Thou am I...I am thou; I spring from the sea of your soul.

Lately I've been spending some quality time with Atlus title Persona 3. We get along wonderfully, too wonderfully. I'm 40 hours into it and I LOVE this game. I haven't been this into a game for quite some time. The only one close was Twilight Princess back in November of last year (good times...good times). I usually get really bored with RPGs at about this point, but I'm frothing at the mouth to get back to this one. The dungeon crawling is broken up between school activities and developing social links with people you meet. The dungeon battles aren't random which I prefer, random battles grate on my patience when I'm not in the mood to deal with a slime or whatever. The leveling up isn't to tedious and comes with distinct benefits IE. better personas and more abilities for said personas. Like the other Persona games you do a lot of the heavy damage with the personas, different from the previous games in the series is the method of calling forth these personas. In the previous installments there was some physical trauma that sent you to the world between reality and dreams where Philemon, a ambiguous benefactor, bestows upon you the ability to call forth personifications of your true self, or other personas. This time the characters use a pistol like "envoker" to traumatize there psyke and release the persona. Just like before not every one can use personas, just a select few have this ability.
The divergences from the RPG norms to me, make it fresh and a blast to play through. The not so subtle psychoanalytical symbols, such as delving into Tartus like climbing higher into the human mind and having to face trauma to really face your true self, are not lost on me and make it very intriguing. The story is a nice one with each social link you develop having a unique back story that is not related, in most cases, to the main story at all. It's actually like being a student with magical abilities and saving the world before finals. I can't count how many times I fantasized about that when I was younger and to some extent still do. Great game and almost as fun a good book.