Also known as "Revelations: Persona" in English, this was the next game chronologically in my journey of playing through the early SMT games. Where Devil Summoner keeps SMT If's more grounded setting and stakes while throwing away the spirit guardian system, Persona famously turns the spirit guardians into its titular system and runs with that instead! I usually just put the English title for the games I beat on here that have them, but in this case, the game is so different between Japanese and English that I felt it was more appropriate to put the Japanese title there instead. I played through the Sebek (normal) route, and it took me about 55-ish hours to beat it with the good ending playing a real PS1 disc via my PS3.
Persona 1 (as I'll be calling it from now on for the sake of brevity) follows you, the main character, as well as several of your friends as you all do a ritual after school to try and summon a "Persona" demon. Well it works, and you wind up getting hurt, but only briefly. But after you wake up and go to the hospital to visit your sick friend Maki (who has a chronic illness that keeps her in the hospital a lot), she suddenly has a turn for the worse and while she's in the ICU, the hospital gets all jumbled around and demon filled! From here, things get more and more demon-y until you're forced to make a soft-choice on which of the two main story paths you'll follow. One is the Ice Queen, which is a time-limited quest that follows Yukino (another friend of yours) and was cut out of the American localization of the PS1 version, and then there's the normal Sebek route which follows Maki, and that's the one I took. Your quest with Maki always includes her, yourself, and your friends Mark and Nanjou-kun, but (much like in SMT If, this game's predecessor) you also get a chance to bring along a 5th party member, three of whom are quite easy to get and one who requires a very specific sequence of events to get (and he's the one I got).
Granted I only saw Maki's route, but overall I really enjoyed the writing. This game is still very much a descendant of SMT If more so than it is the previous SMT games, and that can be seen from broader things such as the high school setting to more granular details like the reasons the main bad guy is doing what they're doing. However, the spins they take on those things here evolve those concepts significantly, and it very much feels like a brand new adventure and not some retread.
You're very much a tertiary part of the story, and honestly so are Nanjou-kun, Mark, and your 5th member. The real main character is Maki, and the rest of you are just supporting members of her story. However, that's not a dig at the writing at all. The game does a really good job of making Mark and Nanjou-kun in particular feel like meaningful and fleshed out characters despite the fact that they never really get any sort of character arc. The only real sore thumb of the bunch is you, as you're given front and center attention very often despite mostly not saying much and effectively doing no more than Nanjou-kun or Mark, but you're the main character, so of course you're the most important by default. That's really my only complaint with the writing though (aside from some light transphobia with the people who run the casino, who are very Atlus-brand casual transphobia). Maki's story may be difficult to see the genuine ending of (getting the true ending requires answering some fairly innocuous questions correctly, and it's for prompts like that that I used a guide), but the ride there is full of well-written dialogue that is fun and engaging all the way~.
Where I have more, and it's a LOT more, complaints, is with the mechanics of Persona 1. While SMT If was in many ways a rushed-out mess of a game, with poorly thought out new mechanics stapled onto the skeleton of SMT 2, Persona 1 is a very bold attempt to build on those new systems in a whole new way. However, there is a lot more passion here than polish, as those more developed systems are very often developed without really considering how the rest of the game functions around them. To start off with one of the game's few mechanical silver linings, however, they removed the requirement for guns to have limited ammo, so you can once away blast away to your little heart's content~.
To get down to proper business, though, here's thing from which all other problems arise: The leveling system. It's not the most intuitive place, I know, but it really is the one thing that, if fixed, the rest of the game would benefit massively from. Instead of summoning monsters, SMT-style, you have a party of five members who summon personas made by fusing the monsters you befriend. These five party members have two sets of experience points: points for general levels, and points for persona levels. The prior gives three stat points every level up to assign to five skills just like most SMT games have (although all of your non-main character party members have theirs assigned automatically) as well as dictates what demons you can befriend, as you can't befriend a demon higher than the party's average level. The latter dictates the maximum persona you can have assigned to you, and persona levels are gained by using your personas more in battle instead of normal weapons or guns. That all sounds simple enough, but where it all falls apart is that EXP in both cases is divided out based on who participated the most in battle (which is generally about doing the most damage, but can also be around support spells used).
What this means in practice is that a grindy game gets even grindy-er. There aren't many personas in the game, ultimately, so getting new ones that your character can actually use can be tricky and time consuming as you grind persona levels to just be at a high enough level to use a new persona you've fused (and then you've gotta hope that the character's alignment is the right one to be even able to use the tarot type of that persona, which isn't indicated to the player at all and even the manual just tells you to figure it out via trial and error). Even weak demons can fuse into high-level personas though, so your early game is really brutal because getting new usable personas at all is really tricky even with a lot of demons to fuse. Demons also tend to be much higher level than you, so if you want to recruit new demons to fuse into personas at all, you'll be grinding a LOT to get your party's average level up to even have a chance to recruit the demons you're encountering, as going back to early-game areas is almost always impossible due to story progression.
These problems are bad already, but they're made even worse because of the way EXP is distributed. Powerful characters (be it due to either good weapons, guns, or persona spells) are just going to keep skyrocketing in levels compared to their friends because they're doing all the damage. This is even further compounded by the range system used in the game. This game tries to put a new spin on the two-tiered row system that SMT used by having both your and the enemy's party be on 5x5 grids and having your weapons, guns, and spells all bound by where you're standing on it. Sometimes that means enemies have a harder time hitting you with mean, close-range instant-death spells, but it more often means that due to how the enemies spawned or how they happened to die, one or more characters simply need to wait and defend because none of their attacks are in range to actually hit the enemy. And of course, what game with an annoying range system would be complete without a total lack of information to the player on ANY move or weapon's range capabilities?
The UI overall is pretty awful for 1996, and that's outside of the woefully inadequate weapon and spell information described earlier (although at the very least they tell you what power level and how many times they hit). They don't just let you not compare weapons in shops to what you're currently using, they don't even let you see who can use what item in the shop. They also don't let you look at your current persona level when in the persona fusing Velvet Room, so if you wanna do that, you've gotta go back out and check it, and then go back in and hope you remember (and the same goes for various other persona stats and player stats and such). The shop comparison stuff in particular is absolutely inexcusable for that period in gaming, as it'd been the standard set over five years before, not to mention one actually met by Devil Summoner which had been released a year earlier.
The terrible disrespect for the player's time doesn't end there though. The difficulty curve is terrible, with the first boss easily being one of the hardest in the entire game, and other awful difficulty peaks continuing here and there from that point (particularly if you're going for the good ending, as there's a lot of extra content beyond where the bad ending stops). Dungeons are also quite large even pretty early into the game, and they very rarely have save points anywhere but very close to the start. You do, however, have a constant mini-map instead of having to use the Mapper spell, and they've even made it much larger. However, what that also does is make dungeons effectively navigated entirely by mini-map, and it makes the first-person dungeons feel pretty pointless in general. It's no surprise that this is the only Persona game to have first-person dungeon crawling, as it just works really poorly here. They've also removed dungeon-escape items and your singular save-anywhere item from Devil Summoner, so exploring dungeons is once again far more time consuming and far more dangerous.
Making all of that EVEN WORSE (I realize I say that a lot in this review, but it's worth mentioning every time XP) is that this game suffers from something that tons of early CD-era JRPGs suffer from in how damn long battle animations take. Particularly for persona attacks and enemy animations, battle animations take FAR too long, and battles are far too dangerous to ever safely use the auto-battle command. This means that a game that already has an awful EXP and money grind amplifies that by having battles that can take super long due to their awful difficulty and the animations that take place. This isn't really the hardest SMT game up to this point (that's easily SMT If, which has far more inexcusable crap in it), but it's easily the one that will wear you down the worst with just how miserable the grind in it is.
One of the only more neutral changes to the whole formula is how demon negotiations work in this game compared to previous ones. Where prior games had more of a conversation between you and the demon, now each character has four actions they can do to try and interact with the demon. Each demon has some combination of the game's eight personality traits, and depending on that combo (and also the phase of the moon and also just RNG in general) the monster will get a rise in a different one of four emotions indicated in the upper left of the screen: rage, happiness, terror, and interest. Interest is the one you want if you're trying to recruit them, happiness will often get you free stuff, and terror will often make them flee, but rage will get them more hopping mad to kill you than ever, so you've gotta be careful.
This makes for a system that's not worse or better than the old one so much as it is just different, because the real change it brings to the table is that demon negotiation is FAR more about simple trial and error than it used to be. It's a bastard learning which moves with which characters work to interest which demons, but once you know those things, they'll work virtually every time. You can even do like I did and just get fed up and look up what different monsters respond positively to online, since there's nothing random about a particular demon type's personality distribution, so you can very easily talk your way past really hard enemies if you so choose. It helps give Persona just one more thing to make it stand out from SMT, and it also ultimately makes the game a bit more forgiving and easy in certain ways, but it's still just "different" rather than "better", and it will probably depend on the player for just how much they find this system appealing compared to the traditional way SMT had done things.
With all the mechanical woes, it's nice that at least the presentation, like the writing, is also generally quite nice, even if it is a mixed bag at times. The music is pretty darn good and very funky, with the character themes being particularly good. It's overall not quite as good as Devil Summoner's soundtrack, but it's still got some real boppin' tracks. The only downside is that the encounter rate is SO high in this version of the game that you rarely hear any music in dungeons other than the singular battle theme that they use for every non-boss encounter in the game, and while that song is a pretty good one, it gets old after a while, and the game really could've benefited from some more battle themes. The graphics are VERY pretty though. The dungeons look nice, but the isometric NPC areas are very pretty as well as NPC portraits themselves. The real star of the show is the monster animations, though. Overly long as they may be, they gave a ton of beautiful attention to detail in bringing these monsters from unmoving front-facing sprites to moving isometric enemies, and the love and care put into those sprites and animations were the start of the visual show for me.
The differences between the Japanese original and English localization are numerous and in some cases very infamous. Most notable among the hall of infamy is how they made the character models look "more American" in trying to de-Japan-ify the game, and making certain characters look more white and they even went as far as to make Mark black in the English version. The other notable thing in the Japanese version is that it's an even more grindy mess than the English version because the random encounter rate is even higher in this version. Granted both versions still have awful cash flow problems, but that's something that makes this version of the game that much harder to recommend despite it not suffering from all the writing issues the localization has.
Verdict: Not Recommended. Honestly, had I played the Super Famicom SMT games without save states or rewinds, most of them (particularly SMT If) would've been not recommended as well, but this game wouldn't even be saved with save states or rewinds. While I may have enjoyed the story, the mechanical road you need to take to get there is just so damn brutal and grindy that I think most people are going to find it VERY hard to justify the time investment unless they are a HUGE fan of SMT and just have to see the early parts of the series. You're going to need a lot of patience and willingness to put up with old game nonsense to make it through this game's meanness, because it's mean EVEN for an SMT game. I didn't ultimately hate my time with the game, sure, but this is one you better be darn sure you're up for before taking the plunge, because you're going to have a very rough ride otherwise Xp
Persona 1 (as I'll be calling it from now on for the sake of brevity) follows you, the main character, as well as several of your friends as you all do a ritual after school to try and summon a "Persona" demon. Well it works, and you wind up getting hurt, but only briefly. But after you wake up and go to the hospital to visit your sick friend Maki (who has a chronic illness that keeps her in the hospital a lot), she suddenly has a turn for the worse and while she's in the ICU, the hospital gets all jumbled around and demon filled! From here, things get more and more demon-y until you're forced to make a soft-choice on which of the two main story paths you'll follow. One is the Ice Queen, which is a time-limited quest that follows Yukino (another friend of yours) and was cut out of the American localization of the PS1 version, and then there's the normal Sebek route which follows Maki, and that's the one I took. Your quest with Maki always includes her, yourself, and your friends Mark and Nanjou-kun, but (much like in SMT If, this game's predecessor) you also get a chance to bring along a 5th party member, three of whom are quite easy to get and one who requires a very specific sequence of events to get (and he's the one I got).
Granted I only saw Maki's route, but overall I really enjoyed the writing. This game is still very much a descendant of SMT If more so than it is the previous SMT games, and that can be seen from broader things such as the high school setting to more granular details like the reasons the main bad guy is doing what they're doing. However, the spins they take on those things here evolve those concepts significantly, and it very much feels like a brand new adventure and not some retread.
You're very much a tertiary part of the story, and honestly so are Nanjou-kun, Mark, and your 5th member. The real main character is Maki, and the rest of you are just supporting members of her story. However, that's not a dig at the writing at all. The game does a really good job of making Mark and Nanjou-kun in particular feel like meaningful and fleshed out characters despite the fact that they never really get any sort of character arc. The only real sore thumb of the bunch is you, as you're given front and center attention very often despite mostly not saying much and effectively doing no more than Nanjou-kun or Mark, but you're the main character, so of course you're the most important by default. That's really my only complaint with the writing though (aside from some light transphobia with the people who run the casino, who are very Atlus-brand casual transphobia). Maki's story may be difficult to see the genuine ending of (getting the true ending requires answering some fairly innocuous questions correctly, and it's for prompts like that that I used a guide), but the ride there is full of well-written dialogue that is fun and engaging all the way~.
Where I have more, and it's a LOT more, complaints, is with the mechanics of Persona 1. While SMT If was in many ways a rushed-out mess of a game, with poorly thought out new mechanics stapled onto the skeleton of SMT 2, Persona 1 is a very bold attempt to build on those new systems in a whole new way. However, there is a lot more passion here than polish, as those more developed systems are very often developed without really considering how the rest of the game functions around them. To start off with one of the game's few mechanical silver linings, however, they removed the requirement for guns to have limited ammo, so you can once away blast away to your little heart's content~.
To get down to proper business, though, here's thing from which all other problems arise: The leveling system. It's not the most intuitive place, I know, but it really is the one thing that, if fixed, the rest of the game would benefit massively from. Instead of summoning monsters, SMT-style, you have a party of five members who summon personas made by fusing the monsters you befriend. These five party members have two sets of experience points: points for general levels, and points for persona levels. The prior gives three stat points every level up to assign to five skills just like most SMT games have (although all of your non-main character party members have theirs assigned automatically) as well as dictates what demons you can befriend, as you can't befriend a demon higher than the party's average level. The latter dictates the maximum persona you can have assigned to you, and persona levels are gained by using your personas more in battle instead of normal weapons or guns. That all sounds simple enough, but where it all falls apart is that EXP in both cases is divided out based on who participated the most in battle (which is generally about doing the most damage, but can also be around support spells used).
What this means in practice is that a grindy game gets even grindy-er. There aren't many personas in the game, ultimately, so getting new ones that your character can actually use can be tricky and time consuming as you grind persona levels to just be at a high enough level to use a new persona you've fused (and then you've gotta hope that the character's alignment is the right one to be even able to use the tarot type of that persona, which isn't indicated to the player at all and even the manual just tells you to figure it out via trial and error). Even weak demons can fuse into high-level personas though, so your early game is really brutal because getting new usable personas at all is really tricky even with a lot of demons to fuse. Demons also tend to be much higher level than you, so if you want to recruit new demons to fuse into personas at all, you'll be grinding a LOT to get your party's average level up to even have a chance to recruit the demons you're encountering, as going back to early-game areas is almost always impossible due to story progression.
These problems are bad already, but they're made even worse because of the way EXP is distributed. Powerful characters (be it due to either good weapons, guns, or persona spells) are just going to keep skyrocketing in levels compared to their friends because they're doing all the damage. This is even further compounded by the range system used in the game. This game tries to put a new spin on the two-tiered row system that SMT used by having both your and the enemy's party be on 5x5 grids and having your weapons, guns, and spells all bound by where you're standing on it. Sometimes that means enemies have a harder time hitting you with mean, close-range instant-death spells, but it more often means that due to how the enemies spawned or how they happened to die, one or more characters simply need to wait and defend because none of their attacks are in range to actually hit the enemy. And of course, what game with an annoying range system would be complete without a total lack of information to the player on ANY move or weapon's range capabilities?
The UI overall is pretty awful for 1996, and that's outside of the woefully inadequate weapon and spell information described earlier (although at the very least they tell you what power level and how many times they hit). They don't just let you not compare weapons in shops to what you're currently using, they don't even let you see who can use what item in the shop. They also don't let you look at your current persona level when in the persona fusing Velvet Room, so if you wanna do that, you've gotta go back out and check it, and then go back in and hope you remember (and the same goes for various other persona stats and player stats and such). The shop comparison stuff in particular is absolutely inexcusable for that period in gaming, as it'd been the standard set over five years before, not to mention one actually met by Devil Summoner which had been released a year earlier.
The terrible disrespect for the player's time doesn't end there though. The difficulty curve is terrible, with the first boss easily being one of the hardest in the entire game, and other awful difficulty peaks continuing here and there from that point (particularly if you're going for the good ending, as there's a lot of extra content beyond where the bad ending stops). Dungeons are also quite large even pretty early into the game, and they very rarely have save points anywhere but very close to the start. You do, however, have a constant mini-map instead of having to use the Mapper spell, and they've even made it much larger. However, what that also does is make dungeons effectively navigated entirely by mini-map, and it makes the first-person dungeons feel pretty pointless in general. It's no surprise that this is the only Persona game to have first-person dungeon crawling, as it just works really poorly here. They've also removed dungeon-escape items and your singular save-anywhere item from Devil Summoner, so exploring dungeons is once again far more time consuming and far more dangerous.
Making all of that EVEN WORSE (I realize I say that a lot in this review, but it's worth mentioning every time XP) is that this game suffers from something that tons of early CD-era JRPGs suffer from in how damn long battle animations take. Particularly for persona attacks and enemy animations, battle animations take FAR too long, and battles are far too dangerous to ever safely use the auto-battle command. This means that a game that already has an awful EXP and money grind amplifies that by having battles that can take super long due to their awful difficulty and the animations that take place. This isn't really the hardest SMT game up to this point (that's easily SMT If, which has far more inexcusable crap in it), but it's easily the one that will wear you down the worst with just how miserable the grind in it is.
One of the only more neutral changes to the whole formula is how demon negotiations work in this game compared to previous ones. Where prior games had more of a conversation between you and the demon, now each character has four actions they can do to try and interact with the demon. Each demon has some combination of the game's eight personality traits, and depending on that combo (and also the phase of the moon and also just RNG in general) the monster will get a rise in a different one of four emotions indicated in the upper left of the screen: rage, happiness, terror, and interest. Interest is the one you want if you're trying to recruit them, happiness will often get you free stuff, and terror will often make them flee, but rage will get them more hopping mad to kill you than ever, so you've gotta be careful.
This makes for a system that's not worse or better than the old one so much as it is just different, because the real change it brings to the table is that demon negotiation is FAR more about simple trial and error than it used to be. It's a bastard learning which moves with which characters work to interest which demons, but once you know those things, they'll work virtually every time. You can even do like I did and just get fed up and look up what different monsters respond positively to online, since there's nothing random about a particular demon type's personality distribution, so you can very easily talk your way past really hard enemies if you so choose. It helps give Persona just one more thing to make it stand out from SMT, and it also ultimately makes the game a bit more forgiving and easy in certain ways, but it's still just "different" rather than "better", and it will probably depend on the player for just how much they find this system appealing compared to the traditional way SMT had done things.
With all the mechanical woes, it's nice that at least the presentation, like the writing, is also generally quite nice, even if it is a mixed bag at times. The music is pretty darn good and very funky, with the character themes being particularly good. It's overall not quite as good as Devil Summoner's soundtrack, but it's still got some real boppin' tracks. The only downside is that the encounter rate is SO high in this version of the game that you rarely hear any music in dungeons other than the singular battle theme that they use for every non-boss encounter in the game, and while that song is a pretty good one, it gets old after a while, and the game really could've benefited from some more battle themes. The graphics are VERY pretty though. The dungeons look nice, but the isometric NPC areas are very pretty as well as NPC portraits themselves. The real star of the show is the monster animations, though. Overly long as they may be, they gave a ton of beautiful attention to detail in bringing these monsters from unmoving front-facing sprites to moving isometric enemies, and the love and care put into those sprites and animations were the start of the visual show for me.
The differences between the Japanese original and English localization are numerous and in some cases very infamous. Most notable among the hall of infamy is how they made the character models look "more American" in trying to de-Japan-ify the game, and making certain characters look more white and they even went as far as to make Mark black in the English version. The other notable thing in the Japanese version is that it's an even more grindy mess than the English version because the random encounter rate is even higher in this version. Granted both versions still have awful cash flow problems, but that's something that makes this version of the game that much harder to recommend despite it not suffering from all the writing issues the localization has.
Verdict: Not Recommended. Honestly, had I played the Super Famicom SMT games without save states or rewinds, most of them (particularly SMT If) would've been not recommended as well, but this game wouldn't even be saved with save states or rewinds. While I may have enjoyed the story, the mechanical road you need to take to get there is just so damn brutal and grindy that I think most people are going to find it VERY hard to justify the time investment unless they are a HUGE fan of SMT and just have to see the early parts of the series. You're going to need a lot of patience and willingness to put up with old game nonsense to make it through this game's meanness, because it's mean EVEN for an SMT game. I didn't ultimately hate my time with the game, sure, but this is one you better be darn sure you're up for before taking the plunge, because you're going to have a very rough ride otherwise Xp