SMT: Persona

(Played on PSP)
I'm in love with this game, probably because is my first encounter with Shin Megami Tensei series.

My first and biggest surprise are the characters personality and its development. Until then I was used to the typical "hero of light and infinite justice", but on Persona I found that the characters are very realistic, I think they behave how humans would, not how they should (not quite sure if my point is clear).

The story and atmosphere are pretty dark, I wasn't used to find that on a game either, and I loved it. I wanted to keep going just to find more details about what was happening.

This is a 1st person dungeon crawler, random encounters and combat is turn-based with 3 basic commands: Melee Attack, Gun Attack (ranged) and Skills that uses the Persona skills. Personas are like avatars, each character has one and have their own skills and level growth. The combat system is fun, people complains that the random encounters are too frequent but there's something that helped me on that: I loved the battle vocal song! I just wanted to enter combats to hear it again and again ^^

Another thing that surprised me is being able to negotiate with the enemies, negotiation can end with the monster getting angry and attacking back, running away, giving an item or giving a spell card. There are many kinds of Spell cards and are needed to create new and powerful Personas, which is needed as they became obsolete as the party and enemies level increases. This system is pretty complex because personas can be fused where using items can change the outcome or the skills, and there's unpredictable fusion accidents too.

The rest of details are correct for rpg: usual shops, equipment customization, experience levels, 2d graphics and cool pop music.

Did I like it? Very.
I think you will like it if you:
- Are a dungeon explorer!
- Don't mind abundant random combats
- Don't hate pop music

I rate my experience with a 9 out of 10.