I love this game. I love the cast and story so much. I even like the characters I dislike as backwards as it sounds. I played portable and loved it and through a friend telling me that I could mod this game so I could control characters the combat became excellent. If you think that like disqualifies my opinions on this subject just take it as me talking about portables combat due to them being similar but you can actually control characters in portable. I love using characters like Akihiko, Yukari, Mitsuru, Shinji (for the few weeks you have him), and Junpei, all of them have their own niches that all makes them feel really unique and fun to use. There's something about P3's atmosphere and soundtrack that interests me more than any other persona game. P5 and 4 have banging soundtracks and the gameplay is probably better but they just don't hit emotional beats for me like p3 does. To talk about the social links p3 has some of my favorites in the series being devil, star, sun, and emperor to name a few. While later games have a more consistent good quality than persona 3 but the good ones outweigh the bad ones for me and I haven't liked later social links as much as the good p3 ones. There are bad social links like hermit or the moon one, it's been 2 years since I first did the moon social link and I still wonder what the fuck is going on with it. I think I'll wrap it up here because outside of saying you only have Shinji for a few weeks I don't want to spoil the story much. I just really love this game