With P3 Reload on the horizon, I thought I'd revisit this game. I don't hate this game as much as I used to several years ago back when I first played it, but I'm still not very fond of it. There are a lot of things about P3 that I honestly love, but those things are very heavily outweighed by just how terrible this game is at being a fun video game.
Every design choice relating to the RPG portion of the game is bafflingly awful, even when compared to other turn-based RPGs that came out several years prior, like SMT Nocturne and FF10, mostly related to Tartarus. Tartarus will almost certainly make up the bulk of your playtime in this game due to it being the only way to level up and gain EXP between full moon bosses. Because I played P5 and P4 before this, I treated trips to Tartarus like I did trips to Mementos: I did them every once in a while, whenever there was nothing going on in the social sim part of the game, to take care of the RPG part of the game; make sure I was sufficiently leveled for the next full moon, rescue any missing people, recover lost items for Elizabeth, you get the idea. Boy howdy, what a big mistake that was. Silly old me, thinking that experience with newer games in the series would carry over to the one that pioneered them. This game really wants you to take your time with Tartarus, and not rush through it; hell, the game borderline punishes you for doing so through the fatigue mechanic, how few and far between checkpoints are, and how frequently enemies use insta-kill moves.
Oh, boy howdy. The insta-kill moves. Very rarely a problem in the other modern Persona games; one could even say completely irrelevant; but in P3? Holy shit, dude. They are relentless with how many enemies have these, and how seemingly often they actually land in this game. The amount of times I lost a huge chunk of progress to the omnipresent assholes that used Hama or Mudo on me or my party is largely responsible for my playtime being probably 10-15 hours longer than it would have been otherwise. The longer you go into Tartarus, the more enemies you run into, which means you encounter more enemies with these attacks. And when you die, you don't just get the option to go back to the start of the floor, or to restart the fight; oh, no no no; it sends you right back to the title screen. If you lost to one of these encounters because you just happened to get hit by one of these and didn't have a Persona immune to Light or Dark, welp, sucks to suck. Doesn't matter how far back it is, go back to your last save point, dumbass. A general rule with RPGs is that it feels way worse to lose to something completely out of your control; like you were robbed of a victory because you got unlucky. This is why insta-kill moves are very rare in modern RPGs, and if they are there, they're often pretty weak and aren't very common in enemy encounters, let alone bosses. P3 does a complete 180 with this and says, "Let's make like every encounter like that. That would be pretty thematic to a game about death, right?" Thematic, sure, whatever, I guess. That doesn't make it fun or good RPG design.
P3's RPG elements actively punish you for daring to be efficient with managing your time, make leveling a chore rather than a natural part of playing through the game, and is so ridden with RNG that losses very rarely feel like you made a mistake, it was purely the game saying "fuck you."
Beyond how god-awful the RPG gameplay is, everything else in the game you've already heard praised to death already (pun not intended), from the music, to the story, to the characters, you get the idea, so there's really no need for me to go any further. I want to make special mention of the final boss fight, I wish the rest of the game was as good as the final boss fight is. In regards to the cast, I love Junpei especially, he's great; Zeno Robinson is the perfect recast for him (obligatory fuck Vic Mignogna). There's a lot to love with this game if you can get past the actual RPG part of the game, but I unfortunately couldn't, as a big reason why I love RPGs is because of the RPG experience. This one is so awful and so dated that it that makes even older RPGs feel like they came out in 2017. I can only hope that Atlus has learned from how well received their later titles have been (sans Soul Hackers 2, please do not make it like Soul Hackers 2) and make changes in Reload to make Tartarus an actually somewhat fun experience.
Every design choice relating to the RPG portion of the game is bafflingly awful, even when compared to other turn-based RPGs that came out several years prior, like SMT Nocturne and FF10, mostly related to Tartarus. Tartarus will almost certainly make up the bulk of your playtime in this game due to it being the only way to level up and gain EXP between full moon bosses. Because I played P5 and P4 before this, I treated trips to Tartarus like I did trips to Mementos: I did them every once in a while, whenever there was nothing going on in the social sim part of the game, to take care of the RPG part of the game; make sure I was sufficiently leveled for the next full moon, rescue any missing people, recover lost items for Elizabeth, you get the idea. Boy howdy, what a big mistake that was. Silly old me, thinking that experience with newer games in the series would carry over to the one that pioneered them. This game really wants you to take your time with Tartarus, and not rush through it; hell, the game borderline punishes you for doing so through the fatigue mechanic, how few and far between checkpoints are, and how frequently enemies use insta-kill moves.
Oh, boy howdy. The insta-kill moves. Very rarely a problem in the other modern Persona games; one could even say completely irrelevant; but in P3? Holy shit, dude. They are relentless with how many enemies have these, and how seemingly often they actually land in this game. The amount of times I lost a huge chunk of progress to the omnipresent assholes that used Hama or Mudo on me or my party is largely responsible for my playtime being probably 10-15 hours longer than it would have been otherwise. The longer you go into Tartarus, the more enemies you run into, which means you encounter more enemies with these attacks. And when you die, you don't just get the option to go back to the start of the floor, or to restart the fight; oh, no no no; it sends you right back to the title screen. If you lost to one of these encounters because you just happened to get hit by one of these and didn't have a Persona immune to Light or Dark, welp, sucks to suck. Doesn't matter how far back it is, go back to your last save point, dumbass. A general rule with RPGs is that it feels way worse to lose to something completely out of your control; like you were robbed of a victory because you got unlucky. This is why insta-kill moves are very rare in modern RPGs, and if they are there, they're often pretty weak and aren't very common in enemy encounters, let alone bosses. P3 does a complete 180 with this and says, "Let's make like every encounter like that. That would be pretty thematic to a game about death, right?" Thematic, sure, whatever, I guess. That doesn't make it fun or good RPG design.
P3's RPG elements actively punish you for daring to be efficient with managing your time, make leveling a chore rather than a natural part of playing through the game, and is so ridden with RNG that losses very rarely feel like you made a mistake, it was purely the game saying "fuck you."
Beyond how god-awful the RPG gameplay is, everything else in the game you've already heard praised to death already (pun not intended), from the music, to the story, to the characters, you get the idea, so there's really no need for me to go any further. I want to make special mention of the final boss fight, I wish the rest of the game was as good as the final boss fight is. In regards to the cast, I love Junpei especially, he's great; Zeno Robinson is the perfect recast for him (obligatory fuck Vic Mignogna). There's a lot to love with this game if you can get past the actual RPG part of the game, but I unfortunately couldn't, as a big reason why I love RPGs is because of the RPG experience. This one is so awful and so dated that it that makes even older RPGs feel like they came out in 2017. I can only hope that Atlus has learned from how well received their later titles have been (sans Soul Hackers 2, please do not make it like Soul Hackers 2) and make changes in Reload to make Tartarus an actually somewhat fun experience.