Persona 3 Portable is likely my favourite JRPG of all time, second to the Utawarerumono Mask duology and maybe NieR Automata. Why is that?

Well, to start things off, I didn't take issue with things that a lot of people did. I read a shit ton of visual novels so the lack of a 3D open world (which didn't even look that great to me in FES) is fine, I am okay with the lack of the Answer, the loss of animated cutscenes is fine, and the FeMC story changes aren't great enough to bring down my opinion of the game. The Ken SLink is disgusting, yes, but thankfully it is optional, and there has never been a Persona game that wasn't bigoted or disgusting in some way. The game didn't look blurry to me due to playing an upscaled, modded version, which work better for P3P than for FES, in the latter of which the UI is difficult to upscale.

The game has a lot of fun content. You get to play as FeMC (who is a fun protagonist in a different way than the usual MC), you get new awesome OSTs, the game is much more fun to play due to using the Persona 4 combat system (the main thing Persona 4 has over FES, imo). I've even played it to the end twice, which doesn't happen often with JRPGs for me. Tartarus is a far lesser grind, too.

I just like it, I have not much else to say.

P3P is something that would have been a lot more novel at the time of its release. Having this big PS2 game on a handheld in 2009. The actual combat and dungeons are pretty much perfectly converted from the original console versions, but it's outside of this where it falls short. So much impact is lost in the cutscenes with this new visual novel style with no models or animations, or even any detailed drawings for important moments - just screenshots of the PS2 anime cutscenes at most. In general the presentation is a huge step down and can be pretty ugly, eg those abysmal AOA portraits. It's way less immersive with no actual city to run around. So this was fine for existing fans back then, but in recent times this has become the most played version of P3 by newcomers by FAR due to how easy it is to emulate, and since last year it's officially available on all modern platforms. It really sucks because FES is sooo much better overall and it's only purchasable on... the PS3 store.

The most notable change - I don't think Portable's full control combat is necessarily "superior". FES tactics system works perfectly fine if you aren't stupid, and every enemy was designed around that system so the balancing is now a bit messed up. I enjoy the styles of both. There's a decent amount of new content, some great social links added that made me see new sides of certain characters, and the option to play from a female perspective is nice to have even if it didn't change nearly as much as I would have thought. I do love the new songs Kotone has but you can tell Meguro was in P4 mode at this time because they don't really fit in with P3's style. In any case it's still hugely disappointing that we will never see an ultimate version with all content from FES and Portable. Gonna be missing some of this in Reload.

I think the fact that this game was mostly a dungeon crawler with a visual novel attached made it a lot less daunting for me to get through than the other persona games. I'm not sure why I like Tartarus more than the personalized dungeons in P4. I'm not sure why the menus of Iwatodai are as memorable to me as P5's Tokyo or P4's Inaba. Despite it's less technically impressive exterior, this little game still oozes so much charm.

I think part of the reason why I love this game so much despite its flaws, is that I played it at the perfect time in my life and it spoke to me. I saw myself in a lot of the characters, and the messaging hit me really hard when I was in the midst of struggling to figure out how to navigate through depression and anxiety, while also questioning the meaning of my life and why I even live in the first place. It was cathartic to have a piece of media that felt like it came to my level on issues that I was struggling with. I think being able to play as the FemC really helped the message hit me. The way she interacts with the other characters made it easier for me to step into her shoes than the Male MC. Sure, the casual sexism really grated against me, but I think I had a lot more of a tolerance to it back then. I was able to ignore it and glean the actual worthwhile messaging that the game wanted to get across.

On top of that, I think the gameplay loop is really simple and fun. It's easy to backtrack and grab old personas you need for fusion crafting or the compendium. Some of the bosses can really surprise you and give you a run for your money on lower difficulties, but if you're used to the persona gameplay loop, it might be better to play on hard mode if you want more of a challenge.

I think it's easy to fall into a rhythm with this game where you progress your social links and social skills, and then grind for a little in Tartarus. It's kind of relaxing to me, although I'm sure for other people it can get a bit boring. Different strokes for different folks, I guess!

Persona 3 Portable is the biggest "mixed bag" game I have played in a long time. There are obviously a lot of good elements here, I would not have played for nearly 90 hours if there was nothing redeeming this game. However, there are also a lot of things holding this game back and I hope that within this review, I can break down what works and what doesn't.

I would like to start with the good, the best of the good being the characters and theming. There is some absolutely excellent writing being shown off here by the Persona team, and the introduction of social links to the series makes for compelling gameplay. Between Persona 5 and Persona 3, this game absolutely has P5 beat for social links. Akinari, Maiko, Mutatsu, President Tanaka, Saori, and Bunkichi are the greatest standouts of the side characters, each grappling with the theme of loss in their respective stories. In terms of the main cast, Akihiko, Shinjiro, Koromaru, and Mitsuru stand out as excellent examples of how to write believable high schoolers without making them feel like stereotypes or archetypes. There are very few characters I would really call bad in this game, although Ken is seriously wasted potential considering his place in the main story compared to his social link. I have to say that I could not completely get into Aigis' character the way others have, not to say that I disliked her character but I simply did not feel she resonated with me the way she did others. Meanwhile, the themes in this game are as strong as ever. The persona summoning is done through means of suicide, the music constantly mentions the coming destruction, and the arcana ends in the Death 13 card. I can see why some people consider this their favorite game of all time, because going purely off of themes, this is one of the best games ever.

However, I do not critique games purely on theme alone, so allow me to indulge my mixed feelings before heading directly into the territory of what I consider bad. First off, the story, which starts off very passively, gradually grows into a much larger narrative toward the middle, before entirely halting just before the climax. This makes the game's story feel really slow at one of the most important parts. The entire month of December lacks any social links, which means your daily life goes from hanging out with friends while the threat of the end of the world looms over everyone, to a boring month of doing absolutely nothing while the characters learn to accept the things that they already accepted months beforehand. I partially understand why this was done from a theming perspective, December is supposed to be an incredibly depressing month for the game's story. But from a storytelling perspective, giving the player nothing to do as the story reaches its peak really kills momentum and just had me going "Can this be over already?" by the time January rolled around. Secondly, menus and UI. The main system menu is decent but a little bland. The battle UI wheel is a little confusing, with left going right on the circle and right going left, as well as inconsistent UI memory in battle. The real struggle with UI comes in the Velvet Room. Because of the limitations of the PSP, I understand why menus had to be dulled in some places, but cutting manual selection for skill inheritance and being unable to sort by name in the Compendium really made me want to tear my hair out. The mechanic that the game gets its namesake from should not be unfun to interact with but so many times I found myself skipping out on a visit to the Velvet Room that would have been otherwise beneficial to my playthrough, simply because I did not feel like it. The lack of skill inheritance picking especially made me feel really unattached from my personas and I found myself not interacting with the card systems, simply because I knew I would be throwing my personas out during my next Velvet Room visit anyways. Finally, for my mixed feelings, I want to discuss the combat. At certain times, the combat feels really fun to go through. Balancing SP usage, using critical hits and co-ops to save SP where I could, and landing a powerful move exactly when you need it all made me feel very connected to my party members and really pushed me through the worst of Tartarus (don't worry, we'll get to it soon). On the other hand, there were times when combat felt like I would press three buttons and then mash A to get through the all-out attack cutscene as fast as I could. The lack of enemy diversity is more so a problem with Tartarus than it is the combat, but ultimately it is the combat that suffers because of this choice. On each block of Tartarus, there are, at most, 10 unique combat encounters. Combine this with the fact that each floor of Tartarus has you go through anywhere between 5 or 10 combat encounters and you tend to run out of unique problems to solve by about a third of the way through the block.

Now I really get to tear into this game's worst features. First off, the obvious, is Tartarus. It really is a marvel of modern game design that in the year 2009, P-Studio can look at 263 randomly generated hallways with no visually unique style separating one floor from another aside from a hue shift and the occasionally added decoration and go "yeah, change nothing." I really do not know how you would go about making this better but P-Studio sure did not do it. I would always reach my Tartarus day, put my headphones in, turn on some music or a podcast, and just accept that the next 5 hours of my playthrough would be mindless RPG grinding and walking down long hallways. Finally, my greatest critique of this game, exclusive to this version of the game, is the presentation. The presentation of this game cost it a full star in my mind. Almost everything else, even the mind-numbingness parts of Tartarus could be excused if the entire game were not presented in this disgusting visual novel style. I understand that the PSP was a very limited piece of hardware and I'm not asking for fully animated cutscenes for everything, but man they could at least let more than 2 PNGs on screen at a time. It's really hard for a scene to emotionally capture you when the scene consists of 2 still characters talking at each other over a crunchy jpg and sound effects convey each action the characters take. This is not a big deal for when two characters are talking in class, but a major death scene in this game is ruined because you can hardly even tell when the character has been killed because all that signifies their death is a gunshot sound effect, the character grunting, then the sound effect of the character falling to the ground while their sprite stays completely still. This is then followed up by every single character onlooking to gasp or interject with a scream, simply to remind you that the character is there. It shouldn't even be too much to ask to have the 3D models in the background of these cutscenes, even doing simple actions, since one of the final cutscenes has this happen for dramatic effect. This presentation takes away a lot of tension and emotion from scenes that would otherwise be the most emotional game of all time.

Ultimately, do I think Persona 3 Portable is a good game? Yes. Do I think it's a great game? Almost. There are a lot of pieces holding this back which really sucks since this seems to be the only way you can play a good amount of the content. But it also seems to be lacking content from other versions of this game. It ultimately feels like the game you play after you play Persona 3 or Persona 3: FES. This really sucks because for many people, myself included, this is the only way they can play Persona 3 at all. It seriously makes the news that the Persona 3 Remake will be excluding both FES and Portable content, only furthering the gap of content in this game. I would say, play Persona 3: FES first if you have the opportunity, but if you cannot, this is not the worst substitute.

I honestly don't know if this game deserved the 4 stars i gave it, but some part of me said it did, so... there you go.

This game made me realize that most JRPGs, no matter how good, get boring after like 60 or so hours, i can only get excited by hitting weaknesses and critical hits on randomly generated rooms for so long. So, i do think the game drags on just a bit, but the ending is quite good, so i can mostly forgive it.

one thing i thought was pretty bad was the social links with any of the main girls, yuko's is the exception but all the other ones feel like "oh man, your're such a nice guy, i love you now", most of that coming from the fact that the protagonist is mostly silent, with you getting some amusing dialogue options every once i a while. It's still something i can forgive but it did feel dull, oh and also, Aegis' social link was really good, although a bit fleeting feeling due to it only being available for a brief period at the end, but at the same time, it also felt mandatory to the story, to see her growth and why she becomes important later.

The other social links were actually pretty good, with my favorite being the gourmet king, some really nice writing and ideas with them in general.

the middle of the game was something i didn't enjoy too much, it's when most of the characters are introduced and it feels like they're throwing too much shit your way at once, thankfully this does technically make it so these characters have wayyy more screentime than they'd have otherwise, which does make them more interesting, even if it makes one specific part of the game a little bit lower quality feeling.

the final boss fight is a bit too long, but it was ok, if not a bit lame and unfair at times.

overall, i don't regret the time i spent with this game. it was... good.

With P3 Reload on the horizon, I thought I'd revisit this game. I don't hate this game as much as I used to several years ago back when I first played it, but I'm still not very fond of it. There are a lot of things about P3 that I honestly love, but those things are very heavily outweighed by just how terrible this game is at being a fun video game.

Every design choice relating to the RPG portion of the game is bafflingly awful, even when compared to other turn-based RPGs that came out several years prior, like SMT Nocturne and FF10, mostly related to Tartarus. Tartarus will almost certainly make up the bulk of your playtime in this game due to it being the only way to level up and gain EXP between full moon bosses. Because I played P5 and P4 before this, I treated trips to Tartarus like I did trips to Mementos: I did them every once in a while, whenever there was nothing going on in the social sim part of the game, to take care of the RPG part of the game; make sure I was sufficiently leveled for the next full moon, rescue any missing people, recover lost items for Elizabeth, you get the idea. Boy howdy, what a big mistake that was. Silly old me, thinking that experience with newer games in the series would carry over to the one that pioneered them. This game really wants you to take your time with Tartarus, and not rush through it; hell, the game borderline punishes you for doing so through the fatigue mechanic, how few and far between checkpoints are, and how frequently enemies use insta-kill moves.

Oh, boy howdy. The insta-kill moves. Very rarely a problem in the other modern Persona games; one could even say completely irrelevant; but in P3? Holy shit, dude. They are relentless with how many enemies have these, and how seemingly often they actually land in this game. The amount of times I lost a huge chunk of progress to the omnipresent assholes that used Hama or Mudo on me or my party is largely responsible for my playtime being probably 10-15 hours longer than it would have been otherwise. The longer you go into Tartarus, the more enemies you run into, which means you encounter more enemies with these attacks. And when you die, you don't just get the option to go back to the start of the floor, or to restart the fight; oh, no no no; it sends you right back to the title screen. If you lost to one of these encounters because you just happened to get hit by one of these and didn't have a Persona immune to Light or Dark, welp, sucks to suck. Doesn't matter how far back it is, go back to your last save point, dumbass. A general rule with RPGs is that it feels way worse to lose to something completely out of your control; like you were robbed of a victory because you got unlucky. This is why insta-kill moves are very rare in modern RPGs, and if they are there, they're often pretty weak and aren't very common in enemy encounters, let alone bosses. P3 does a complete 180 with this and says, "Let's make like every encounter like that. That would be pretty thematic to a game about death, right?" Thematic, sure, whatever, I guess. That doesn't make it fun or good RPG design.

P3's RPG elements actively punish you for daring to be efficient with managing your time, make leveling a chore rather than a natural part of playing through the game, and is so ridden with RNG that losses very rarely feel like you made a mistake, it was purely the game saying "fuck you."

Beyond how god-awful the RPG gameplay is, everything else in the game you've already heard praised to death already (pun not intended), from the music, to the story, to the characters, you get the idea, so there's really no need for me to go any further. I want to make special mention of the final boss fight, I wish the rest of the game was as good as the final boss fight is. In regards to the cast, I love Junpei especially, he's great; Zeno Robinson is the perfect recast for him (obligatory fuck Vic Mignogna). There's a lot to love with this game if you can get past the actual RPG part of the game, but I unfortunately couldn't, as a big reason why I love RPGs is because of the RPG experience. This one is so awful and so dated that it that makes even older RPGs feel like they came out in 2017. I can only hope that Atlus has learned from how well received their later titles have been (sans Soul Hackers 2, please do not make it like Soul Hackers 2) and make changes in Reload to make Tartarus an actually somewhat fun experience.

kimi wa ne tashika ni ano toki watashi no soba ni ita 🫂
itsudatte itsudatte itsudatte 🤪
sugu yoko de waratteita 🤗
nakushitemo torimodosu kimi wo 😭
I will never leave you 🥹

Não é exatamente o jogo da minha vida, mas eu não tenho nenhum problema com todo amor que esse jogo recebe. Ele não é perfeito, a música não é lá das melhores, os social links são paias (queria ter feito todos pra ter uma conclusão sobre cada um, mas infelizmente não aconteceu, eu deixei vários de fora, mas sinceramente eu sinto que não perdi muita coisa), a gameplay fica chatita, o tartarus não é muito bom (apesar de estar longe de ser uma das piores dungeons que eu já vi) e algumas idéias simplesmente não fazem sentido. Mas eu diria que no final do dia ainda é um ótimo jogo, não é excelente, mas tem os seus momentos, principalmente lá pro final, que tá, não é o pico da ficção, mas que ainda consegue emocionar e trazer ótimos personagens, pelo menos a maioria dos principais. Fora que Persona atualmente só é Persona porque esse jogo arriscou, então algumas coisas são realmente perdoaveis.

3,5 estrelas

Só um adendo: Portable não é tão ruim assim, acredito que a qualidade não mude muito dessa versão pra FES. E vai pra casa do caralho Nyx Avatar.

My opinions on Persona 3 Portable are very neutral; I do lean towards a more negative outlook, though, sadly.

The portable version is certainly not the best way to play the game. I hate when people act like visual novels aren't a worthwhile medium, but portable is clearly a game pushed into a medium it wasn't originally intended for. I think it makes some of the story beats very weak, and the presentation as a whole feels very cheap, only made worse by the off-chance moments of Persona's stylistic flare.

Personally, I find the combat to be terribly weak. It's boring and tedious. It doesn't have the reward or addictive feeling of good SMT combat. An extra turn for hitting weaknesses or criticals doesn't really amount to much. In SMT, you reach this point where you are suddenly much stronger than you were before in a way that is rewarding and apparent; this is true of most RPGs. I never felt like I got this moment in P3, despite being the correct level for bosses. My damage always felt so low; nothing ever scales to be that big or grand. Also, I really hate the buff/debuff system in P3. Not being able to stack or extend the time of support skills is just annoying. I like the idea of one big dungeon, but when paired with poor combat, it makes for a tedious experience. The boss fights were very poor and uninteresting. The final boss is one of my least favorite final fights I have witnessed in an RPG, which tainted my view of the ending overall.


This may be a silly point to make, but I do not understand making a SMT game without demon talk. I think when putting SMT against other RPGs, SMT stands out due to its surprising nature. SMT will catch you off guard and force you to engage in demon talk mechanics: hold-ups, demons forcing themselves into your party, demons begging for their lives, etc. It's very charming and a core foundation of SMT's identity. P3 doesn't have any of that, though. I know the game doesn't have demon talk since the enemies are not demons, but that is another issue I have with the game. I dislike that the typical SMT demon designs are reserved for just Personas. In a series known for fun enemy designs, I grew a little sick of seeing the same tables, sludge monsters, dice, and gloves over and over again.

My issues with the combat and presentation are separate from the story, but they taint the experience as a whole, and I find it hard to view the story just as it is. I like how focused the game is on its main themes; it is very insistent on death and moon imagery, and I commend it for that. There are some very strong moments in the game. 10/4, Akinari's social link, and Aigis's social link, but the issue for me was that those moments were incredible, but they were the only ones I found myself really caring about. Take my opinions of the story as fully subjective, but I found it as a whole uninteresting and shallow. The parallels between characters are strong and drawn beautifully, but that's the only major praise I have to give. I think many of the twists are built up very poorly. The ending, to me, felt like it went out with a whimper. Not that stories need to feel bombastic and grand; there is beauty in quieter moments (I like how understated and bleak the ending was), but that's not what it was; it felt empty. Once again, I do think my issues with the combat and presentation give me a negative outlook on the story as a whole.

I think if I played Persona 3 FES or base Persona 3, maybe I would have given the game a 3.5/5, but, to me, portable takes an already weak game and makes it weaker. When it is good, it is incredible, heartfelt, and tragic; at any other moment, though, I felt nothing.

This is game is really awesome. I still haven't finished Persona 5 Royal, but i found this more enjoyable. And i exactly don't know why. But i've totally fallen in love with this game, his soundtracks, his characters and their lives. This game talks about death and depression, and the main quotes is "memento mori". The gameplay loop it's not that bad:
Basically you need to fight in the Tartarus this big tower that you can find in this "otherworld". In the portable version you can control the other party's member and it's a really cool and useful feature. But what i love most of this game are the dialogue, they feel so real. Thank to that you can enphatize so much with all the character, really all memorable. Except maybe one npc, that will become friend of the protagonist a little bit too randomly. But in this game like in the real life, you need to work (so with the money you can buy upgrades), go to school and hangout with friends to level up your social link (it's a very cool system that permise you to level up the friendships). The atmosphere it's absurd, in the hall of the dormitory you will find all your friends there, doing their things and feeling real. The soundtracks has become easily one of my favourite of all time, all the tracks are memorable from the opening to the small soundtrack that you can hear for 30sec in a selection screen. The story it's really interesting, the main character is Makoto Yuki (or you can choose the female mc) transferred from another school. And he'll find himself in a really strange situation, that will change his life forever. It isn't the classic "sad boy", i would say it's more apathetic and trying to understand the value of the life. I don't wanna say anything more, 'cause i wanna avoid any kind of spoiler.
Even if this is the worst version, with visual novel classic dialogue and no animated cutscenes, no explorable location, i've instantly fallen in love with this game.
But if you can wait, i would recommend to wait for the remake version Persona 3 Reload!

I still gotta play the female mc but i have finished the male one. This game is incredible and i can very easily understand why one would think this is the best persona game. I prefer the story over persona 5 actually which is the only other persona game ive played. The aspect of death and the meaning of life in the game kind of hits very close to home for somebody who thinks about stuff like that a lot. Some aspects are of course outdated such as a few combat things and making me actually go back all the way to my last safe file if i died to a boss which was painful when i realized it. Also Nozomi exists that automatically puts it down a point