Persona 3 FES is the newly released expansion pack to the original Persona 3 that not only includes a standalone epilogue game entitled The Answer, but brings many changes and additions to the original Persona 3 as well, which is also included with FES as The Journey.

As anyone who’s played the award-winning Persona 3 can attest, it was already a massive game to begin with, easily offering in the range of 100 hours of game-play, and this expansion simply adds to that. Additional quests in the original game, coupled with the 20-30 hour long epilogue could lift your playtime with FES into the 150 hour range.

The addiction of building your social links, exploring the dungeon levels and tinkering with the new weapon synthesis system could send your real-life social links into a tailspin, and your consumption of caffeine for those late night FES marathons skyrocketing.

For those unfamiliar with the original Persona 3, it’s a traditional turn based RPG similar in style to the two previous entries in the series, which both appeared on PlayStation 1. Like those games, the story is set in a modern style alternate world, and centered around a high school student and the high school itself.

The main attraction of the series is the unique collecting of monsters or personas, which can be used by the characters to increase their stats or skill sets. FES features over 160 different Persona, which gives the game a small Pokemon collection vibe. In addition FES offers the ability to fuse those Persona to your weapons, creating new weapons in the process with unique stats and abilities.

New to the Persona series is the increased focus on character interaction and storytelling, turning FES into a hybrid dungeon crawler/dating simulation. You spend your time outside the dungeons immersed in daily activities, which includes going to classes, spending time playing games and interacting with people.

Depending on your choices during these interactions, the feelings that different characters have for you will change, resulting in different story arcs and persona becoming available.

The story is dark and mature with great localization resulting in natural and flowing dialogue. I enjoyed the social aspects of the game, though they create a greater dichotomy between interaction and game-play found in other RPG’s, as you’ll often spend long stretches of time either doing social stuff or dungeon exploring.

The Answer does away with much of the social stuff and turns into a straight dungeon crawler. It’s also much harder than the main game, meaning you’ll definitely want to play The Answer only after you’ve mastered the main story, for both story and challenge reasons.

Graphics feature anime style characters with nice character portraits, and a large, realistically modelled school that features every type of area you would expect in a major college and then some. The dungeons unfortunately are randomly generated, and as is the prevailing theme with any game with random dungeons they’re quite boring to look at and traverse after awhile.

The music is an eclectic mix of rock, jazz and lounge style tracks composed by series veteran Shoji Meguro. Overall the soundtrack is excellent and a change of pace from the traditional orchestral trappings of most RPG’s. Voice acting and sound effects are also well done.

For a budget title, Persona 3 FES offers an incredible amount of value in terms of sheer game-play alone, with the added bonus of great quality being icing on the massive, multi-layered cake.

NEWS-The sequel to Persona 3 FES, Persona 4 has recently been announced for North American release in late 2008 or early 2009, and in somewhat of a surprise will also be for the PlayStation 2. The setting will shift away from the urban school settings of the previous instalments to a more rural countryside setting.