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Persona 3 Portable: its out in Japan, here's the first 20 minutes
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still no North American release date
Atlus' third version of their venerable hit Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 has been released for PSP in Japan over the weekend, and thanks to YouTube user Wonderpierrot, we can now view the first 20 minutes, plus the first battle sequence. These videos answer several of the questions that came up in my Persona 3 Portable information write up, such as the state of the game's full motion video, which is no longer motion. Instead, still shots will be given the appearance of motion by camera movements, a common trick made popular by Ken Burns in his lengthy PBS documentaries. As you can see in the videos below, this actually doesn't look too bad, and I noticed that there was also a new sequence inside the train that you frequently ride at around the 9:30 mark in the first video. The great news is that the spoken dialogue all seems to be intact, which I know not everyone cares for, but is really the aspect of these games that make them so endearing in my opinion. As I reported earlier, character portraits now appear in front of static backgrounds, which works fairly well, but there is still something particularly odd about seeing an empty room in the background, or worse, a room full of motionless people.
You can get a good idea of the new area exploration as well, which now involves a cursor. I feel like the camera may have been pulled back a little too far in these segments, particularly in the dorms, but otherwise I don't see any problem with playing the game this way. Atlus has said that they made this change to improve the framerate, and if that's true, then it's a welcome change. Having to run around the world with the game chugging would have been dreadful. During the first battle segment, I noticed that the previously full motion video of the protagonist's persona being summoned was now all in game, and that it actually looked quite a bit more brutal. In addition, there is new music which accompanies the school and battle scenes, and new portraits of faculty members who I do not believe had portraits before, such as the principal. All-in-all, I think despite the cutbacks for the new format, the game remains intact, and I really look forward to an English language version being released in the future.
