TIMELESS CRISIS

PERSONA 3 PORTABLE creeps along, but it's still top-class

- Andrea Shearon

All of my worst thoughts strike in the ungodly hours after midnight. It’s quiet, noises I wouldn’t usually notice grow louder and I’m painfully aware of every shadowy figure in an unlit room. Sometimes my anxieties spiral out of control thanks to a weird pile of clothes or a blanketless foot. Sometimes it’s just a little too dark, and the blank eerie abyss of a dark bedroom goes full-on existential horror.

Persona 3 Portable’s fretful cast must share that midnight dread with me, though they have more supernatural terrors to blame. This RPG blend of high school and gothic apocalypse welcomes you with a litany of reminders that time is always running out, and before you even know what it’s counting down to, Persona 3 starts the clock. You’ve got a year to figure out who, or what, the race is actually against.

Persona 3 shares most of the social RPG hallmarks I adored in Persona 4 and Persona 5. There’s the day-to-day studying, flirting, exams and other school-life woes. At night, the focus shifts to dungeon crawling through the mysterious labyrinth Tartarus. You’ll do the usual Persona collecting and Shadow slaying along the way, desperately searching for the omnipotent big bad torturing the city during its nightly Dark Hour. The PC debut is a port of the 2009 PSP retelling, which is divisive for its changes to the sort of ‘director’s cut’ version of the game, the PlayStation 2’s Persona 3 FES. It’s better in some ways and questionable in others.