Pyroclastica

This is the first Shin Megami Tensei game I have ever completed, and it is my impression that this is one of the lower-commitment / less-brutal ones.
Total completion time was almost exactly 100 hours. That feels about right; I don’t think any of that number represents e.g. leaving it running overnight or some such thing.
Only “The Journey” is covered by this review. I did not even attempt to play “The Answer.” Maybe I will someday, but the main campaign feels so all-encompassing and so overwhelming that at this point I’m mostly glad to be out of it.
Which is not to say that this is in any way a bad game. I liked it a lot, and I now totally understand that feeling people talk about where, when it’s over, you just want to go back into Persona world and hang out with your friends. The characters are all very well developed and obviously you get lots of time with them
The gameplay loop is actually extremely simple, but maybe I’m only saying this because there are entire sections of it which I never engaged with.
For example, I never used weapon fusion to make anything good.
I also did not spend a lot of time on the mechanics of fusing monsters. I’d pull up to Elizabeth every few levels, fuse some higher level monsters, and leave it at that. I never went deep on finding “the best recipes” or trying to get a whole bunch of killer attacks on one monster.
I wasn’t even purposely trying to avoid engaging with the fusion system; I just happened to make some good ones by about halfway through the game and never really needed anything better. (This is playing on Normal mode)
For the record, those were:
- Surt (Ragnarok + Fire Amp + Fire Boost is a killer; it’s hard to beat in terms of pure damage dealt)
- Odin (Thunder Reign + Spell Master takes care of a LOT)
- Alice (Die for me!)
- Daisoujou (Samsara)
- Lilim (Very early in the game, I figured out how to fuse her with 1 each of the major elemental spells, so this was the best walking-around monster for the entire game. You can almost always ‘All-Out Attack’ any opposing party with this. When you can’t, switch to either Alice or Daisoujou)
The Tartarus bosses make it really fun to try and find a party / Persona combination which covers weaknesses and can still hit in every situation. This is not always easy and P3FES is in no way a “push X to win” game. Especially some of the late game bosses. You actually have to think about how to approach them.
Something else I was not familiar with before playing this game was how legendary the soundtracks are. That status is SO so deserved, the music in this game is like nothing else. Sometimes when I’m playing RPG’s and they get grindy I will throw on something else like an audiobook or whatever, but I never did this with P3. The soundtrack (and the entire rest of the sound design, character voices etc) deserves all the hype it gets
Speaking of soundtrack, a pro tip is: when you’re in Tartarus, ask Fuuka to change the BGM for you.
Bottom line: P3:FES is great, I do recommend it, and while I will not be covering this on here (because retro only) I have it on good authority that the Reload version is also worth it, though it’s not an exact remake of the original.

Persona 3: FES