Mind Zero Review

There's a notorious production company called The Asylum. It's not involved with gaming (at least, not yet), but you might know the company as the folks behind such films as Transmorphers, The Day the Earth Stopped, Atlantic Rim, and Android Cop. Its modus operandi is making half-baked films--mockbusters--that clearly want to ride on the themes and popularity of much more visible properties, while trying to remain different enough that they aren't completely wholesale rip-offs of a source.
Why do I mention this? Because Mind Zero feels like The Asylum's version of the Persona series. The similarity of the setting, story concepts, and overall design is undeniable. And like the inept mockbuster trying desperately to re-create the spectacle of its bigger inspiration, Mind Zero fails at anything beyond being occasionally mediocre.

Leo's standards are remarkably low.

The premise behind Mind Zero sounds familiar: in modern-day Saitama, Japan, mysterious happenings are afoot, with random people going on violent rampages due to a force called MIND. While the police are investigating these freak occurrences, a group of high school kids stumble into a portal to a strange alternate world where they are given weapons and told the secrets of MINDs: they are parallel beings from another world. Some MINDs are leaking out into the world we know and are preying on people with negative emotions, and it's up to a scrappy team of kids (plus a grizzled supernatural detective) to investigate and stop the MINDs from opening doors from their world to ours, all while keeping their special powers a secret from the police.
Sound a bit familiar? It might, because it's basically the plot of all of the various Persona games stitched together like some sort of Frankenstein's monster. And much like said creature, Mind Zero's plot trudges along with the speed of molasses for a good chunk of the game. Even in the most cinematic-heavy Japanese role-playing games, there are usually things developing in the story when you're not dungeon-crawling. Mind Zero takes its sweet time just getting past the basic "MINDs are bad; let's find and fight them" conceit into something more substantial.
But while other RPGs might emphasize interactions between characters to help make up for a weak main plot, Mind Zero gives you a cast of teenagers whose personalities fall into one of two categories: incredibly irritating all the time or about as well defined and interesting as a brick. The lead character, Kei, is so aloof and angsty that he may as well have been a mass-produced unit purchased straight from JRPG Hero Stereotype Industries Inc. It wasn't long after my introduction to him that I was wishing I could have a silent lead this time.

Mind Zero's plot trudges along with the speed of molasses for a good chunk of the game.

Other characters have one-note traits and are easily summed up in single sentences: "He won't shut up ever about buying dumb crap," "She's kind of stupid in a way that's supposed to be endearing but isn't," "She has no discernible personality to speak of, but she fights stuff, so she's OK," and so on. The game's most interesting characters end up being Ogata, the grizzled detective and sole adult on your team, and the antagonists that emerge later on. The sheer dullness or unlikability of everyone makes the game's attempts to present short vignettes of interaction between characters (akin to Persona's social-link sequences) laughable.
The combat and exploration are better than the story, though that's not really saying much. Dungeons are presented as first-person-view mazes, and a map fills out as you explore, making things much easier for you--especially since the dungeons become quite expansive, quite fast. What they never really become, however, is attractive. The visuals for these settings are bland and uninspired (the fact that setting assets are recycled by the third major dungeon is seriously off-putting), and the layout of the mazes is sprawling and confusing, with only a few uninteresting gimmicks to break up the monotony.
Combat, however, has a few interesting elements. Up to three characters can participate in combat, and they have three separate meters each: life points, mind points, and technical points. Life points are pretty easy to grasp: lose them all, and the character is out of commission.