My first go round with any version of Persona 3. First, the good (and great) points. It looks absolutely incredible. The styling is very much inspired by Persona 5, and the way every little detail, right down to the sub sub menus, is made to feel in keeping with the colour scheme and themes of the game, as well as just looking beautiful and streamlined, makes it incredibly satisfying to simply navigate the game.
I played in English, and the voice cast are outstanding throughout. Every character is well defined, you get to know their voices, and the acting during the cut scenes, especially some heavy emotional story beats, is genuinely excellent. The writing is also largely very good. It deals in some tropes, and the way every character falls over themselves to tell you how insightful and brilliant you are can feel odd, especially in the early game, but the story arcs are well written and sincerely emotional, none more so than Aigis'. These emotional and heavy moments are also balanced with a lot of very funny bits, and you'll always want to talk to people to see if you're missing something amusing.
If you like the Persona gameplay loop, this is a very satisfying version of it. The balancing of your time is challenging in the early game as you try to make social links while raising stats to pass exams and open up links. The dungeon crawling in Tartarus is fun, and building your roster of both teammates to take with you and personas to utilise and fuse, while not super demanding strategically, lets you find a play style of your own.
On the other hand... while the story is very satisfying, smacks you with some stinging emotional moments and lands solid laughs, it is VERY stop-start. Things take a long time to get going, and while the new Link Episodes and dorm activities give you things to do, the fact a lot of the party social links open up VERY late in the game is frustrating, and makes those relationships a bit rushed. Several would benefit from being gated at a certain point, the way P5's were. Some SLs are better than others, I found Star to be almost entirely incidental, and Moon deeply annoying.
The stop-start nature of the storytelling is exemplified by Strega. When they are on screen the story advances in gripping and dramatic fashion, with part of the story involving one of them being one of the game's biggest emotional gut punches, but the game seems to forget about them entirely for large stretches at a time.
There are going to be ups and downs over a 125 hour playthrough though, and given how much I loved how Aigis' story developed, and the beautiful ending, I'm anxious to come back in September, take another run at the game (in Japanese, perhaps) and play The Answer.
I played in English, and the voice cast are outstanding throughout. Every character is well defined, you get to know their voices, and the acting during the cut scenes, especially some heavy emotional story beats, is genuinely excellent. The writing is also largely very good. It deals in some tropes, and the way every character falls over themselves to tell you how insightful and brilliant you are can feel odd, especially in the early game, but the story arcs are well written and sincerely emotional, none more so than Aigis'. These emotional and heavy moments are also balanced with a lot of very funny bits, and you'll always want to talk to people to see if you're missing something amusing.
If you like the Persona gameplay loop, this is a very satisfying version of it. The balancing of your time is challenging in the early game as you try to make social links while raising stats to pass exams and open up links. The dungeon crawling in Tartarus is fun, and building your roster of both teammates to take with you and personas to utilise and fuse, while not super demanding strategically, lets you find a play style of your own.
On the other hand... while the story is very satisfying, smacks you with some stinging emotional moments and lands solid laughs, it is VERY stop-start. Things take a long time to get going, and while the new Link Episodes and dorm activities give you things to do, the fact a lot of the party social links open up VERY late in the game is frustrating, and makes those relationships a bit rushed. Several would benefit from being gated at a certain point, the way P5's were. Some SLs are better than others, I found Star to be almost entirely incidental, and Moon deeply annoying.
The stop-start nature of the storytelling is exemplified by Strega. When they are on screen the story advances in gripping and dramatic fashion, with part of the story involving one of them being one of the game's biggest emotional gut punches, but the game seems to forget about them entirely for large stretches at a time.
There are going to be ups and downs over a 125 hour playthrough though, and given how much I loved how Aigis' story developed, and the beautiful ending, I'm anxious to come back in September, take another run at the game (in Japanese, perhaps) and play The Answer.