Why You Should Play Persona 3
Or, how the interplay between the themes and and game mechanics of Persona 3 create a unique and worthwhile experience
Persona 3 is a game worth playing. This probably isn’t a controversial statement considering the amount of praise the Persona series has received in the 18 years since Persona 3 first released, but it’s worth reiterating. From the music to the aesthetics to the unique blend of social sim elements with a traditional turn-based RPG, there’s no shortage of reasons to fall in love with Persona. However, none of those aspects—or many more—are exclusive to Persona 3 in particular. If anything, by the iterative nature of games, Persona 4 and 5 are generally improvements upon Persona 3 in most respects, if at least equals. Despite this, Persona 3 possesses a quality which distinguishes it not just from its siblings, but from every one of its contemporaries in the genre: how the themes of the game are communicated not just through the narrative or the gameplay, but by the interplay between the two. To explain why this interplay between gameplay and narrative is so impactful, I’m going to have to, naturally, first give an explanation of the gameplay and the narrative, at least so far as they concern each other, so please bear with me.
Persona 3’s narrative begins as such: you are a young man who has recently transferred to a new high school and begins quickly experiencing supernatural phenomena, along with a small number of your fellow students, which results in the acquisition of a power called ‘Persona,’ a psychic and/or magical manifestation of a person’s will. (If you’ve ever heard of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, these are basically just stands). This power allows you and your classmates to combat said supernatural phenomena, namely, preventing people from turning into ‘The Lost,’ people who shamble through life, completely devoid of any purpose or will to live. There are some elements I left out for brevity and the story continues to unfold from here, but this is the basic premise. We’re not here for a wiki summary though; let’s get to the juicy bits: the themes.
Although there are a number of themes in Persona 3 worth exploring, one towers above all: death. It’s inescapable; it permeates nearly every aspect of the game. When Persona wielders use their powers, they mimic an act of suicide. In the first few minutes of the game the main character finds himself surrounded by people transmogrified into coffins. Minutes later the player is prompted to sign a contract stating that “Time never waits. It delivers all equally to the same fate,” yet they “chooseth this fate of [their] own free will.” All of this happens within the first hour, if that. Beyond that, nearly every major character—and many minor characters—have death present in their lives through one form or another. I could go on, but by now it should be evident how important death is to the identity of Persona 3.
With the narrative and thematic elements covered, next comes the gameplay. There are essentially two parts to Persona 3. There’s the more traditional turn-based RPG side that more or less follows in the footsteps of its parent series, Shin Megami Tensei, featuring the exploration of hostile environments filled with various enemies to fight, a party with diverse strengths and weaknesses to balance against the weaknesses of said enemies, and Persona fusion, a feature I’ll touch more on a bit later. Then there’s the social sim side, which has since become the series’ defining feature, wherein you navigate the life of a (mostly) normal Japanese high school student. Aside from daily classes, the player is free to decide how they want to spend their time, whether it be studying, playing sports, joining clubs, hanging out with friends, playing an MMO, going to the arcade, eating too much food, getting a part-time job, or even more besides. There is almost always a reason or benefit to spending time in these myriad ways, but it’s a balancing act of opportunity cost; any time spent on one activity isn’t being spent on ten others. If you spend time becoming better friends with the people on the track team, that’s time you could’ve spent studying for the exam in two weeks, for example. There is one more activity that I neglected to mention however, which certainly must be addressed: Tartarus.
(Almost) every night, you are given the opportunity to enter Tartarus, a seemingly endless dungeon to explore and delve deeper into. This too has an opportunity cost, as any night spent in Tartarus could be spent another way, but there’s good reason to go, as it’s your only opportunity to grow stronger in your typical RPG ways, and there are mandatory boss battles every month so you’ll want to be prepared. For the optimizers and combat junkies out there, it might sound tempting to just grind it out in Tartarus and get stronger while ignoring all the other stuff you can do around town. After all, if the only roadblocks to progress through the game are the bosses, all the other stuff is superfluous from a gameplay perspective. You can certainly complete the game using this method, it's as valid as any other approach I suppose, but the game is built in a pretty smart way to encourage players to interface with the social sim elements, namely through social links.
Unfortunately, to understand why social links matter so much to the gameplay I’m going to have to get into some of the nitty-gritty, but I’ll try to make it as painless as possible. With that being said, let’s talk mechanics. Throughout the game there are a number of characters you can befriend and when you do, you form a social link. These go from rank 1 to 10, with higher ranks being representative of a better friendship. Some of these social links don’t require anything special, it’s as simple as talking to them and spending time with them. Others require you to work up the courage to talk to them, or to be smart enough to engage with them, or to simply be charming enough for them to take notice. Ignoring the implication of certain characters not even bothering to have a meaningful conversation with you if you aren’t smart enough, the point is that you need to improve yourself if you want to connect with people. How do you improve yourself? All those activities we talked about, of course. Be courageous enough to sing karaoke with no friends around, become more charming by working a part-time job at the coffee shop so you have more experience conversing with people, or just sit down and have a study session to get smarter. Just experience life and you’ll start becoming the kind of person people want to spend time with. But I digress. Back to social links.
Each social link is associated with a handful of specific personas, and the higher your rank, the more bonus experience you get during persona fusion for those selfsame personas. That, of course, brings us to persona fusion. Normally, a person can only have one persona, but you, the protagonist, can have multiple because you’re the main character and very special. You can get new personas through battle, but your selection tends to be limited and personas level up far more slowly than the main character himself. This is important because personas are how you fight the bad guys; if your personas are weak, you’re weak. Luckily, this is what persona fusion is for, as you can combine two (or sometimes more) personas and the result of most all persona fusions will be of a higher level than the components. You can create personas of any level, up to your main character’s, so you can avoid dealing with the problem of personas leveling up slower than the protagonist, and your personas can even be a higher level than the protagonist due to the aforementioned bonus experience. Not only that, but the strongest personas can only be acquired through persona fusion after you’ve maxed out the social link of specific characters. Basically, higher social links means higher level personas and higher quality personas. Purely from a mechanical perspective, to maximize combat ability, you have to engage with the social sim aspects of the game. It’s a brilliant way to create a more cohesive gameplay experience where the two halves of the game interact with each other, but it's when we consider how this plays into the game’s themes that I think it becomes something truly special.
Before I continue, I must first state that I’m going to have to talk about some late game spoilers to properly convey my point. In my opinion these spoilers are not so major that they’ll ruin someone’s experience with the game, but that’s an incredibly subjective topic and it’s an easy claim to make when I’m not the one being spoiled. If you’d rather avoid that, I completely understand, and also rather pleased you have enough interest in the game that you care about being spoiled. That either means I’ve succeeded in generating interest for the game or you were planning on playing it anyway, which are both wins in my book. With that out of the way though, let’s continue.
As I said earlier, the main theme of Persona 3 is death. Truthfully, that might be underselling it, as it’s revealed late in the game that the final objective of the game is to prevent Nyx, a primordial god, from ending all life on the planet. The final enemy to overcome is death itself. This might not come as too much of a surprise if you’re familiar with JRPGs, but I do think things are a little more nuanced than ‘teenagers kill god.’ If you’ll recall the contract I quoted from the beginning of the game, how “Time never waits. It delivers all equally to the same fate,” that sentiment is echoed throughout the game. When you first learn about Nyx it’s stated that “It is inevitable...The entire human race will become members of the lost...Defeating Nyx is...impossible. It has nothing to do with strength, ability, or power. Just as all living things die...and the flow of time is continuous...Nyx cannot be defeated.” The inevitability of Nyx, of death, is the big takeaway from these passages, but another aspect of importance that might not be as obvious is that Nyx will turn everyone into The Lost. Nyx’s arrival will end all life on the planet, yes, but only as a result of taking away everyone’s will to live. Nyx is not the god of death, but rather the god of nihilism. What reason is there to living if it inevitably ends in death?
The answer to this question is not told to you nor is it shown; it is experienced. The gameplay is the answer. Nyx might be a god, but they are also a boss to be fought the same as any other. Where do you get the strength to face down a god in combat? The same place your strength always came from when facing every other enemy: your social links, your bonds with those around you, and the days spent experiencing every facet of life and becoming the best version of yourself. The meaning of Persona 3 is found not in dramatic, world-altering events but in the accumulation of mundane, beautiful moments. Spending your afternoons eating at every restaurant in the strip mall with your classmates, befriending the strange old monk who drinks too much and breaks his vows, even just gardening on the rooftop of your dorm with friends, none of that time was wasted. It is precisely those days spent enjoying the people and world around you that gives you the strength to reject Nyx. Death may be inevitable, our time may be short, but it is worth living anyway.
This is what makes Persona 3 so special. Rare is the game so wholly—and so successfully—crafted with its themes in mind. Rarer still is the game that can deliver upon those themes through gameplay. To then create even deeper meaning in the interaction between the two? Few games can hope to rival what Persona 3 was able to accomplish all the way back in 2006. So much of the game has been iterated upon in the 18 years since Persona 3 first released, with Persona 4 and 5 improving in so many key ways that continue to push the genre to new heights, but for my money, nothing hits quite the same way as Persona 3. It’s singular, it’s timeless, and it’s certainly worth playing.