Persona Review
Persona for the PSP is the re-release and port of the original Persona game. This is the real version, not the PS1 edited for the US version of the game. You will be traversing a town trying to get to the bottom of a mysterious phenomenon that is happening. You'll also get sucked into an alternate dimension. The best part though is that something happens to you and your friends and you all now have the ability to summon Persona to help combat the monsters, zombies, and more that will step in your way while you try to find who is behind all that is happening.
Graphically this game doesn't really have any pop, but its very clean, and the iso-metric view definitely gives the player something different than most games. The character models all have their unique looks, but there are a lot of students that have a very generic look to them. Yes, I know this is a PSP game so there's not a lot of memory to play with. The different stages look good to. It was an interesting move to have a dungeon crawler feel when traversing the halls. You could tell that the textures weren't the highest quality, but it was sufficient.
The music in the game definitely shows where the music from other Persona games came from. It fits, and its enjoyable. The voice lines that are said in combat can get a bit old, but I really don't know of a game that has unique things to say every random encounter.
The controls in this game are very straight forward. The only issue I ever had with them was the fact that I could never quite get comfortable with the iso-metric move and remembering which direction would move my character where I wanted him to move.
Overall this game is exactly as billed the original Persona, the way it was meant to be seen. The story does have its slow spots, and sometimes during those slow spots the random encounters start really wearing on the player, but if you're willing to stick it out, you're going to be playing a solid game. I did like the fact that if I convinced a demon to join my part, or if I got them to give me something that combat was over. Come to think of it I really enjoyed trying to find the correct character to interact with an enemy type to see if I could confuse them, make them happy, thoroughly piss them off, or convince them to join me. If you are looking for a good solid, slightly strange, RPG for the PSP, you should pick this up and give it a spin. This game gets an 8.2 out of 10.
