Having completed Persona 3 Reload, I am confident that it is now the definitive way to experience Persona 3, especially with the The Answer DLC coming later. The added scenes and especially the fact that it's almost entirely voice acted makes it much more enjoyable than the sum of its parts. What I definitely wasn't expecting was how they managed to turn Tartarus from a boring slog into an enjoyable experience.

It's still Persona 3, a game from 2006 at its core so a lot of its elements show its age. Despite this, Persona 3 Reload manages to be my new favourite Persona game in terms of combat, presentation, and narrative experience.

Anyone who calls this a soul-less or effortless remake needs to take off their rose-tinted glasses.

Incredible story that still influences the themes of the series moving forward. I really loved the balance between light-hearted and serious moments within the story.

I'm thankful emulators exist because unfortunately the game is dragged down by its sluggish UI and slow battle animations even when fully skipped. While at its core the combat is similar to Persona 1 in that you are setting up auto battle commands, the gameplay itself is a significant improvement over it because of the removal of the horrendous grid battle system. Negotiation is also made less tedious because of the way better level gain curve and the existence of Free Cards.

Despite that, it's worth slogging through the less-than-stellar gameplay just to experience the atmosphere and story.

I haven't been introduced to Atlus until the DS generation, so going back to playing their older games starting with Soul Hackers on the 3DS in 2016 was eye-opening to say the least. Let me preface by saying I have no problems playing "old and dated" games, but there's a lot of things wrong with Soul Hackers that I legitimately don't get how the game is perceived to be "good".

Sure, Kazuma Kaneko's art is amazing (I prefer Persona 2-era onwards though) and the game's premise was interesting. But those aren't enough to redeem the flaws that makes the game mediocre. Dungeons are very badly designed, and the demon loyalty system is garbage. Story ends up being very lukewarm as well. What confuses me is none of its peer JRPG series that I adore like Breath of Fire, Suikoden Final Fantasy or even Dragon Quest had this much fundamental flaws.

I've yet to be proven wrong at this point, but old Atlus is pretty much throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. Which is good because they've figured it out in Nocturne and I've always enjoyed everything they've released onward.

This was my first experience ever with Persona 3 to anticipate the upcoming remake, Persona 3 Reload. Playing this version definitely soured my first experience with this entry even with the Anime Cutscene Restoration mod. I generally don't mind visual novels, it's just I'm not a big fan of how this game turned everything into "tell don't show". Social links in this game tend to be way shorter than later entries; which is something I understand. But converting them into visual novel events makes them even way shorter than they already were. I'm generally not a fan of the social links in this game too, although there are a few standouts among them.

I find the dungeon crawling and enemies to be as boring as Persona 4 Golden dungeons were, so I tried playing with Tactics on at first. To my disappointment, about 50 hours in I later find out the game removed the original game's tactics option in favour of the more simplified version from the later entries.

I won't deny this game was revolutionary at the time. But as a whole I find Persona 3's pacing to be horrible, and playing this version certainly didn't help. However I will say that the game's theme and messages certainly did grow on me the more I let the game sink in.

After playing Reload, I will try the Female MC route and compare this with Persona 3 FES at some point.

I love first person dungeon crawlers and I've played a variety of SMT games before, but this game completely blows. Game is easy even on Expert difficulty but for some reason the enemies are always set to be significantly higher level than your party members throughout the entire game. This makes negotiation significantly more frustrating since you won't get the materials from them to fuse new Persona until you catch up in level. The thing is, once you fuse a certain early game Persona with the right spell, you are never incentivized to ever engage with the fusion system again right until the final boss. The game will then force you to grind for a few hours just so your level can catch up. Fun.

Everything in the PSP enhanced version is sped up to be twice the speed of the original PS1 version, but it still feels slow as molasses. I don't want to imagine how the original game was.

I did enjoy the music more than I thought I would, especially the vocal tracks. Story was decent too I guess, but definitely not worth dragging through this abysmal mess of a game.

Great blend of Metroidvania with Third Person Shooters. Very impressive visually with amazing physics engine. I love seeing small details like having debris controlled by your telekinesis match what is available in your current environment. Narrative-wise it's kinda hard to follow, but has one of the more intricate world building I've seen in a video game. Having it being tied to Alan Wake is an interesting choice, but it got me hooked into the Remedy Connected Universe.

Gameplay can get repetitive and in fact it almost overstayed its welcome for me, but it manages to pull off one of the most amazing experience in a video game for me.

Not many games make me think deep about their story after I beat them, but Alan Wake is one of them. The narrative is tied beautifully with the gameplay elements. The use of live-action moments is a massive step-up from Control. The game is not without its flaws though, the game's resource management becomes trivial when the game essentially showers you in tons of essential items. I'll also have to say the game's particular over-reliance on cheap jumpscares is way over-used and falls flat in the middle of the game.

A visual masterpiece with great narrative albeit with slight gameplay flaws.

Even as someone who plays a lot of fighting games online, I've never been a big fan of Mortal Kombat. I really wanted to like this entry, but this has to be one of the most blatant cashgrab wrapped in a fighting game package to ever be released. $10 fatalities? Check. FOMO skins? Check. Boring seasonal mode? Check. Krypts? Browse our lovely store instead, did you see the shiny costume? It's only available for the next 6 hours!

Don't get me started on the gameplay issues with this title. P1 and P2 deals different damage with the same combo for some weird reason.

This game is not even cooked yet.

I thought Persona 5 was massively overrated until I played it in 2022. But the game was amazing, it fixes a lot of the gripes that I had with Persona 4 Golden. It had way better pacing, introduced a lot of gameplay elements from the SMT mainline games, and massively expanded the life sim elements. Being someone who enjoys SMT, I still find Persona 5 to be easy, but it's way more enjoyable than 4. Bonus points for having acid jazz as the main music genre.

The Royal Edition included one of my most favourite villain archetypes in gaming.