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I created a new video of the first 42 minutes of Persona 3. It's been uploaded to GameVideos (http://www.gamevideos.com/video/id/13454) and GameTrailers (http://www.gametrailers.com/player/usermovies/86990.html).

  It shows off every thing from the title screen all the way to the first time your character utilizes his Persona. Obviously the video is nothing but spoilers, so if you don't want to ruin anything for yourself just skip it. However, in light of the delay I figured some people would be interested in this.

 Unfortunately, the full sized video is just simply too large to easily distribute. It had to be compressed and lowered down to a 320x240 resolution. Obviously video sites compress video even more, but it's still definitely watchable. The main issue, to me, is that the audio is noticeably more hiss-y. "S" sounds definitely don't come off that poorly in the actual game.

I was going to embed the video, but unfortunately GameVideos' player scales the video up and makes it look even worse. I would suggest going to the page for the video (http://www.gamevideos.com/video/id/13454) where you can either watch it or download it for yourself. Gametrailers, meanwhile, seems to have sampled the video up to a larger size. You can watch it here (http://www.gametrailers.com/player/usermovies/86990.html).

 Thanks!

Thanks alot for the video, excellent video quality and sound, enjoying it so far, very appreciated.:devo:

I'll probably be putting up the full 720x480 video later on... possibly as soon as today. The main problem has been finding a way to compress it nicely.

Doesn't DivX compress the video to good quality in a nice size ?

By the way, the part where the classmate says "Tony gave him the answer...
He must pay attention to class!"
Then it says "> You are slightly popular"
Lol.

Thank you for the vid.
i loved it..:):)

No problem.

Just to let every one know, I'm upping a 640x480 version to Gametrailers now.  I imagine by the time they re-encode it that I'll have the link for it in the morning.

I said I wouldn't watch, but I'm watching it!

Tony, did you try out the text auto scroll?

Yep, that's what's being used in the video. I'm not sure if you'll be happy with it, but you can check it out. I don't think it works too badly, but it has the same problems most games do -- if someone gets cut off by someone else, you can always see it coming.

I hate that lol. That's never how it would work in real life... and yet it happens when you see plays, movies, games, tv shows...

In the video, any dialog moves along automatically with that setting. Anything I have to press a button for has an arrow on the side.

Tony, thanks for the upload the video was amazing.

Nice upload...I must resist!

Here's a 640x480 version if anyone is interested:

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/usermovies/87147.html

Hopefully it's just re-hyping people up for the game that were a bit disappointed by the delay. I think it could help get new people interested in the game as well. I really don't think anyone will watch this and be like "well, after that I don't have to play it!" or anything like that lol. The game is really good so far (and reviews seem to say it will continue to be so) and I hope people make sure to pick it up. It has a very addicting quality to it and I often find myself wondering what might have been different had I said something else... even if it's just a different character reaction.

I don't plan on doing any other clips, by the way. This (in particular) and what's out there are more than sufficient... This actually winds up spoiling very little in the scheme of things (I did a whole new game for this video, I'm a decent amount past this point), believe it or not. A lot of what is in this video has actually appeared in some official videos, particularly ones from Japan.

Tempted to watch this but I'm not sure If I should. Do I go in fresh or watch the video? =/

If you're not sure, don't do it. That's my suggestion to anyone lol. There's other far less revealing videos all over the Internet, I'd stick with those.

Is there a way to download the movie directly from the Gametrailers site?

Not that I'm personally aware of. I don't think they allow it for user movies for some reason.

You can download the Gamevideos.com one, but that's it.

Another point I wanted to make: Let me put it this way, if you have the guide. What's in that video is covered on one page of it. It's a drop in the proverbial bucket. The game appears to be absolutely massive.

Is the one up at gamevideos 640?

They have a 100MB limit, so the one there is 320x240.

So Atlus sent you a preview copy? Did you get everything included, like the artbook and outer cover, or was it just a disk that says not for resale or something?

Pretty sure, just the game. Reviewers only get the games in, not the game box or anything.

Yeah. At least with Atlus, you get a small white cardboard sleeve and the disc is inside. The disc is silver and has very simple printing on it. It says "not for sale" or something to that effect all over it.

With Devil Summoner there was actually a PDF of the manual available on their site for the press. I've not seen anything like that for this game, but honestly, I don't feel it's very necessary since the game explains every thing to you when it needs to.

Thanks for uploading, I enjoyed watching it. If you don't mind me asking how did you get this footage before the games release...or have I missed something?

thanks again.

Tony got a review copy sent to him by Atlus, and recorded the footage himself, dunno how he did it though.

Capture card

ah, promo copy. thanks.

I'm new here and I'd like to say hello everyone. Hello! Now on to discussing those 42 minutes of bliss. Man that game sports some sexy presentation and style. Everything from the main menu, to the text boxes, to the graphics are so polished. The plot also seemed to set up nicely a more than likely epic plot. But, on to what I really wanted to ask. Coverage of the game thus far has given me the impression that Tartaros can be explored at your leisure; similar to the school activities. Is this true, or when the Dark Hour approaches, do you need to complete floors of the dungeon to allow the next school day to arrive?

There are times when you have to do certain things during the Dark Hour, but for the most part how you want to climb it is up to you. If you go one night and want to just level up and do the same floors over and over it's up to you. If you go and change your mind, you can just leave. Tartarus isn't really forced upon you, but obviously you do have to go at certain points to advance the story.

Ugh.  Dubbing.

I think the voicework is above average. Not fantastic but much better than some other rpgs I've listened too. (Valkyrie Profile=most character's voices sucked= Thousand Arms, the combat wasn't the only element that failed in this game= Grandia which had good voicework but bad pauses between lines, and numerous other titles.) Growing up through years of bad voice acting has made me appreciate anything that doesn't torture my ears.

It just seems so cheap to me...  I mean the game takes place in Japan, right?  So why would they be speaking English?  You have to read the dialog anyway, it's an RPG for chrissakes.  Is it asking too much to not have to hear the same 20 or so Canadians dub over everything?  It's just so lame.

I think the main idea is that most people are simply not going to get much out of a language they don't understand. The average American person does not get much out of Japanese inflection, nor do they understand the language enough to want to pay attention or even know if the voice actors are doing a good job. There are people who do like to just pay attention to the voices when it's available as well and it certainly can add more to the scene. This doesn't mean they're disinterested in Japanese culture or whatever else.

I mean, really, there are RPGs in Japan that take place in areas like France. Yet, magically, the dialog isn't in French. It's in Japanese. This isn't a concept that's unique to this area. Persona 3 takes place in Japan, but not a single character even looks Japanese.

At the same time, not being able to fit Japanese and English on a single DVD (which was probably the main issue), I would imagine any company localizing something would go with the latter... regardless of where the game took place. I think going from using full Japanese is a bit more extreme than trying to keep the rest of the game "authentic" in terms of interaction and locale (I mean, even "senpai" is not translated well and would probably require some pretty heavy sentence restructure to give the same idea in totally different situations).

It's just weird to me because despite every thing that has been done in this game, there's still this sense of "It's not Japanese enough!", but on the flip side I've read reviews were people seriously complained that they wished it was even more Americanized, including even the player names. I'm kind of happy Atlus didn't go into that extreme. It's funny because usually people are upset that localized Japanese RPGs are not as literal as possible lol.

As for the voice over stuff, yeah, there's some familiar people in there lol. I don't really mind, honestly, as long as it's done relatively well (I've not heard Ash Ketchum voice guy yet, thank god... but there's someone in there that sure seems to be Cam Clark -- if I spelled that right). I think in this case it is, although there's a handful of voices I've not been very big on. If you've heard the Japanese voices, though, I think they did a pretty good job of matching them... the Mysterious Boy, for example, has a similar sound going on.

Anyway, that's just my opinion on the matter. If it really bothers anyone, the voices can be turned off entirely.

^^ Awesome post. Agreed on all points. You wrote how some reviewers complained of how Japanese Persona 3 is. Off the top of my head I remember egm, and gamespot making this complaint. I was surprised the reviewers felt the need to note the presence of the Japanese culture in the title. Considering it's location is, y'know, JAPAN! I had no idea a geographic location and it's people, played such an important role in the consumer's purchase. Any gamer who reads the back of the box, or even glances at the anime front cover, will know this. I guess it just bothers some people.

I don't know if it was brought up already but I'm fairly sure I heard something about SCEA won't allow a game to be published here unless it's dubbed. You can have the multilingual option for dialog but It' can't just be Japanese with Subtitles etc. Not that it matter much, I can only think of one game off the top of my head that only had JP VA with subtitles and this was before that whole rule came up (GunGrave). The only game I've ever wished they had kept the original voice acting was Yakuza.

It's worth noting that, at least in my copy, the two different videos that play if you do nothing on the title screen are still completely in Japanese. So you can get some of an idea of how that sounds.

I sold my Japanese copy a long while back (before I even scanned anything in, which I stupidly realized the next day), but I do have video of the first hour or so of it. I can cut that down to the same game play span as this one, if anyone really cares to see such a direct comparison.

Just let me know.

The only voice I don't like in the English version is Orpheus's, he sounds a lot cooler in Japanese.

Yeah, Orpheus in the English version sounds "WAYYY uncool", as Ryo Hazuki would put it. ;P

He sounds EXACTLY like Helios.

I think you hear from him a grand total of twice, so you guys don't have too much to worry about.

For REAL? :corkysm17: You think piping in a entirely separate audio track in a completely different language is less extreme than just subtitling?  The way that most people defend dubbing so whole-heartedly makes it a lot less surprising that everything that comes out of Japan now seems to be butchered in the audio department.

In any case, I don't really feel like arguing.  I've accepted that fact that as a fan I've lost to an overwhelming tide of retards.  I can't and won't watched dubbed anything (well, I have a dubbed copy of La Cage Au Folles but it was a freaking dollar for a VHS copy).