Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 FES is an updated rerelease of the original Persona 3, exclusive to the PlayStation 2. Not only does FES added to the original's story with more story events, now known as The Journey, it presents an epilogue to the game's ending, called The Answer.
The Journey
Unlike previous entries in the Persona series, Persona 3 FES made a pretty significant revamp to the game. While still set in high school, it incorporated sim elements into the gameplay. The mostly silent protagonist, whom you can name, attends high school. The game takes place over the course of a year, where you will be studying and taking exams, creating friendships and of course, fighting to save the world. You play through each day and you will have free time on most of the days. This is where you complete what the game calls "Social Links". Social Links are where you create bonds with NPCs and learn their backstories, getting to know them better and trust them. Their stories are actually quite interesting and are one of the highlights of the game. By the end of it, you truly do feel that you have created a close bond and their circumstances will genuinely sadden or hearten you. It gets to the point where you feel guilty that you brush them off after they asked you if you wanted to spend time with them, in order to focus on other Social Links... Social Links can be levelled up which ties into the Persona system as it gives them extra experience.
As Social Links take time, and you have limited time in the game, if you wish to max out all Social Links, you will definitely require a walkthrough or thorough planning through multiple playthroughs. The other portion is of course the dungeon crawling. The main dungeon is called Tartarus, where every floor is randomly generated every time you enter it. It can be boring since it all looks the same. Even though there are different "blocks" where the theme is different, the layout is too generic which gets boring fairly quickly. There are 264 floors to conquer and since it generates a different layout each time, you can't even map out each floor for future reference. The enemies, called Shadows, roam the battlefield but will chase you if you get within their field of vision. Striking from behind gives you the advantage of having one turn first, while them striking you first has the opposite effect. If you are at a significantly high level than them, they will ran away which is great if you just wanted to grab some treasures.
Persona 3 FES utilizes a turn-based battle system but has a few annoying "features". You can only control the main character and AI will control the other three. This means that there will often be times where they spam HP or SP intensive attacks on weak enemies or using an item when you would rather them cast a spell. You have little influence via setting Tactics which boils down to either dedicating them to healing/support only, specifying one target or not do anything at all. Furthermore, if the main character dies, it is game over which is frustrating when you're grinding for levels and you lose hours of progress (since you cannot save unless you return to the first floor, but you can only go back to specific floors and then have to climb up again). It is worse when you encounter enemies that spam instant death attacks, it feels cheap if your character just got hit with one that connected and you see the game over screen.
If you attack an enemy (or are attacked) by something that they're weak against, you gain one extra turn and they are knocked over. If you knock all enemies over you can initiate an All Out Attack which has all the characters rushing in to attack at once, and quite cool to watch. There is a "rush" option where it sets all characters to automatically use their normal attack. Fairly useless in most situations since even during grinding, you would want to pay attention to health and spells. Characters and enemies can miss with their attacks, and you WILL miss often. This has a chance of causing them to fall over, losing a turn, too bad it mainly happens to your characters and not the enemy. While characters can attack with their weapons, they utilize a power called a Persona. These are summoned beings who can attack using special moves and spells. The protagonist is unique in that he can use any Persona and you gain Personas randomly during battles or more reliably, fusing two or more together. You can buy back any Persona you used in fusion which is helpful.
Unfortunately, there is a fatigue system where characters will get Tired after fighting a certain number of battles. When a character is Tired (or heaven forbid, "Sick"), they become weaker and more susceptible to status effects and attacks. Characters who get these statuses will automatically become unplayable for the rest of that session when you return to the first floor of Tartarus (to save, for example). This limits exploration and is easily one of the more annoying aspects of the game early on. Thankfully, it becomes a no-issue when everyone is levelled up, as the higher the level a character is, the more battles they're able to participate before getting Tired. Plus, when you get the full roster of playable characters, you can swap them at will and continue on your quest to reach the top of Tartarus easily. The difficulty, even on Normal, if you are not expecting it, can be punishing and tough. You cannot change the difficulty after you have selected it at the beginning of the game. Experience points are capped so the game kind of forces you to be at a preferred level it thinks that is appropriate to challenge the boss.
Bosses get progressively harder. Buffs and debuffs become a lot more important than most JRPGs. Bosses will spam instant death attacks, high level multi-target magic, high resistances and immunities. It requires high amount of preparation and a few bosses definitely feels cheap. The camera can only be rotated in certain environments and dungeons, and is fixed for a lot of the time. The game is generally really addictive with its mix of high school simulation events and dungeon crawling. Once you're around 5 hours in, and can form a full part of four, that's where the fun starts. In terms of the main plot, it is on the darker and more serious side. It uses anime cutscenes and text dialogue using character portraits for its storytelling. The unnamed protagonist is transferred to a new school and discovers that he has the power to summon Personas, in order to fight Shadows. Shadows appear in the hidden 25th hour after midnight, called the Dark Hour. The protagonist will join forces with other high school students who are also Persona users to destroy Shadows and explore Tartarus, which seems to be the source of the Shadows. Of course, their aim is to eventuallyd destroy all Shadows, find the secret of Tartarus and remove the Dark Hours, thereby saving the world. This is because people can get killed or become brain-dead during Dark Hour.
There is an interesting twist two-thirds into the game. However, there are plenty of moments where characters become annoying and unlikeable. The story ends up feeling underdeveloped though. The social links portion was meaty but the main plot involving Tartarus, Personas, Shadows and the villains didn't really meaningfully move forward too much. However, the relationships between the team members are great and there are some emotional scenes towards the end of the game, perfectly accompanied by the evolving soundtrack. If you're following a walkthrough, The Journey takes around 50 hours to finish depending on how much you grind and the difficulty you are playing on. Playing it blind and on Hard will definitely cause you to take much longer, upwards to more like 80 hours. Overall, The Journey is fun and merges two distinct elements into one coherent package that hasn't been seen before in a JRPG. While the story is solid, reflecting back on it, it doesn't cover that many events. The dungeon crawling aspect is hit and miss since the repetitive layouts of the dungeon is disappointing, while the combat system can be frustrating due to the AI deciding to do stupid things. It's still a fantastic game though and a lot of fun.
The Answer
The Answer is a new addition in FES and is an epilogue to the main game. It takes place one month after the ending, starting off with a surprising revelation (which kind of ruined the ending, feeling contrived). The team is in the dorms planning to move out when they end up encountering a time loop. Metis appears and they discover the Abyss of Time, a dungeon similar to Tartarus which has appeared beneath the dorm. Metis is an anti-Shadow weapon, similar to Aigis, and she is a new playable character. The team must fight through the Abyss of Time in order to break the time loop and in the process, learn the truth about Nyx and the fight against the protagonist such that they can put it all behind them and move forward. You get to learn in more detail the characters' pasts which is probably the best part about this new addition (along with the fairly epic ending). The Answer removes all the social interaction of the main game and instead is basically just dungeon crawling and combat. There's no more attending school, no more Social Links and no more events to increase your character's charm etc. This isn't inherently bad but considering you have just spent 50-80 hours on the game, doing another 30 hours of just solid grinding can be too much.
The general flow of the game is that you push through the dungeon, fight the boss, have a short story event and then rinse and repeat. It is mind-numbingly boring, especially since the plot isn't that engaging in the first place. You control Aigis as the main character this time around since the plot centres around her. The combat system remains the same as the main game, with AI controlling the other three party members. The Abyss of Time is just another word for Tartarus since it features the same randomly generated dungeons, the same drab backgrounds and boring layouts, and the same Shadows as enemies who are either reskinned or recolours of existing enemies. Upon starting The Answer, you're treated with the message that is harder than the main game and to please enjoy the difficulty. Basically, this means that you cannot pick the difficulty and is forced to play on "Expert". Have fun being forced to grind in order to level up to summon the appropriate Personas to face the bosses.
The other thing is that there is only a save point before bosses. If you want to go fuse some more Personas or change your team members, you have to trek through all the previous floors again to get to that point, wasting heaps of time. Bosses are cheap, doubly so now that a lot of them have skills to dodge their own weaknesses. There's nothing more annoying than an even higher chance of characters' attacks missing. Fusing Personas is really important but what is annoying here is that you don't get access to the Compendium anymore. Once you fuse a Persona, the two that you used disappear and the only way to get them back is randomly by winning battles. Impressive though is that all the new scenes are voiced, with some new character models and portraits. Overall, due to the repetitive gameplay with no other events to break things up like the main game, and a story that doesn't provide that many answers, The Answer could have easily been compressed into a 5-10 hour epilogue. If you were a fan of the story, and a fan of the dungeon crawling aspect, then The Answer is worthwhile, otherwise, you might be better off just watching the cutscenes on YouTube.
Overall
Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 FES is no doubt the complete package for Persona 3 and is the definitive version of the game (barring the improvements to the mechanics and the female perspective from Persona 3 Portable). It presents huge value since playing through both The Journey and The Answer will give you 80 to 100+ hours of content (although a lot of that is repetitive combat). Persona 3 FES is recommended for any JRPG fan.
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