Persona 3: FES for PlayStation 2 Reviews by Gamers

In Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 FES you will take control of a high school transfer student. By day you will go to school make friends and even take quizzes. Though by night you will run around slaying monsters called shadows. In FES you will can obtain 20+ new Persona, armor that will change your characters costumes, and best of all and extra mode called Episode Aigis. Overall this game takes old turn based RPGs and adds some delightful elements. The only bad thing would be is that you can not control your other party members. This leads to the character AI to be flawed at times.

First things first: Persona 3 - The Journey was as much fun on the second playthrough as it was when the original came out, and was enriched by the addition of a few story bits and new Personas. Aside from that, not much has changed about The Journey.

I can't really say the same about The Answer, though. At least half of the entertainment value of the original Persona 3 was in the school life portion, and trying to grow your Social Links to level up your Personas. In The Answer, every time you fuse a Persona you only get them at their base level - which means you have to level each one up to get at their upper level skills. This just means that smart use of skill inheritance and Growth skills is key, but is still rather annoying. The Answer is pretty much a pure dungeon crawl with storyline. Compared to The Journey, it's like ordering a root beer float without ice cream. In my opinion, the storyline of The Answer isn't really a resolution, but more of a side story. I was fine with how Persona 3 ended the first time around, and the new plot seems a bit extraneous. The characters are also a lot more emo than in The Journey.

In short, if you enjoyed the battle system in Persona 3, go ahead and do some more in FES. If you thought of combat as something to get over with so you could do the school stuff more, give FES a pass.