Internal Conflict: Does Persona 3 Hate Itself

(Warning: I wrote this at like 1 in the morning and wasn't really thinking clearly. It's just me barfing a bunch about my thoughts on Persona 3. It might not be very coherent or even correct, it's just mind vomit. There's probably some interesting stuff in here, but I apologize if you have to dig for it)

So I've been playing the everloving crap out of Persona 3 Portable on my new PSP system, getting sucked into its "one more day" addiction and perpetual obsession with increasing stats that will in turn increase that other stat which will allow for better stats to be made and raised in this chain cycle of addiction. It's a known fact I really love both this game and Persona 4, which is essentially the same game except Scooby Do and with better voice acting. It's weird replaying a 100 hour game again, knowing full well what I'm getting into, but luckily the female protag in P3P adds enough freshness (and it's been about a year and a half since I first beat P3FES) that the story still seems very new.

However, I noticed a few things replaying the game. Things that are...strange. Really strange. And as I thought further on the gameplay mechanics and systems in play inside Persona 3, I realized something. Like it's suicidal prone, head-shooting teen protagonists, Persona 3 might actually hate itself.

Let's go over quick basics of how the two most recent Persona games work just as a refresher. The game is a pretty standard turn-based JRPG at it's core, with an emphasis on elemental weaknesses. You get XP the normal way, which levels your Personas (a batch of spell-casting pokemon you can make). You have a bunch of Personas to level (meaning XP management is a thing you have to do), while your team is simpler and they just straight up level (you also level in addition to your Persona, which is weird considering your teammates are all-in-one, but I'm digressing).

The point of the game in a basic mechanical sense is to get the biggest and baddest Personas, level them up so they learn moves that can apply to enemy weaknesses (as you cannot beat this game without exploiting enemy weaknesses) and then mix them to make bigger and better ones, take them and level them, etc. In a traditional JRPG sense, the numbers go up but the spells don't really change. You have a single use fire and a multi-enemy fire, and then you get a higher damaging one that takes more SP (but your SP pool has grown, so the percentages are still all the same). That's the combat portion of the game.

Taken at its core, the battle RPG mechanics are, frankly, drivel. Yeah, it's all the rising numbers game nicely dressed up in some awesome art direction and head-shooting goodness, but it's still the rising numbers game at its absolute core. While I appreciate the elemental requirement that makes it so you have to have a balanced "team" of personas (much like Pokemon), that doesn't stop battles from quickly becoming repetitive and tedious. Replaying the game only solidified this fact: the level grinding is painful.

I will make note that the game is designed so that you shouldn't have to level. With the right elements, you should be able to get pretty far without having to grind (though grinding makes things easier). However, there are things obviously gated by lack of leveling. SP levels stay low (and are required to fully use the elemental weaknesses system) if you don't level a bit. Party members (which you thankfully can control in P3P) also need to level to learn moves to be able to deal with new threats. I only bring this up because I know people will get on my case for what I'm about to say because "Persona isn't a game about grinding," but let's be honest here: the system is in place to encourage it. Moreso in 4 and P3P then FES (as FES very clearly said "YOU ARE TIRED NOW STOP LEVEL GRINDING AND DO SOMETHING ELSE," which was clever, but P3P and 4 don't do that and just let you grind forever until you run out of SP or money to buy SP), but still...they wouldn't give all those billions of Persona's XP bars if you weren't going to fill them.

Then we get to the other part of the game: the dating sim. OR social sim. Or time management sim. Or whatever.

In both 4 and 3 you have a boatload of "stats" traits you have to raise (Strength, Charm, Academics in 3) that are basically just gatekeepers to Social Links, so I don't think I need to talk about them. They're annoying (basically they exist to fill time and require you to pace your social links, which the Social Links do normally with their "points" requirement to level, but this is just another buffer I guess?) but they fill time and give another bar to raise and actually do change bits of the game a little, which is cool.

What I want to talk about is Social Links, and why I think they both compliment and are at odds with the battle system, depending on your point of view. Raising Social Links has nice little visual novel stories attached (which is, honestly, my favorite part of the game), but from the battle side they provide a benefit as well. For each Arcana they let you fuse better pokemon monsters (allowing for a higher damage fire spell to use with your new SP max) but also do something important: give you free XP. The higher your level in an Arcana social link, the more "bonus XP" you get when fusing a Persona. This amount is usually monsterously huge (I believe you gain the # of levels on the Persona equal to the # of levels in your social link, but I might be wrong. Point being: fuse a Lv 88 persona, get a free jump to like 95, which would be roughtly twenty quadzillion XP normally).

...which is weird, because I thought this game was about the battles. Basically, Persona 3 has this system that's like "Hey! Spend time social linking, then we'll toss ya some XP so you don't have to go level grind these guys anymore!" But isn't the point of JRPGs like this the battle crawl to slowly gain XP to get better numbers? Why is this system bypassing it?

At first I thought it was because the game hated itself and was putting its two systems at odds. The social link is basically straight up saying that leveling sucks, so if you do some visual novel bits we'll throw free levels your way so you won't hav eto worry about it (though you still do, as you yourself and your party won't level). It isn't like a JRPG to admit its grinding is the worst thing ever.

But the more I thought about it the more I realized that maybe it's actually genius. Maybe it knows grinding sucks. Maybe it knows all the battles are (frankly) tedious and not particularly interesting, and it knows you'll have higher social links near the end of the game (hence more XP) when you are getting super bored of all that crap. So it's basically saying "congrats! You read a lot of text and were good at managing time. Here's some super-powerful guys, now just cruse through this dungeon." Which is very nice of it, because I got bored of leveling in Tarterus after the second block.

But then again, does that really make sense. I mean, it's basically giving you an "ignore this portion of the game" card (or at least it's telling us that's what it wants us to do. On the harder difficulties, you are going to have to grind regardless), but then doesn't that kind of kill the point of the rest of it? The mandatory stats raising and social links are just a different sort of level grinding. I'm pushing up social links so I don't ahve to grind battles in tarterous (and on that level, grinding my character stats so I can unlock more social links to do so I can do those social links to to get better monsters so I can avoid the level grind in the battles). So this whole thing still seems structured around keeping you out of battles as much as possible and just spreading the grinding out over two systems.

I don't know where I'm going with this, I'm just overthinking it. Grinding in these game is so tedious. Boss battles are the funnest part because they are actually challenging (normal battles can be too, but after discovering an enemy weakness it turns more into "spam the weakness" for every battle, so the focus changes again to figuring out how to get everybody down while winning the war on attrition against my SP bar) and you can give them your all without the attrition thing for the dungeons, but you spend the bulnk of your time in these games wandering the dungons slapping up shadows. Why is the game designed around trying to get rid of that? Because it knows it's super tedious?

If they knew, why didn't they make it better then? The rest of the game seems clever in how everything is integrated, from the fusing system to the social link leveling and all that, it's just the battles that come off as the super lame duck of this whole equation. I honestly enjoy doing social links and screwing around fusing personas the most out of everything in this whole game. The time management is stressful but in an entertaining way, and the regular battles bore me. Again, it really feels like they built this whole awesome system to get you great personas, and then actually using them is a drag (and the game knows it, so it makes them fat an dpowerful).

Anyway, this is just me thought barfing. I could see why people could quickly hate this game for that one half of it (the battles) while still loving it for the other half (the social links). I personally don't know what side I'm siding on, but after playing through FES, then 4, and now replaying P3P, I can say for certain that Persona 5 better do something to make that battle system more dynamic. Kudos to them for making a turn-based system that's actually relatively fun to execute for the first few times, but enough is enough. Spice the game up. The systems in place all focus down onto these battles. Make them better, not a war of SP attrition as I spam stuff hoping to find a weakness and do an All Out Attack. I spent ten hours in the fusing room, make my reward feel more significant.

That's all I can think of because I'm tired and my brain hurts. I was going to put graphics in this so it isn't a huge wall of text, but it's going to have to be after the fact as I literally can't think at the moment. Hopefully you enjoyed this little rant (and I still love these games, fyi. I just think they could do a few things better) and I promise I'll actually put a review up sometime.