- System: Playstation 2
- Year: 2008
- Region: North America
- Developer: Atlus
- Publisher: Atlus
My previous review was for the amazing main quest of Persona 3: FES, called The Journey. Now let’s look at the second part, and one that really brought out my rage, the 30 hour bonus quest, The Answer. Now, if you’ve never played through any version of Persona 3, you may want to stop reading right now since there will be some unavoidable spoilers. With that out of the way, let’s take a look at The Answer…or the ans-wer. Seriously, what meathead decided to put a friggin’ silent ‘W’ in that word. The English language is really fucking dumb sometimes. Anyways, let’s take a look at The Answer.
Now before we get started, we need to discuss the Playstation 2. This console has one of the greatest library of games in my opinion, especially if you’re a fan of RPGs, but the system itself is a defective piece of fucking shit. It may not be as bad as something like the XBox 360’s early models, it will work for a few years, but you will eventually have to buy a new one. My slim PS2 seems to have a problem registering that the door is closed, so I have to dick around with it for 10 minutes to get it to work. Sometimes I have to open and close the lid, sometimes I have to take the disc out and move the laser, sometimes I have to reset the system, and sometimes I have to rest a few game cases on top. It’s different every fucking time. So, as you can imagine I’m already stressed out before I start playing the game. With the Journey I quickly calm down because it’s such a great game, but with The Answer, I get even more pissed once I start playing.
For starters, there is no difficulty setting for this campaign, the only setting is cheap as fuck. Shadows are smarter than they were in The Journey, they dodge quite often, and will summon other monsters. I’m okay with stronger and smarter monsters, but what I’m not okay with is battles relying so heavily on luck. The enemies dodge A LOT, and many seem to have skills that allow them to dodge their elemental weakness. You will waste so much SP in this game just trying to hit the damn enemies. On top of that, you can be doing everything right, only to get killed by one or two unlucky critical attacks. And this is just in normal encounters, boss battles take this cheapness to an entirely new level.
Be prepared for a lot of grinding. Most of this bonus mode is spent grinding. You spend an hour or two grinding to be able to fight the next boss, only to realize that you are not strong enough to fight them yet, and need to spend another 2 hours grinding. Sure, there was the occasional bit of grinding you had to do in the main story, but there were other things to do to break up the monotony of it. In The Answer you will spend hours grinding just so you can view a 5 minute flashback. Can ya guess what you have to do after that? More! Fucking! Grinding!
Sometimes the Shadows will lull you into a false sense of security. You’ll be clearing out groups of enemies with ease, and will be sure that you’re strong enough to take on the next boss, only to have that boss laugh at you and annihilate your team within a few turns. I even had one boss fight that ended during the first turn because the Shadows got lucky with 2 critical attacks in a row. Oh yeah, don’t even bother trying to fight the Red Shadows, because they will send your party to their fucking graves!
Another problem that goes with the excessive grinding is healing your party. In the main game you would travel through Tartarus until you reach the boss floor. You then had the option of using the teleporter to heal and save, and then could use the teleporter in the Entrance to go right back to where you were and then fight the boss. In The Answer, you will reach a save point in a dungeon along with an Access Point. While it’s great having the save points inside the dungeons this time, the Access Points are one way and only warp you back to the Entrance. Which means if you want to completely heal up before tackling the boss, you are going to have to tell your party to split up and search every floor until you get back to where you were. Or you could decide to not teleport out, but this presents the problem of not being able to restore your precious SP. Finding items to refill your SP is quite rare in The Answer. I think I only found 2 or 3 within the first 3 dungeons. It does get a little more manageable when you find Mage’s Marks, which will regen a few SP per turn, but it’s still a huge problem.
People often criticize Final Fantasy 4: The After Years for being lazy and recycling dungeons and towns from Final Fantasy 4, but at least they updated the damn menus. In the answer, they literally just transferred the exact same menu over, and then grayed out things that aren’t usable. So throughout the entire game, you have to stare at a Social Link option that never becomes available, along with quests and the dictionary. What’s bizarre about this is that they did go through the trouble of removing an option in the weapon fusion store, so why couldn’t they do the same for the menu?
Another thing that is kind of lazy is the item store lists the same items as new throughout the entire game. They also left the bit in the status screen that says what kind of condition you’re in, which always says good since there’s no fatigue in this bonus campaign. They went to the trouble of giving everyone new victory poses, but couldn’t be bothered to tweak the menu. It may be a small thing to many of you out there, but to me it screams laziness.
Another annoyance is that you don’t have access to the Persona Compendium, even though Igor goes to the trouble of telling you that you have 170 possible Personas dwelling inside you. Why wasn’t this included in the game? If you’re a completionist that needs to get all the Personas, you better hop on Gamefaqs and print off a list so you can check them off as you go.
It’s not all bad though, you do get several new pieces of music from Shoji Meguro, which once again are outstanding. I really liked the new dungeon tracks and actually enjoyed it much more than the Tartarus music.
Oh yeah, I got distracted by just how fucking terrible the rest of the game is and completely forgot to mention the plot. The story begins about a month after the graduation ceremony in Persona 3, where the silent protagonist suddenly passes away. The group is spending their last evening together in the dorm before it gets closed down. They feel something strange when the clock strikes midnight though, and notice that the reporter on the news says that today’s date is March 31st. They find this odd because yesterday was actually March 31st. The party blows it off as a mistake by the newscaster and decide to turn in for the evening.
Everyone is suddenly awakened when there is a loud noise in the lounge. They find an entity there that claims to be Aigis’s sister, who views the other party members as a threat. Aigis defends everyone and during her battle with the being, she awakens to the power of the wild card, the same power the silent protagonist of The Journey had.
After the fight, Aigis’s sister, Metis, tells them of the Abyss Of Time that has been expanding underneath the dorm, which is causing the time anomaly. It also prevents the party from leaving the dorm, so once again, they will need to use their Personas and find the cause of this strange occurrence.
The story in The Answer is decent, but definitely not worth the trouble you have to go through to see any of it. Most of what you will see during the adventure are short 5 minute flashbacks, not a great payoff after doing hours upon hours of grinding through battles that rely almost entirely on luck. The meat of the story happens at the end, but most people will probably get frustrated and shut the game off long before then. That might have been okay if there were Social Links to take part in, but those are not available here. It does make sense from a storyline standpoint, but I really feel that finding a way to add meaningful interactions in between story and combat could have made things much more enjoyable.
Overall Persona 3: FES is amazing journey with great story, wonderful character development, top notch voice acting, great music and combat. While I did not enjoy The Answer bonus content, The Journey is a must play. Unfortunately, there is no definitive version of Persona 3. Neither one of the PS2 versions lets you directly control your party members during combat. The PSP version gives you total control over your characters during battles, adds a playable female main character, but is missing The Answer bonus content and is also missing the 3D exploration in towns. If you’d like to buy this on the PS2, it is really cheap. I scored mine for 15 dollars, brand new. The PSP version, on the other hand has shot up in price recently, with complete copies selling for over 50 bucks. Which version is right for you is something you will have to decide on your own. While I wouldn’t recommend buying FES just for The Answer, it is definitely worth a purchase if you want to play the main game.
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