Backlog Burnout Review of Shin Megami Tensei Persona 3 FES: Face Yourself

System(s): PS2, PSP
Release Year(s): 2007, 2008, 2010
Rating: Mature
Current Amazon Price: $98.70 (PS2 original), $15.16 (PS2 FES), $34.99 (PSP)

The Skinny:

A shining testament to the powerhouse that is the bizarre Shin Megami Tensei JRPG series from Atlus, Persona 3: FES is a lengthy, meaty, dark experience that is chock full of fun, personality, story, and enjoyment. This is a game with a unique idea pouring out of every orifice and its all wrapped up in a super stylized world that needs to be experienced.

The Meat:

Final Fantasy meets The Sims meets Silent Hill meets Pokemon. This is how I would describe Persona 3 to someone who is not familiar with it. If that sounds really bizarre to you that's because it is. It should also sound extremely fun and intriguing which would also be a correct assessment. Persona 3 is one of the most eclectic, strange, and stylish games ever made. Its mash up of genres and ideas should leave it a jumbled mess but instead it comes together to form an exquisite gaming experience that really needs to be played to be understood and appreciated.

Persona 3: FES is an updated version of the original Persona 3. There are several gameplay enhancements, as well as new story content. The entirety of the original Persona 3 is contained in a mode called The Journey, while the new 20ish hour mode called The Answer continues where The Journey left off. The basic story is that you take on the role of a new exchange student who has just arrived in the fictional Iwatodai/Port Island station of Japan to attend Gekkoukan High School. Everything seems normal when you get off the train and begin walking to your dorm, however soon everything takes on a green sheen, pools of blood appear on the ground, and all the people around you transform into coffins. Hurrying into your dorm you are met by a creepy little boy who asks you to sign a contract before disappearing into thin air. Then several other students come down the stairs with guns and begin questioning you. From this strange beginning your character embarks on an adventure that unlocks his ability to use personas, or physical manifestations of his personality. He uses these to battle monsters in the mysterious time known as The Dark Hour, an hour of lost time that exists between 12 and 12:01 AM that is only experienced by those who have unlocked their personas. i won't say any more, as the story of Persona 3: FES is excellent and one of the games many strong aspects.

From a gameplay perspective Persona 3:FES has two distinct styles that it switches between. The first of these is the exploration, persona collection, and combat that takes place around town and in the mysterious tower Tartarus that appears during the dark hour. You explore the tower floor by floor, constantly questing upwards. The tower is populated by Shadows, which are many armed black blobs wandering the floors. If they spot you they will aggressively and quickly charge at you. If you can manage to hit them with your weapon before they reach you then a turn based battle will begin on even footing. However, if they catch you by surprise or you miss then every enemy in the fight will get an extra turn to act before your party. This can be devastating and easily instantly wipe your team because the enemy AI is smart, brutal, and takes no prisoners. On the flip side if you can sneak up on a Shadow without being seen you get the same advantage. Once in battle your character can switch between the personas you have collected or created. Each different persona has different abilities, weaknesses, and stats, much like Pokemon. Magical abilities cost SP whereas powerful physical abilities cost your own HP to cast. This creates an interesting risk/reward system where to damage your opponent you must damage yourself. There are three different kinds of physical attacks (slash, pierce, and strike) as well as a full elemental system. Learning enemies weaknesses and keeping track of your own is key. If you hit an enemy's weakness it will be knocked to the ground and you will be granted another turn. Knocking down all enemies will give your party access to an all out attack where they jump on the downed party in a comic book style dust cloud of dirt and smacking sounds, dealing massive AOE damage. Care must be taken however because the enemy enjoys the same benefits as you. Get hit by an element you're weak to and you lose a turn and the enemy gains another. After battle you gain experience as well as occasionally gaining access to shuffle time. This mini game consists of cards ranging from experience boosts to additional personas. The cards rapidly switch around and it's up to you to track the one you want.

Speaking of acquiring personas through shuffle time, in classic Shin Megami Tensei fashion this game contains a robust fusing system. You can take two personas and fuse them together into a new, more powerful one, providing your character is equal or higher to the resulting persona's level. Mastery of this system is key to beating the game, as your power is directly related to your personas. There is an inheritance system in play for abilities known by the base personas as well, so careful fusing can result in powerful, custom made fighters. As the game progresses your fusion options open up to fusing 3,4,5, and even 6 personas into one powerful new force. Collecting all the available personas in the game is a similar feeling one gets from collecting Pokemon. It's fun, functional, and experimentation with different personas can reveal some fun new strategies.

One thing that may turn some players off is the lack of direct control of your teammates. They are controlled by the AI and you can give them general instructions like focus on healing or focus on knocking down the enemy. Overall the AI does a very good job and makes fairly good decisions. I actually like this system because to me it feels like you're really playing as this one character, and your party members are your friends, acting on their own to help you instead of just being mindless meat puppets tied to your whims.

Aside from the slick and smooth combat that can be found during the dark hour, there is another side of the game. This one involves time management and building of relationships in the normal world. This is an extremely strange and wonderful addition to the game. Aside from being this demon fighting bad-ass by night, your character, along with his friends, attends school and lives a fairly normal life by day. Aside from your combat stats you have social stats as well. These are charm, courage, and academics. These are raised by doing things like studying, standing up to bullies, or helping your friends with homework. These determine things like who you can ask out on dates or what activities you can take part in. The relationships you form with people, be it through dating, hanging out after school, or taking part in music club determine the strength of your social links. Each relationship you have has a specific tie to one of the arcana of the tarot cards (i.e. the magician, death, the hanged man, etc). These act as the class system for your personas. The stronger your social link is with that particular arcana, the more bonus experience it will get when you fuse it. For example, lets say you start dating a girl and your relationship with her is associated with the strength arcana. When you fuse a strength persona it will gain one bonus level. Now lets say you've been dating her for months of in game time and your relationship is pretty serious. Now when you fuse a new strength persona it will gain 6 bonus levels. This system is great because it requires decisions to be made. Do I go hang out with my girlfriend to raise the strength social link or do I go to practice with the swim team to raise the chariot link? And what about the exams coming up? I could either go to Tartarus tonight to fight some shadows and increase my combat stats, or I could spend the night studying to increase my academics stat to do well on the exams. This interaction between your social world and the combat world is the meat of the game and it meshes unbelievably well. It creates choice, tension, risk, and reward perfectly, all while giving the events of the game real meat and gravitas, all while telling a plethora of extremely interesting, interconnected sub stories.

A few final notes about the nature of the game in general and the differences between versions. One thing that must be mentioned is that this game is hard. Like really hard. The enemies are powerful, dangerous, and smart. Oftentimes elaborate strategies need to be planned out to deal with certain bosses. I personally enjoy this sort of challenge but it may turn some gamers off. This is only emphasized in The Answer mode which is significantly more difficult than the main part of the game. The game is incredibly long as well (hence the long delay since my last review). My final game clock, after completing both The Journey and The Answer was 110 hours. If that length of game is intimidating to you then I would recommend you steer clear because once you start playing you won't want to stop.

 Furthermore, there is a PSP port of this game. The graphics of the game were significantly downgraded for this version, however there were several gameplay changes. The option to play the entire game as a female was added which is a nice change of perspective. The story is the same but new character interactions and social links can take place. Also, in the PSP version it is possible to directly control your party members. So if letting the AI do its thing doesn't appeal to you then the PSP version is the way to go. However, this version does not contain The Answer, and neither does the original PS2 version.

The Bottom Line:

Perfectly fusing a multitude of disparate styles and designs, Persona 3: FES is a beautiful, bizarre, dark, wonderful game that I highly recommend. If you've got the time and the desire this game will provide you with an experience unlike any other and one I bet you will enjoy thoroughly from beginning to end. Also the soundtrack is one of the best in the business. All around an extremely solid game, and one I think any fan of JRPGs should play.

Grant Nielsen

Backlog Burnout Review of Shadow of the Colossus: Joy and sorrow in a forbidden land

System(s): PS2, PS3
Release Year(s): 2005, 2011
Rating: Teen
Current Amazon Price: $59.90 (PS2), $19.39 (PS3)

The Skinny:

Holding a very secure spot in my top 3 games of all time, Shadow of the Colossus is a beautiful, fun, challenging game that succeeds at everything it attempts to do. An interactive work of art, this game is an absolute triumph that provides exciting action, perfect art direction and design, and an emotional experience very few games have achieved.

The Meat:

Last week I talked to you about the often forgotten gem that was Ico. This week I bring you the reason that people don't really talk about it anymore. While Team ICO created an extremely solid game in Ico their next offering completely blew it out of the water and out of people's minds. Shadow of the Colossus is a game that I believe anyone who enjoys video games needs to play at some point, and with the extremely reasonably priced Ico/Shadow of the Colossus HD collection for PS3 there has never been a better time to do it.

First thing's first. I will reveal nothing of the story of Shadow in this review. The game is an experience that is best enjoyed blind so my comments will be intentionally vague so as not to ruin it for you. What I will do however is describe what your task within the game is. Your sole purpose in this game is to hunt down and destroy the sixteen giant beings that populate the beautiful, desolate landscape of the Forbidden Land in which the game takes place. That's it. While at first glance this may not seem like enough content to fill out an entire game I can assure you it is. Gameplay is essentially broken into three different categories. Locating and travelling to each Colossi, figuring out how to destroy it, and then executing your plan.

Step one in your quest is locating your quarry. This is done by standing in sunlight, raising your sword above your head, and using the way the light reflects off of the blade to pinpoint the location of your next foe. This is a really cool mechanic because it really provides a supernatural and mystic air to the proceedings and gives the feeling that you're on an epic adventure for a higher purpose. After the sunbeams give you an idea of the general idea of where the next fight will occur your task becomes to traverse one of the most beautiful game worlds ever created. What is so cool about it is how there's really nothing in it, but that doesn't make it any less enjoyable. Aside from the occasional lizard or bird its just you and your horse exploring the remains of what was once clearly a living, breathing place but is now a haunting, empty land. There is so much story that is never said in words oozing out of every ruin, temple, and forest that you traverse. The world sucks you in and captures your imagination. Anyone who says games can't be art has never seen this game.

After you have shaken the feeling of wonder and sadness that the world invokes and actually manage to bring yourself to the lair of the next Colossi the action begins. The music swells and you find yourself face to face with some of the most epic and unique boss fights in gaming. Some of the Colossi are vaguely people shaped, some are animals, and some are just plain terrifying. One thing that they all have in common is that they all have distinct behaviors and personalities that are immediately apparent. Some are passive, some are hostile, and some seem sad. It is truly amazing how unique and unusual each Colossi is and each one brings a distinct flavor to the proceedings that prevents the game from ever getting stale, even for a moment. Their uniqueness doesn't just stop with their looks or personalities either. Each one is fought in a completely different way. While the way you kill them is always the same (climbing onto their enormous bodies like a flea and stabbing their weak-points) the specifics of each fight are completely distinct. Some involve using the environment to your advantage in order to disable the colossus or to get yourself onto it in some way. Some involve causing the colossus to do something in order to hurt itself in some way. Still others require you to fight from horseback while dodging and riding like mad. Each one is fresh, unique, and extremely fun.

Finally, once you've analyzed the landscape, personality, and nature of each battleground and colossus its time to actually do your duty. You climb aboard the giants and locate their weaknesses. These behemoths don't like being climbed on and will do everything in their power to get you off of them. This creates extremely exciting and tense moments, where you're about to land the killing blow but the creature is shaking and roaring, trying to throw you off, as your grip meter slowly drains. Dropping from the head of a 200 foot tall giant is a doom that always is lurking and providing an incentive to find secure rest points and handholds. Its difficult to explain just how epic and thrilling each fight is, but I'll try. Take the most exciting, large scale, and unbelievably crazy boss fight you've ever done in a video game and make it better. That's every fight in this game. Yeah.

The Bottom Line:

Melding aspects of puzzle games, platforming, climbing, adventure, and action, Shadow of the Colossus is a triumph in every sense. Its a beautiful game, with a mysterious story, exceptional art design, sublime gameplay, and an atmosphere that is second to none. This game receives my highest of recommendations and I envy those of you who just might still get to experience it for the first time.

Backlog Burnout Review of Ico: Living in his younger brother's Shadow

System(s): PS2, PS3
Release Year(s): 2001, 2011
Rating: Teen
Current Amazon Price: $74.99 (PS2), $19.99 (PS3)

The Skinny:

Ico is a haunting, beautiful game that is often forgotten due to it's impeccable "sequel" Shadow of the Colossus. Artistic, moving, well crafted, and only occasionally marred by awkward AI or character control Ico is an excellent, somewhat overlooked gem that you should definitely check out.

The Meat:

Shadow of the Colossus is in the top five of many people's best games of all time lists. It's consistently heralded as a work of art and is deserving of all of the praise it receives. But we aren't here for that game. We're here to talk about Ico. The "older brother" game of Shadow that, for some reason, people don't seem to talk about or like nearly as much. Is it just one long escort quest? Absolutely. Is it as good as Shadow? No. Can the AI occasionally drive you up the wall? No doubt. Is the combat kind of meh? No argument here. Do any problems that the game has fall to the wayside while you're playing it and you you realize you've lost yourself in a beautiful, desolate haunted castle and couldn't care less about minor grievances? No question.

Ico was the first major release of a development team inside SCE Japan Studio known as Team ICO. Recently  It is a puzzle/platforming game in which a young boy named Ico with horns is taken to an ancient ruin by the elders of his village and sealed inside a pod and apparently left to die. After escaping his pod he finds a strange girl locked in a cage who speaks in a language neither he nor the player can understand. This girl is hounded by mysterious shadow creatures and has some unknown connection to the decrepit castle our hero has found himself in. Together, young Ico and Yorda (mysterious foreign girl) try to escape the castle.

The entire game is one long environmental puzzle. Your only goal is to escape the castle, but this is much easier said than done. Many doors are blocked by odd statues. These statues react to Yorda and move aside for her, so the goal of most rooms is to get Yorda to the statues. While Ico is very nimble, Yorda is not at all. This creates a really fun dynamic in the game where Ico goes scrambling along tiny ledges and climbing pipes on walls to get to a higher platform, and then reaching down to pull Yorda up after him or drop a box down for her to climb up. It makes you feel like you're really helping her and she in turn helps you by opening the way forward through the castle. I personally grew attached to Yorda throughout the course of the game, which is impressive considering that she never says a word you can understand at any point.

Threatening this new budding relationship are the denizens of the castle, the ghostly shadow beasts. These dark creatures will pop up from time to time and try to steal Yorda away. They will knock Ico down, pick Yorda up, and attempt to force her through a shadow portal. If they succeed a shock wave comes from the portal, that turns Ico to stone. Yorda will also be captured if Ico leaves her alone for too long. Your job in these situations is to fight off the shadow beasts with a stick that you pick up near the beginning of the game. The combat is extremely simple, with one button for swing sword. However, there are subtle layers of nuance to it. Some of the beasts will go for Ico and attempt to incapacitate him while others bee line straight for Yorda. Or a big hulking beast will distract you in front while a smaller one flies around to sneak up on Yorda from behind. It creates tense situations where you're trying to protect her from multiple foes or chase down a flying beast that is carrying her off. While not an impressive or mind blowing combat system, it is effective and enjoyable in its own right.

The puzzle design of this game is sublime. Figuring out how to get through each room is a unique and enjoyable experience and is really divided into two parts. First off, you need to figure out how to get Ico through the room. Then you need to figure out how to get Yorda through. While some of the puzzles are fairly simple, some of them took a little outside the box thinking to unravel. Are there objects in the room I can make a bridge out of? What would smacking this do? The game perfectly walked that line of difficult puzzle solving without ever dipping into the annoying or arbitrary zone that many games fall prey to. If you're the kind of person who uses walkthroughs for games, this is one I would strongly encourage you not to do so for. The entirety of  this game is figuring out how to traverse each room, so having someone tell you how to do it really defeats the purpose and takes away the joy of accomplishment.

One of the most impressive features of Ico is how effective the atmosphere of this game is. I mean that in more ways than one. The environments are both beautiful and forbidding at the same time creating a sense of wonderment coupled with unease at all times. The way that Yorda behaves timidly and strangely, and yet seems to understand far more about what is going on than you do is intriguing and draws you in. The fantastical designs of the shadow beasts hunting Yorda are truly remarkable. Some just look like men whereas others are hulking monstrosities or bizarre birdlike creatures. There is a minimalist attitude to everything that I find refreshing. There is very little music so what is there is all the more effective. The castle is desolate and empty, except for the powerful moments when it isn't. There's no real story being told directly, so every little snippet you can discern for yourself is that much more rewarding.It is just an incredible journey that can't be adequately explained and has to be experienced.

There are a few minor gripes I have with this game. Occasionally Yorda just won't cooperate. You'll stand at the top of a ladder and yell for her to climb up and she'll just stand there for 30 seconds before doing it. Sometimes she'll refuse to jump a gap three times, and then just do it. It's rare but these moments are really immersion breakers because they show that Yorda isn't a person, she's just a stupid AI. Also, sometimes Ico won't do exactly what you tell him. If you've played Assassins creed you know what I'm talking about. Yes of course I wanted you to jump at that angle directly off the platform instead of 2 inches to your left. That's what I needed.

The Bottom Line:

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Ico is a beautiful game that any serious video game fan should play. It has enjoyable gameplay, wonderful artistic design, an appealing main concept, and a fantastic atmosphere. Small technical gripes here and there do break immersion or cause frustration, but these moments are few and far between. Oh and let me save you a major headache and say that you can swing on chains using the circle button. You're welcome. Took me far too long to figure that out. With its recent re-release as part of the Shadow of the Ico/Shadow of the Colossus HD remaster collection you should definitely check it out. And, for its low price of $20 you get this wonderful game as well as its "sequel" which is one of the greatest games ever made. But that's a discussion for another time. Thanks for reading!