called “The Answer,” the new chapter seems to have really been made to favor the more hardcore RPG players.

With the socializing element gone, all that’s left is 15-30 hours of battling through dungeons to find the true ending to Persona 3’s story. The constant combat can get monotonous and the new chapter is automatically set to hard difficulty which means challenges greater than anything encountered in the original game, some of which at times can feel completely unfair, but aren’t unbeatable.

Bottom Line

If you haven’t played Persona 3 yet, FES is the definitive way to get the game now. At $30, the already massive original game with dozens of hours of extra content is a steal. For once, fans of the original game will find a game that’s been re-worked just enough from the inside to make it worth revisiting in full despite its extreme length.