I started on Persona 1 about a month ago but then never got back to it, so I'm starting off again a bit of a ways in (not not too sure how much is left).
The story so far (as I recall):
A group of high school students try out for a lark a demon summoning spell, and suddenly a creepy transparent girl in black appears and they black out. While passed out they all have a poorly rendered CG dream (but I guess not bad for the time) saying they unlocked the power of persona.
After they wake up the school nurse suggests they stop by the hospital to see a friend of theirs that has been hospitalized for a bout a year. While at the hospital the whole place shakes and is suddenly filled with monsters, and to make things even more weird the room their friend was staying in no longer exists...
The group escape the hospital and make it back to their school (don't these kids have homes?) where they find out that the big bad science company in town is probably to blame for the weirdness and they should stop by the police station to get some guns (and bail out a friend) before charging into the place. Also at the school is the friend who was hospitalized, but she has not recollection of it. So they go to the police station (where I turned down the help of an optional party member), get armed to the teeth, and then head off to the big company (on the way I picked up a different optional party member).
After traveling from bottom to top to bottom and back to the top of the large building (the architect must have been drunk) the meet the nut job who is trying to make some dimensional portal thing (not to sure why). After taking out his goons you chase him and his assistant into the portal thingy, and before you can either kill him or let him live (I chose the latter) the creepy girl in black shows up and everyone gets sucked into a dimensional vortex, winding up back at the school where things are not as they were when they last left (seems to be the past)...
And now we continue...
So, it turns out that the word the gang is currently in is not the past but a parallel dimension. Dimension where a poor student is rich, the police station is a forest (formerly a flower garden), the dean is a nice guy, and the home room teacher is mute...
Also in this place are a couple of students from the gang's original dimension (one joins the party briefly and is super strong) and it turns out the girl (Mary) who was supposed to be hospitalized is actually the Mary from the parallel dimension, and there is also a girl in white walking around town. No sooner is this all revealed than the girl in black (Maggie) redesigns the school so that there are no exits and fills it with monsters. Really weird powerful monsters like invisible basketball players and Toilet Kids...
So I make it to the central courtyard and face off with Maggie, but she starts one of the weirdest boss fights of the game so far, a fight against...
ROBO-RAT!
The weirdest thing about the fight is the music, it's like a circus tune with a cat chorus, I guess it's the persona equivalent of the Chocobo theme in Final Fantasy. The actual fight is a rather long slog since the robo-rat is not very strong (except for the nuke attack) but has a huge amount of HP and defense, so it took me about 10 minuets to beat (the toilet kids were deadlier).
After the battle Maggie disappears and one of the kids from the home dimension says that he wants the gang to meet some guy in the library who is the only one in town who believes what's going on is trans-dimensional. So I saved and this point and so next Sunday I'm going...
TO THE LIBRARY!
Sunday: Persona series
