First Impressions: Shin Megami Tensei: Persona (PSP)

I've played for just over an hour so far and I currently have mixed feelings about it, although not so mixed that I'm going to stop playing.

First off, a brief description of the game for those of y'all who'ren't (yes, double contractions are accepted here) familiar with the Megami Tensei series, is that it's similar to Pokémon in that you "collect" "demons" and facets of your personality to fight for you in random encounters.  The goal isn't to "catch 'em all," but having a list of demons/facets that you have had is pretty cool.

In the Shin Megami Tensei series (hereto referred to as SMT), I've played about 80% of SMT: Strange Journey on the DS, so the concepts in this game are not entirely foreign to me.

At this moment in the game, the only thing that it taking a while to get used to is the map and moving around within the overworld.  The game world is set up in four districts and, presently anyway, you move around by walking through the streets.  The problem with all this is that your character has been a resident of the area for I don't know how long, yet the player has only just been introduced to the city/world/map and knowing where things are is a bit confusing.  None of the buildings are labelled.  Part of me says that I'm only complaining too much and want my hand held just to cross the street.  My defense is that when, during dialogue, you're told that you need to go to Building X, which is just east of Building Z.  That's all and good, except that I don't know where Building Z is.  So within the first hour, I went looking online for a map of the four districts so I can at the very least where the damn buildings are, rather than wandering aimlessly trying to enter any building that looks somewhat plausible.

Part of my problem could very well be that I'm not sitting down and devoting and hour+ to getting to know the world and familiarizing myself with the locations over everything.  I admit, that's all on me, and something I should get around to fixing.

I should probably also say something about the music, which I am quite enjoying.  For the most part, the music seems pretty standard fare for RPG's, except that the music has a modern flare to it.  And then there's the "Battle" music, which sounds like a J-Pop song with vocals singing something in Japanese with the obligatory English words thrown in for exotic-ness.  I'll admit, the song is pretty catchy and I'm really interested to see if the song changes as the game progresses, which would be really awesome.

So that's really where I'm at with SMT: Persona right now.  I really want to like this game as it's apparently a hugely popular RPG series in Japan and I want to get into another RPG that isn't a Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest series, not that I have problems/issues with either of those series, but it is nice to have something fresh that I'm not entirely familiar with.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

I'll Take A Look At Your Specials Menu, Thanks.