Okay, wow. I've played maybe an hour of actual gameplay (combat)? I've been PLAYING for about three hours. I should find this incredibly plodding and boring, but instead I'm just intrigued. Anyways, here goes.
You are a dude with no specified name. Your parents died in 1999 and that sucks. 10 years later, you're generally being detrimental to society on some island in Japan as you make your way to a mysterious new dorm. Chick pulls a gun and you're all like, "What?!" and then a hot red-head comes and bails you out. So you're staying there, which is cool, but creepy monsters attack, which is not cool. The only way to fight them is shoot yourself in the head with a special pistol called an "Evoker" to release your "Persona", which'll fight for you.
Make sense?
Some of the cutscenes are
ridiculously long and it takes a while to get to any actual control, but it really pulls you in pretty much immediately. I haven't played any other SMT games, soo... for now this is just for P3 & P4, which are directly linked as far as I can tell.