Persona 3: FES is a video game by Atlus for the Playstation 2, released (in the US) in 2008. It is essentially a "director's cut" edition of Persona 3, for the same system, released in 2007 (again, Stateside), featuring a new postlude (entitled "The Answer"), as well as some additional content in the original P3 storyline (named "The Journey" to differentiate it).
P3 has been called, with some justification, a cross between a dating sim and a traditional JRPG — a description better matching Thousand Arms, Atlus' earlier work for the original Playstation. It presages P3's Social Link system in many ways.
What Thousand Arms does not take from dating sims (and other simulation games) is the scheduling aspect. Like Tokimeki Memorial (and, to a much lesser degree, such games as The Sims with its aging mechanic), Persona 3 proceeds from day to day over the course of a fixed time period; the protagonist only has 25 hours a day to allocate to such activities as dates, studying, shopping, sleeping, hanging out with friends, praying at the shrine for good grades, thwarting paranatural jihadist assassin squads, directing a creepy old man to splice random bits of your psyche together, and fighting unnatural monstrosities and reified universal principles in a time outside of time.
(One spends most of one's time at the controller doing that last bit. P3:FES is first and foremost a JRPG, after all.)
The really notable aspect of Persona 3's scheduling, which (to my knowledge) few dating sims or RPGs have done before or since, is this:
The game and storyline (of P3 and of FES's Journey) starts on April 7th, 2009, and continues up until January 31st, 2010.
It's almost curious that other games don't do this: they prefer to try for a "timeless" setting that dates itself within a dozen years. P3 dates itself immediately, and is a believable 2009. (Although no mention is made of the global recession; the dollar is still as strong against the yen as it was in 2006-2007; and Aigis is never asked, at least onscreen, to sing either "Still Alive" or "Miku Miku ni shite ageru".)
The Answer, being only a short postlude, opens on March 31st, 2010, with the ending sequence taking place today -- 2010 April 1st.
(TBC)
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