Okay, so you play this silent school kid who, upon arriving at a new school, experiences something called the ‘dark hour’ where everyone in the world – bar a select few – is placed in a coffin at the stroke of midnight. During this hour the world is attacked by demons and it’s up to the few humans awake to fight the demons by shooting themselves in the head.

Once the hour is up everything returns to normal and then you get to go to school. You even get to take some exams.

You might be familiar with a couple of the other games in the Shin Megami Tensei series: Digital Devil Saga and Devil Summoner. But even with all the weirdness wrapped up in those, they still don’t quite match the bizarreness of fighting demons by night and then joining the fashion club and the kendo team during the day. Even the fact the game takes place over a year is strange. But not as strange as watching your characters shooting themselves in the head every time you attack a demon.

The battle system is very similar to that found in Digital Devil Saga, it’s all about exploiting the weakness of the enemy. You can scan enemies for free (after you’ve scanned them once it becomes instantaneous) to find out their weaknesses, then hit them with the corresponding, but confusingly named, spell (Mufu is ice, by the way) and you’ll get another chance to attack. Which kind of makes the other non-controllable members of your party redundant until one of your attacks misses and they get to have a turn.

The skills and spells you can use come down to what Persona you are carrying. They’re ancient spirits and by collecting them, levelling them up and fusing them together you can unlock more devastating attacks. When you’re doing the whole school thing during the day you develop social links, which help to boost the skills of the Persona when you’re creating a new one.

There’s a heck of a lot of dungeon crawling. In the tower that you climb, each floor is randomly generated so it’s always an adventure to try to find the stairs up to the next one. Well, it’s more just a case of wandering around until you find them.

Unfortunately, Persona 3 doesn’t feel very rewarding to play or that there’s really much point in completing it. It’s the story that lets it down more than anything, because it feels like you’re playing an anime that you’d rather not watch.

Tim Empey