Rewinding back in the series to play MGS3 as someone who played MGS5 first was admittedly harmful to my experience, as the movement and controls felt awful and awkward for my entire playthrough- In general there were many aspects to this game that are quite reminiscent to the annoying stuff you'd see in games from the late 90s and early 2000s. Obviously this game is very impressive for the time it came out though, so I cant totally hold that against it.

That said, it was clear to me while playing this game why it is such a classic. MGS3 is very much a Kojima game and it is certainly not lacking in interesting, eccentric characters and complex war-and-spy based story elements. It also delivers a pretty impressive sense of atmosphere for a game from 2004. It does however occasionally have some of the silly and eye-rolling moments you'd expect from a Kojima story, but it's all very charming and got a laugh out of me multiple times. Ocelot and the final section with The Boss were particular highlights for me.

Cool game, but ultimately I'd be lying if I said i loved it.

Rewinding back in the series to play MGS3 as someone who played MGS5 first was admittedly harmful to my experience, as the movement and controls felt awful and awkward for my entire playthrough- In general there were many aspects to this game that are quite reminiscent to the annoying stuff you'd see in games from the late 90s and early 2000s. Obviously this game is very impressive for the time it came out though, so I cant totally hold that against it.

That said, it was clear to me while playing this game why it is such a classic. MGS3 is very much a Kojima game and it is certainly not lacking in interesting, eccentric characters and complex war-and-spy based story elements. It also delivers a pretty impressive sense of atmosphere for a game from 2004. It does however occasionally have some of the silly and eye-rolling moments you'd expect from a Kojima story, but it's all very charming and got a laugh out of me multiple times. Ocelot and the final section with The Boss were particular highlights for me.

Cool game, but ultimately I'd be lying if I said i loved it.

I am very happy and thankful to have gotten a modern remake of Persona 3 since it's one of my favorite games. The quality of life and modern visuals naturally made it feel fresh and made it easier to recommend to friends than the original. It's also very faithful in terms of the story (so faithful in fact that it even maintains the same flaws the original had). The other positive thing I can say is that I very much like the several new music tracks introduced in the game, and the remastered tracks are also all good (with the exception of Mass Destruction which i think is just not as good as the original- unfortunate since this is kind of the most iconic song from the game)

That said, this remake has a lot of really small changes from the original that can't stop myself from nitpicking......For one the game's lighting is way too bright and kind of ruins the darker visuals of the original. Turning down the game's brightness helps this some but you can't totally fix it. This game also has a weird obsession with the green hues associated with the Dark Hour in the original, so all the night time scenes in Reload outside of Tartarus have too much bright green lighting going on. In general, I would say the remake simply fails to recreate the creative vision that permeates the original in terms of visuals. There are some other tiny things i could nitpick but personally I can look past a lot of the small issues. HOWEVER, there is one thing I simply could not overlook which was the removal of certain anime cutscenes from the original, which were replaced by in-engine rendered cutscenes. These scenes were very important parts of the story and the in-engine versions are a massive downgrade, seriously hurting their impact. This was by far the most disappointing aspect of the remake.

All things considered I love Persona 3 and I was happy to have experienced it again remastered and refreshed. I would consider myself mostly satisfied with this remake, I just really wish the developers put more effort into recreating the visual style that made the original unique.