After 108-plus hours played, I’ve completed Persona 3 FES. What an extraordinarily annoying final battle that was. It took me three tries to beat the Ultimate Bad Guy in what were protracted struggles that epitomised everything that’s awful about boss battles. Gaming as a whole will be much improved when designers finally manage to distinguish between challenge and tedium, and recognise gamers should be presented with one and spared the other.

What followed afterwards was equally extraordinary but more welcome by several orders of magnitude. There were several powerful and affecting moments in P3F’s finale that would leave only the most stonehearted of gamers unmoved, with plenty to reflect upon after the console has been shut down.

The Journey has come to an end, but The Answer remains undiscovered.

(Original image source: Persona 3 FES intro.)

The player character in Persona 3 FES is a mystery even to the player. An orphaned teenager with powers far beyond his SEES teammates, he may well be the single most powerful entity in the game.
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One of the things I like about RPGs is that they tend to be long. There’s no five-hour RPG and a 10-hour RPG would be a notable aberration. A 20-hour romp would seem to be the norm these days and a game that takes double that time from start to finish would not be uncommon. The genre usually offers a lot of game for your buck.

In writing terms, that allows plenty of time to develop story and characters, to give both body and nuance. In gameplay terms, there’s enough time to accommodate complex game systems. Skill development can be deep and combat systems can be sophisticated since players have plenty of time to explore and experiment.

RPGs can, of course, wear out their welcome. Final Fantasy XII was a game too long for its own good. I gather the game can be completed in 40 hours and I’m assuming that was accomplished by a gamer experienced with the mechanics and not averse to referring to FAQs and forum posts for help when stumped. I took 100 hours to finish FF12 — that’s excluding the hours of failed attempts — and I was ready for the game to be over at the 50-hour mark.

It was particularly frustrating because Square Enix never made good use of my invested time. The story elements were barely developed and the characters never fully realised. The game was just dragging on. Once the “I beat the game!” buzz wore off, I looked back on the experience with little fondness. I expect I might pop in the DVD-ROM again at some point in the future to complete the optional content I bypassed but there’s absolutely no way I would want to replay the game from beginning to end.
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(Image source: Atlus.)

In Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 FES , the player’s avatar is an orphaned teenager who’s just been transferred to Gekkoukan High School. Capable of unleashing a Persona with extraordinary abilities, the player character is invited to join the Specialized Extracurricular Execution Squad (SEES), a secret organisation dedicated to vanquishing the Shadows and solving the mystery of Tartarus, a tower that appears during the equally mysterious Dark Hour.

As the game is from a developer from Japan, a rapidly aging, youth-fixated country, the members of SEES are naturally high school students. The sole exception is the SEES advisor, whose role is to crack awful jokes and provide exposition. As a general rule of thumb, adults in P3F are hopeless, helpless, ineffective or unreliable.

There are two types of character advancement in P3F. The player character gains HP and SP as he gains levels by battling Shadows but abilities are gained by improving the Tarot-inspired Personae.

Personae may be improved in two ways. The conventional method involves simply levelling up the Persona by gaining experience in battles. This is slow and the player is explicitly told this is not the best way to go.
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