No Time For Love, Dr. Jones!
You'll spend about half the game planning out and watching your character's social life. Picking between a sports team early in the school year, deciding if he's going to be an egghead or a popular kid, taking finals, romancing or giving romantic advice -- you're a busy transfer student. Successful social interactions, ones where you strengthen your tie to someone, bring you closer to the Arcana they represent, whether that's the Chariot for working out with the Kendo club or the Hermit for playing an MMO. Each Persona relates to a particular Arcana, and these relationship bonuses translate into straight bonus experience points when you create a new Persona of that Arcana. More on that when we talk about creating Personas, but the most important part about that bonus experience is that it can raise a Persona above your character's level, the usual cap. We typically had Personas from our stronger Arcana who were 20-25% higher level than our character, a huge advantage.
The social side of the game is sharply limited by time; you have essentially a single "turn" per day to try and build a relationship. Some relationships rely on you increasing your charm, bravery or academics stats; these will also consume time to raise. Academics, in particular, will mean long nights spent studying instead of adventuring in Tartarus. Often, relationships will be mutually exclusive: you can only join one sports team your first year; you can only join one of the main extracurricular clubs; and you can only have one girlfriend without running the risk of souring all your relationships. When you sour a relationship -- say, by bailing on spending Sunday hanging out -- you'll have to work extra hard to make amends and regain access to that social relationship bonus.
The sim side of the game will probably be the biggest hurdle for traditional fans of RPGs in general or the Megaten games in particular, but we can't stress enough how well-done it is. Beyond the fact that it's actually a turn-based resource management game disguised as a social sim, the stories in it are almost universally fascinating. We were honestly worried about our friend from Kendo pushing his knee too hard; our friend's relationship with a teacher was sad to watch; and the tragedy of the old couple who owns the local bookstore will move anyone with an ounce of decency. We're looking forward to going through the game again with save+ data to try different tactics (preferably with a North American release of the Fes expansion), but trying out different stories is just as big a draw. It's absolutely worth the time it takes to really master the social planning half of the game.
The combat is deep but easy to learn, and the social stuff is as well-written (and localized) as it is fun to play. That, honestly, would be enough to endear this game to us for a long time. But where the two parts of the game come together, in the variety of choices you get to make, is where the game really shines. If you're tired -- from studying or from dungeon-crawling -- it makes it harder to do either. Creating truly horrifically powerful Personas with high social links makes the dungeon crawling easier; having to spend less time dungeon crawling to gain experience means more time to raise social links. And if you find yourself frustrated with one type of gameplay, you can focus on the other and keep advancing the game, a nice alternative to throwing the disc across the room in rage.
