Quote:[b]blackaeronaut wrote:[/b]TL;DR version: Persona 3, high school students fight a secret war against an occult threat, with the psychic ability to manifest their own personalities and angst.
... Summarize Persona 3 please?
Long version: Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3's a JRPG. It's part of the broader Megami Tensei series, dungeon crawlers set in a modern or future era. Persona is about high school students who attend classes by day...but fight the supernatural by night. Gameplay is a mixture of high school life sim and dungeon crawler RPG. The series theme is psychological issues and trauma - human flaws, angst, and so on. But it also focuses on friendship between the heroes - the positive message of standing with your best friends against the darkness.
In Persona 3, the threat is the Dark Hour. Every night the city goes still. Unknown to most people, creatures emerge to nomnomnom on the minds of people. The heroes of Persona 3 are a group of students that call themselves the Specialized Extracurricular Execution Squad, or SEES. Each night during the Dark Hour, they descend into Tartarus and fight evil, both with regular weapons and with their persona powers. Ultimately they triumph, but at great personal cost to many of the heroes.
In the series, heroes have the power to manifest their persona as summoned creatures, giving them powers. In the later Persona games, characters each have their own unique persona, which corresponds to their personality. The Persona 3 character Junpei is a wannabe ladies-man, impulsive, plays the fool a lot...and he summons Hermes, the messenger of the gods. Persona 3 is infamous because the persona summon animation involves shooting yourself in the head with a spectral handgun - the gun animation is controversial, and hasn't been used in subsequent Persona games.
It's worth noting that Buffy/Persona is really more of a crossover that should be, because they have pretty much the same broad theme... a bunch of dysfunctional teenagers trying to deal with school life, while at the same time having to carry out this nightly secret war against a supernatural threat. Evangelion also meshes well with Persona..the Persona universe is literally one where your angst translates into psychic powers, and everything has a Western occult theme (Kabbalistic stuff for Evangelion, the Tarot for Persona).
(I apologise for the multiple edits, I kept making non-spellcheck errors, repeated words, bad grammar, etc.)
-- Acyl