So this is a bit of a weird one. I was playing this game through game pass, but recently the Xbox launcher on my PC, stopped working, so now whenever I tried to launch it, it just doesn't load. I am still trying to fix it, but that brings us to this game. Shortly after this incident happened, I started playing Cyberpunk 2077 and it really highlighted to me the differences between JRPGs and Western RPGS and why I tend to gravitate towards the latter. To be honest, I haven't missed playing this game, and if my issue doesn't get resolved or the game leaves game pass tomorrow, I won't miss it really. Usually when I abandon a game I like to just write a small impressions paragraph (not a review) about why I stopped playing the game, but this one might be a little longer so strap in!

So to start off, this was my first time playing a Persona game. I have always wanted to play them but their hella expensive on Steam since Sega knows people love these games, and they want to hit your wallet accordingly. After doing tons of research, Persona 3's story seemed like the one that interested me the most to start on, with its themes of life and death and how the characters use their evokers to summon their Persona's. And ya its a pretty interesting story after the 20 or so hours I played but the pacing is a bit too slow for me. But we'll get to that.

Firstly the combat is pretty fun, as you summon Persona's to help you in battle. The combat is very much about revealing enemies weakenesses and trying to exploit that so you can do an all out attack. I enjoyed fusing some of the Persona's to make more powerful ones. And the battle music is just awesome, as when it hits the lyrics just as you do an all out attack, the combination of music and flawless animations make it a sight to behold. However, it did start to get tedious for me, as I have just never liked traditional turn base combat as much. It would be great if it was a 20-30 hour RPG, but this game is 50-60 hours minimum, so I don't know if I would have gotten tired of it if I had kept playing. I also don't like the cap you have on how many Persona's you can carry. Sometimes when you have the option to get a new Persona from battle, if you select it and your Persona cap is full, you have to sacrifice one of your current Persona's for it. Why I can't just put this Persona in like a storage is beyond me, and if you get into this menu like I described, there is no backing out of it, meaning you HAVE to now sacrifice one of your Persona which is just so frustrating.

The dungeons are also pretty terrible as the original Tartarus was pretty infamous from what I have heard. They have added some nice QOL features to make the dungeon crawl easier, but it doesn't stop the level design from being absolutely boring and tedious. Its all randomly generated, but you will be seeing the same looking layouts, over and over again. I guess I'm more used to dungoeons that offer envoirmental storytelling, alternate routes and stuff to find off the beaten path. Back to Persona 3, you climb the floors of Tartarus until you hit a road block, which basically forces you to go back to the real world and engage with the social link gameplay.

Social links are the bread and butter of this series and I was excited to dive into it. You quickly get into a routine of going to school, spending time with someone before spending your evening: studying, working a part time job or going to Tartarus. This was nice at first but it can get a bit much if you've hit that road block I mentioned earlier in Tartarus and are now stuck doing Social Link stuff until the calendar finally lands on a day where the story can actually progress. I found it odd too that your social links are mostly with NPCs in the gameworld rather then your actual party members. You can start social links with them, but only WAY later when your stats are basically maxed out. They do introduce hang outs a bit later, where you can spend time with a party member cooking or reading a book. These are nice additions, but its not the true social link stuff obviously. And the social links that I got to experience, were okay, some better then others but some of them just felt like a waste of time. Like the one kid in your class who just wants to bang his teacher, or the other on the track team who's sick and shouldn't be doing track, but forces himself too. These would be nice, but you often get these stories in such short, bite size pieces that if feels like nothing is progressing and your not really doing anything other then just giving them advice. Also, the game advertises that the social links are fully voiced but that is kind of not true. Most of the time, they will be voiced, but there are plenty of times where you hang out with an social link and their will be no VA, meaning you have to read text. It doesn't bother me too much, but still wanted to mention it if your expecting a fully voiced experience.

You can pick dialogue options, which is something I love in RPG's but its pretty basic here. Basically either be a nice guy, a jerk or pick an option that the NPC just doesn't agree with. There's a right option to all of these to get them to like you which I felt was a little bit limiting, but many RPGs I play, cough Bethesda cough have the same thing. For me, I tend to like choice and consequence in RPGs and having morally grey choices that have more nuance to them, but thats not really here from what I played.

The story is also pretty interesting and I do really like the party members you interact with, as they have great VA, I just wish I could social link with them a lot earlier in the game. My main issue with the story, is that its just poorly paced. Like your start with your first two party members and your just dungeon crawling and social linking for a while until only later does the plot start actually progressing. Its one of those stories where I want to learn more, but again, if don't get to play this game again, I won't be crying over it. And I am definitely NOT buying this game as knowing Atlus, they will rerelease the game a year or two from now, with new expansion content that you can ONLY get buying that addition and essentially double dipping. I find that to be an outdated and anti-consumer practice that I fell for once with Diablo 3 on console but never again. So who knows, maybe I will return to this game one day, but right now I have other games that are interesting me more. Like I said, this is not a review since I didn't beat the game, its more just an impressions/reason why I am shelving it for now.

Oh boy where do i start with this one. On one hand the storylines and sidequests are genuinely fun and if you (like me) care about seeing every little thing the game has to offer it can honestly feel like an unending game. The amount of content this game offers is absolutely baffling, with a near unending stream of sidequests available, complex in depth ship building and base building, and tons of planets to visit and explore, there just an infinite amount of content to go through. However, the problems arise exactly from the sheer scale of it all. Because there's just so much stuff, most of it tends to be really shallow and surface level, lacking any depth of meaning to it.
A couple of examples: the ship building is phenomenal and really just lets you build almost anything, however, you don't have any control over the interior of your ship, which can lead to awful maze like stair placement in between ship levels, or just really ugly interiors that you couldn't preview on the ship builder itself, making the ship not fell truly your own. The outpost building, even if incredibly tedius at the start, is honestly great once you get a constant stream of materials and is surprisingly in depth, however, there's little to no incentive and benefit to having one, as it doesn't really do anything useful or is necessary for any questline at all, making you feel like you just wasted hours of your life with almost nothing to show for it. It really does feel like they just put outpost building because it's a planet and space exploration game, without really having any ideas on what to actually do with it. The hired companions (not the ones from constellation, i'll get to them in a bit) are utterly dissapoiting as well, with them merely serving as a stat boost and nothing else. they even hint about having interesting pasts and ongoing life troubles but there's no way to help them or learn more about them at all, making them fell really shallow. I mean they don't even interact with the modules of your ship in a convincing manner. You'd think that if you hired a gunsmith or a doctor they would stay at the armory and the medbay right? Nope, they just stay on the same generic spots as everyone esle, completely shattering any sense of immersion you might've had. That leaves us with the 4 main story companions (the only ones you can romance at that), and honestly they're allright and their questlines are quite fun. Yes they can be a little too goody two shoes at times but i think they just behave like normal human beings with morals, meaning they wont like if you just murder a civillian out of nowhere. But after you complete their questlines they just become soulless husks that repeat some of the same lines over and over again, losing basically everything that made them slightly interesting. Even marrying them makes little difference and the other main npcs have absolutely no reaction to it, making you feel like whatever you do has no impact at all. Actually, that complaint can be made for the whole game really. Almost nothing you do has any real impact at all and the world stays largely the same as you left it, with only a few spoken lines by npcs here and there making you feel like you did anything at all. Hell even the faction questlines make no difference. Yes they're some of the best questlines the game has to offer but the world around you couldn't care less if you're a ryujin operative, a freestar collective ranger, an united colonies vanguard or a crimson fleet pirate, with you actually being able to be all four at once. At the end of the day where this game really suffers is its rpg elements, with lots of immersion breaking moments, useless decision making and feeling like nothing you do has any effect on anyone at all outside of questlines (i mean, people don't even care how you look, how can you apply to be a uc vanguard wearing the fc ranger uniform, that makes no sense). Even if the main storym the factin quests and sidequests themselves are genuinely fun and great (which they really are!) the game really falls completely short on its rpg component, making it incredibly hard to play any role at all during your playtime outside of the main constellation ambassador role or whatever they want you to actually play instead.
And i haven't even talked about the exploration yet. The game look epic in scope and size but it feels so incredibly small and restrained. the main cities are an absolute joke, being so increedibly small it makes the vatican look like a continent, which makes, again, absolutely no sense given it's been almost 200 years since humanity left earth so there's been plenty of time to expand more than a few kilometres, especially if one of these cities, New Atlantis and Akila, are supposed to be the capitals of the uc and fc respectively, while looking like they can barely fit a thousand people in them. Also, how on earth does an entire planet only have a single city. Not even a single country or anything, just a singular city. Which, in turn, makes the world feel so incredibly small and confined that you barely feel the "largest world bethesda ever made" boasted about on ads. Couple that with the truly awful planet exploration, lacking any means of fast transport and with generic, copypaste landmarks that make almost no planet truly unique from each other, making so that you have absolutely no incentive to explore them, you now have an awful open world experience that doesn't feel immersive at all and feels incredibly tiny, especially in comparison with games like cp2077, or even bethesdas own elder scrolls and fallout series.
Overall, it isn't a bad game per se, with it having fun combat, great questlines, decent, albeit slow, skill tree and progression system, and fun game mechanics like outpost and ship building. Where it really lacks is direction and focus, with most mechanichs feeling very surface level and underdeveloped, coupled with minimal sense of immersion and belonging in the world, making it a fun game yes, but a not so fun rpg experience.