9/10
(Little fact about me before this review, this was my first persona game, I heard about the P3P port sucking ass, so I decided to play portable on PPSSPP instead.)
It's pretty good, I really like Kotone, her social links are pretty good here, Junpei's social link is really damn good, I love how we learn about his more vulnerable side and about his father, how he finds out about the weird photos about you and tries his best to find who it is so that you can be safe really shows how he does care about you, I like how he rejects you if you confesses to you and how he only saw as just a friend and nothing more, Akihiko's social link is also pretty good too, we don't get to learn much about him in it but I loved talking to him all the time and seeing how much of a dork he is was pretty adorable tbh, yes i romanced him for all my playthroughs leave me alone, I love shinjiro's social link, i love how we learn about how under the tough exterior, he's a really nice guy and how he cooks for the entire group and seeing him care for Kotone was nice as well, the choice for saving him by giving him the watch I'm fine with, I do prefer him dying since Akihiko's and Ken's resolutions hit a lot more for me, Rio's social link is nice, I'm fine with her having feelings with Kenji since there's always someone who has that strange romantic interest, I feel so bad for Saori, she keeps getting kicked down so much in her social link and she has to live somewhere else really hurts too, seeing that she's growing in her final interaction in march really sets the mood a lot too. Ryoji's social link I wasn't able to complete due to me missing the deadline before it locked, Ken's social link is fine, I wish they just went for how Ken saw Kotone as a mother figure, what the fuck were they thinking by adding a romance? that's fucking weird, why did they have to ruin a good character and a good social link with the writers barley disguised fetish? what the hell were they on to think adding a romance option to an 11 year old, I wished they chose Hidetoshi or Bebe instead. That piece of shit romance is the worst part of the FEMC route. Koromaru's social link is cool, you can hang out with the dog. the linked episodes with the male protag in reload (Akihiko, Shinji, Ken) are better than the social links with Kotone but I like the social links too, Ken's social link would've been an A tier social link if they didn't force some dogshit romance into it, if they do Kotone in p3 reload, get rid of it, I don't want that garbage romance in the social link.
Moving on now, the changes to the story are nice, the new changes with conversations with other characters, how you hang out with the girls instead of the guys here, Junpei being more hostile with you than with Makoto with his inferiority complex, and a few more. I'm glad they didn't change the story too much here. The gameplay is good here, I enjoy that they take a lot of stuff from persona 4 and implement it into persona 3, I enjoy the combat here a lot more than than FES but Reload did a lot better with the combat and with Tartarus, Portable Tartarus is better than FES but I still don't like it that much, it's a complete slog, everywhere barley has any space and you can't sneak up on enemies here. Reload Tartarus is a lot better. Let's talk about the visuals now.
The visuals suck ass though, I don't like them. I don't like that it went with a visual novel style for this game since it really doesn't fit since persona 3 shows off a lot of stuff for it's story. The lack of hub worlds and cutscenes really put salt into the wound too, the emotional scenes fall really short from Reload and FES since it's just text that's describing stuff for you. The scenes that I nearly cried to in Reload lack the punch in portable a ton.
This being the only way to play as Kotone is a complete bummer, it''s 100% fine if you don't like her but people should be able to play it and gain their opinion on Kotone, everytime I was playing portable, I was just thinking to myself "man, I wish femc was in reload"
I do enjoy portable but a lot of my positives and negatives are done a lot more better or fixed in reload. My opinion on the game has heavily decreased but I still do enjoy the game a lot.
Play this game for Kotone since Makoto's route is the second worst way to play as Makoto (the first is Vanilla persona 3 imo).