Shin Megami Tensei: Persona is a spin-off from the Shin Megami Tensei games and is the first in the Persona series. However, this isn’t anything like Persona 3, 4 or 5, but more typical of the Shin Megami Tensei JRPG series in gameplay and structure. Originally for the PlayStation, it was ported to the PSP with some new cutscenes and a reworked English localisation. The game was originally a PS1 game, and it shows. It takes on an isometric view that makes the control a bit more awkward, whether you’re using the d-pad or the analogue stick. The city map is annoying as you’re moving a cursor along the streets, and it feels slippery and inaccurate. A menu based system would have worked much better here given that the traversal does not feel good at all. The dungeon crawling also takes place in first person but looks so aged and with an extremely high random encounter rate, it can grate on your nerves too.
The game lacks a tutorial or any kind, nor does it mention any of the game’s mechanics. You’ll need to rely on the instruction manual or online guides if you want to make sense of the various complex systems. The combat system is confusing and filled with too much stuff. Characters can attack but they can use either a melee attack or a gun for a ranged attack. They can use skills, which is basically magic and the skills that they have access to are dictated by their currently equipped persona. Lastly, characters can guard if you need to skip a turn. Given that battles are on a grid-based system and your attacks can only hit certain squares, you may need to do that, and this adds to the annoyance factor as it depends on the enemy’s placements on whether you can hit them or not.
Then there is the negotiation aspect where you contact the demons before using trial and error to see if you can spell card from them. Why? Because these cards are what you require to create new personas. New personas can be more powerful than the one you have already equipped, learning new and different types of skills, with different weaknesses and strengths. It’s in your interest to fuse new and more powerful personas. Unfortunately, complicating matters are that characters have two different levels. The character’s level determines their stats, and then a persona level which dictates the highest level persona that they are able to equip. The persona level is independent of the equipped persona’s strength. Each persona has a rank, and the more you use the persona in battle, the higher it will rise in rank and power. This means it can be annoying to grind (and you will need to grind).
Characters also level up at different rates as the experience points are distributed based on the character’s actions during battle. This means you will have uneven leveling and is quite a pain to manage given that certain characters will fall behind, rapidly. And then the more a character falls behind, the less likely they will do enough in battle to get a bigger chunk of the experience points, and so they become further behind, it’s a vicious cycle. While there is a high encounter rate, even if you fight every single encounter you come across, plus more, you’ll still need to excessively grind in order to keep up with the levels. Battles themselves don’t lend well to grinding as there are plenty of enemy combinations where they will spam party wide status effects. This means that more likely than not, you’ll have several characters with some sort of status effect, giving you a severe disadvantage. This can feel unfair and cheap. The same goes for the enemies that sacrifice themselves to drop all your characters’ HP to 1, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
The game really likes to beat you down. Just when you may get a bit more comfortable and confident, you are smashed with unfair enemy groupings that will continue to spam those annoying party wide status effects with party wide devastating damaging moves. You’ll end up losing control of your party, watching them helplessly be pummelled into a game over that feels completely unfair and down to sheer luck. It’s not difficulty, it’s straight up cheap and trash. Losing progress is the worst part thanks to the save point system. And of course, the escape option fails often (a horrendous trend in JRPGs, you only try to escape if you can’t beat the enemy, so losing turns when you attempt to do so is horribly frustrating). What makes even even more annoying and difficult, and this is a staple of the Shin Megami Tensei series, are the absurd resistances and immunity that enemies have. Some might have completely immunity against physical or magical attacks, others might repel it. And when different groupings come that each require a very different strategy, that’s when you’re in trouble and it becomes a massive pain to go through in every single dungeon.
Suffering through the demon contact menu trial and error to get enough cards to fuse new personas, equipping them, and then ranking them up, is tedious and repetitive. It’s annoying that when you get a persona to a certain rank, unlocking their abilities, you then must start again with the next stronger one. It feels like you lose a lot of your progress as you cannot use abilities during battle apart from the currently equipped persona. This makes changing the style of your party and tailoring their strengths and weaknesses against bosses waste a lot of time. The cheapness continues all the way to the end where an endgame dungeon gives you the same powerful enemies, while outnumbering you and walloping you with their strong party wide attacks… but only two party members to use. The designers went out of their way to make it frustratingly annoying, hoping to wipe your progress or waste as much of the player’s time as possible, which is just horrendous gameplay design. If you want to grind for some levels (because you will need to to beat the game), it’s a long tedious affair and just all around not fun at all.
Rounding it all out is the story, which had some potential, but it is boring and not told in an engaging way. While the protagonist is visiting a friend in the hospital, they are attacked by demons, which has also infiltrated the town. They didn’t intend to at first, but they end up setting out to find out the cause of this, gaining access to the power of persona. There are some interesting concepts like the different worlds, and the actual cause of the phenomenon but because the story elements are after the poor, tedious and long dungeon crawling, the game is disjointed and poorly paced. It takes around 30 to 40 hours to complete the main story quest, depending on how much you grind and how lost you get. The ending is fine, nothing great or special, just like the rest of the story. Perhaps most impressively is that the game contains two separate storylines, with the second one more geared towards experienced players. The second one more heavily leans towards the dungeon crawling aspect, and is filled with even more tough encounters, tough bosses, and other types of restrictions, so it can be incredibly hard if you don’t know what you’re doing. Unfortunately, there is no New Game Plus, nor can you carry over anything, so if you want to play the other story, you will need to start from scratch.
Overall, Shin Megami Tensei: Persona can be fun, but it can be incredibly cheap, unfair and frustrating. It’s not even rewarding to get past the tougher sections because it can be so reliant on luck during random encounters. Grinding for levels is tedious and you are forced to go out of your way to do it because even fighting every opponent with the high encounter rate is not enough. It relies quite heavily on trial-and-error gameplay, even against normal enemies, each encounter having the potential to destroy you. The dungeon crawling is not a great experience since every dungeon basically looks and feels the same. The game has not aged well in this aspect, losing potentially up to an hour of progress, if not more, due to a cheap shot is not fun and makes you want to put down the game with the time it wastes you.
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