The last hour of this game is unbelievably impactful. I was completely unprepared for that ending.

What a treat it was to play this game for the first time. Superb characters, a gorgeous score, wonderful art direction that just pops and an excellent story to boot. Joyous.

I will make a point to recommend this to my friends.

Fascinating little piece of history. You can see a path here from Star Wars to Mass Effect in terms of rpg design. I fond the combat extremely bad and there's plenty of pacing issues. The lore gets dumped on you in such chunks, its hard to find the emotional resonance its looking for in those heightened moments.

The Good/Bad choices seen in KOTOR or Mass Effects really suffer here. Open Palm vs. Closed Fist starts with some interesting nuance. Open Palm believes in helping others no matter what. Closed Fist believes in self-strength and tough love. Closed Fist ideology might ignore someone in danger if they felt the victim merely needs to get stronger. But if they felt the odds were clearly unfair, with the oppressed having no path forward on their own, then they might feel obligated to help. Its an interesting distinction, but ultimately the choices fall back into that Good Bad binary.

But the ambition here carries this a long way. Numerous people worked on this with a different idea of what kind of story they were telling and you can feel how those concepts meshed or clashed with each other. There character writing needs some polish and there's definitely a feeling of 00s yikes about a few asian character designs. But the overall vibes are nicely tuned, its easy to forgive the clunk.

I might get immersive sim pilled from this.

This was my first time ever playing Persona 3 and I'm glad I waited until the remake to try it. I have played P4G before (only 10.5 hours) so I had a guess on what to expect from this game but was a bit clueless on stuff like persona fusions.

As my 1st persona game I cannot overstate how good this is as a beginners first game into the series as it has the modernisation of the more recent persona games, with the amazing story the original from 2006 has which makes it a memorable game that took me 64.1 hrs to beat.

The only complaint I have is how repetitive Tartarus can get, I would only ever go and do it when there were missing people or I needed to get to the next border floor for the next month.

Overall the game is amazing and if you want to get into the JRPG genre I would highly recommend this as your first game to attempt.

Memento mori -- remember, you will not have enough time to complete all your Social Links if you focus on the old couple and their stupid persimmon tree the second you start the game. Do any of these kids even go to school!?

Apologies to FES devotees, but the "Persona 5-fication" of Persona 3 has, in my eyes, been nothing but a net gain. Sure, it's upsetting that the only other legally accessible version of Persona 3 is a ho-hum port of a compromised portable release, but I'm no stranger to the base game, and when stacking it up side-by-side with Reload, it's hard to not internalize the remake as being the superior way to play the game.

Pretty much every facet of the original is improved or otherwise preserved, and nothing has been downscaled or infringed upon in a manner I would view as harmful. That extends to giving the player direct control over their party, a choice that was originally made to suit Persona 3's themes of communication and bonding by treating each member of SEES as their own individual with their own will. You could largely avoid Mitsuru's habitual casting of Marin Karin by engaging with command presets, my issue is not with the AI. I just think having input over 25% of my team in battle makes the game a little too passive and boring. Well, not anymore. Now I have total control, me, and I'm using my newfound agency to... habitually cast Marin Karin-- wait what the hell

An expanded list of spells and abilities adds a lot more variety to combat, and having more input over how your Personas are built permits more strategic planning over the original's randomized inheritance. All quality-of-life changes that are more or less standard parts of the modern SMT experience, effectively bringing Persona 3 on par with Persona 5 and Shin Megami Tensei V. It is likewise as easy as those games, but being accessible to new audiences isn't necessarily a bad thing. I opted to play through Reload on hard and found the difficulty curve to be more enjoyable this way, though by the time you reach the end game you'll still likely be overpowered. Armageddon is basically the "bully The Reaper" button, and I feel a little bad about it, but that's free EXP so what're you gonna do?

Even the individual blocks of Tartarus, Persona 3's massive procedurally generated labyrinth, are fleshed out in a way that makes navigating less rote and tiresome... though it doesn't completely alleviate some of the tedium. This is perhaps one area where Reload is a bit too slavish to the original game. Enemy designs are turned over and recycled constantly, and the limited number of blocks ensures that even though the geometry is more varied, you'll still probably get sick of exploring before reaching a border floor.

Though I've seen people upset that Reload recasts everyone (except Tara Platt, who apparently had the one unassailable performance), I do think the new cast is excellent, and emotional beats that I found affecting when I played the original game were even more impactful despite anticipating them thanks in large part to better voice direction, more emotive character models, and more dynamic cinematography. I've seen mixed opinions on the soundtrack and changes to Persona 3's aesthetic, but I'm way into all of it. These are my favorite versions of familiar songs, I think the character portraits are a clear step up and I adore the hard lines segmenting areas of shading, I am 1,000% down with the water theming in the menus, and I think the new SEES uniforms are great and actually make the party feel like a well-backed force.

I also have nothing but praise for the new Not S. Links Reload adds, which provides the male members of SEES additional screentime for their individual stories to develop. I think this helps bond the player with each member of the core party even more than the original did, something that Persona 3's two sequels got right by giving each member their own dedicated Social Links. Strega and their ideology are also given a greater amount of time to develop, which helps build them as a credible threat and enhances their presence in the story. However, I must dock points for not being able to date Takaya, I can fix him

Reload might be me at my most defensive of remakes, and at my most insistent that changing material is not inherently bad. The few ways in which Reload does lack is still a noted step up from the original, and the content which is outright excluded is material I didn't care about anyway (I think The Answer is the closest any expanded content has come to essentially being an IGN "ending explained!" article, and unfathomably boring besides.) That said, I think it's possible to feel this way about Reload and still lament the fact that the original game is only accessible through piracy or by overpaying on the aftermarket, and that even more Persona 3 media is outright lost to time.

I had always loved JRPGs growing up. I was obsessed with Dragon Quest, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy - the classics that defined the genre. Persona wasn't nearly as popular and it had slipped under my radar for years. When I finally caught wind of what these games were, it was honestly the perfect time - I was the same age and in the same year of school as the characters in the game.

It sounds corny, but I had never really connected with a game like this before, or realized that JRPGs could be so versatile. It was the first game I played that tackled the most mundane aspect of growing up - school - but made something fun out of it, and tied it into a frankly touching narrative about living life to its fullest.

Looking back, sure, this game has its flaws. But that first experience was honestly pure magic for me - the soundtrack, the suicidal imagery, the characters - I had never seen a game try anything like it, and it opened up an entire world of related titles for me to get into.