I discovered the Persona series in 2016 when I was probably at my all-time lowest, having moved away from my hometown to study at a university, then moving back home a year later, feeling like a complete failure and spent most of my time avoiding people and pondering what in the world I was supposed to be doing with my life or what I even wanted to do, and these huge games (especially 4) about sort of finding oneself honestly helped me a lot to both feel a bit better about myself and made me feel a bit less alone in some way, but also distracted me from the most depressive thoughts I had, which I'm very grateful for even to this day.
It was also from an economic viewpoint a very good time to get into the series since it was before 5 and all the games were quite old at this point so even those PSP games that are so expensive these days could be bought for, like, $10 each. This meant that I could buy and play all 4 games within a pretty short time span, and I liked them all to some extent, but I think I might have been a bit burnt out by the time I got to 3 (I played them in order of 4, 1, 2 IS, 2 EP, and then 3 FES for last) and maybe just didn't really appreciate it to the extent that it deserved. I haven't gone back to it since then so I was really looking forward to Reload and whether I'd find new appreciation for what these days seems like the favorite Persona game for Cool People™.
Now that I've played Reload, platinumed it even, I can safely say that... It's still my least favorite of the modern Persona games. Not that it's bad – it's actually very good! – but it's just so infuriatingly uneven of an experience that I just couldn't enjoy it as much as I'd have liked. It has by far the best main story of any of the games after the 2 duology, and the whole memento mori theme of the game and how you shouldn't let fear of death keep you from living is honestly pretty inspiring, and really well done throughout both the main plot as well as the social links, often in a way that's surprisingly subtle for this series that really likes to hit the player over the head over and over again with what it wants to say with each game.
The party members are also about as strong as usual. I mean, Fuuka is sort of just there and Koromaru is very much a dog voiced by a human who does a pretty poor job at imitating a dog's noises, but the rest of them all get their time to shine, and manage to have lives outside of spending time with the protagonist, and actually grow bonds with each other during the journey which was nice to see. I do find though that their personalities can be a bit bland and therefore don't find them as fun to be around as the characters in later games, and it's a bit jarring how the game very clearly just turns Junpei into a different character whenever it needs someone to freak out about what's going on, and then just flip him back to the same "best friend" Persona trope character that he usually is immediately afterwards. Would have been nice if the other characters – especially Yukari who starts out the game very afraid of death and how that aspect of her is sort of just never really relevant again – could have shared his load a bit more, and if it these aspects could have seeped out a bit more than just during the big story moments. Still like them all despite this, and the remake adding new scenes for the boys (who don't get social links) is very much appreciated since they make me as a player grow closer to them.
The biggest issue I probably had with the original game was the, uh, JRPG part of it, for lack of a better term. Outside of the life sim, Persona 3 is mainly a dungeon crawler through the tower Tartarus that's just a whole lot of procedurally generated floors, and combat had you only control the protagonist and the entire rest of the party were AI controlled though you could set different behaviors. Tartarus was okay, and the AI certainly worked well enough for me to get through the game, but none of these things were ideal. Nor was the fact that characters would get fatigued after spending enough time fighting, which meant you'd have to retreat or fight with pretty severe drawbacks, and then go into to Tartarus with a whole different party set-up the next night since it took a while to rest up, which shouldn't be an issue, but characters outside the party wouldn't get any experience, and this was a pretty grind-heavy game so it just added a layer of annoyance to what already wasn't a great experience.
All of this has been mostly fixed in Reload, probably to the chagrin of some fans of the original who liked that kind of friction, but 100% for the better in my opinion. Tartarus is still pretty weak as a dungeon to spend most of the game in, but it at least changes looks and music a few times throughout the game to breathe a bit of new life into it when needed, party control is finally a thing (which it obviously was already in the PSP port, but that wasn't the version I played back in the day so this is new to me!), and fatigue is gone for good while leveling up characters outside the party is much less of a hassle so switching someone in is pretty painless now. From what I recall of the original, I still think I stuck with the same party here as I did back then, though, without even trying to (Yukari, Akihiko, and Aigis.) The combat is also noticeably easier than it used to be, and I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that since I do like at least some challenge in my turn-based RPGs, at least on bosses, and didn't really get any here. At least the combat system itself is basically just 5's, and that's about as snappy as it gets in a game like this which I appreciate greatly when there's so much combat to be had, but I can't help but feel like I've been a bit robbed of re-experiencing the true Persona 3 experience when the final boss doesn't kill me on its last phase after spending about 24 hours fighting it (I will probably never forget that The Arcana is the means by which all is revealed.)
Did I still have a good time going up all those floors, fighting all those enemies that didn't pose much of a threath whatsoever and sometimes looked suspiciously like Hulk Hogan? Yeah, I honestly did. I'd have preferred some tweaks to the difficulty and hand-crafted dungeons instead of what we got, but it still works and the developers do have a very strong sense of pacing (not something most people would probably associate with a Persona game) in the floors don't take long to get through, combat is fast-paced and there's always something to do on every floor, be that finding useful treasure, fighting rare enemies for more experiences, or gathering materials by smashing things. It's nothing amazing, but also not boring until maybe the final few floors and at that point the game's almost over anyway.
So there are a few small things that I'm not the biggest fan of in Persona 3, but the biggest issue is one that this remake probably could have fixed, but for some reason didn't. Probably the biggest draw of the modern Persona games to me is the life-sim aspect of them, and just getting lost in the day-to-day activities. As the first game in the series to have this structure, it's not super surprising that 3 sort of doesn't do this very well, but I'd forgotten just how poorly it manages to balance Tartarus with this. It's still as addictive as ever, but weak social links are a big issue (so many of them just revolve around saying yes to the worst suggestions people throw at you, and even the good ones rarely have enough of a story to really be interesting for the 10 parts they have), as is the fact that you can max out all of your skills fairly early in the game without any need of some guide to get an optimal playthrough.
Persona 3's biggest flaw, however, is just how many days there isn't anything to do. Since you have both days and nights and Tartarus can only be entered during night-time, there's a lot of just going to bed at least once, but often even twice a day since there isn't anything to do after a certain point and that month's whole Tartarus section can easily be cleared in a day or two. For a game about not being afraid to live life and sort of seize the day, I'm not sure just wasting day after day on doing nothing really goes hand in hand with that, and from a gameplay perspective it becomes pretty boring. It becomes even worse during the game's many school breaks since almost every social link is tied to a student and they only exist on school days, so those days are mostly spent just wasting away when you really should be able to call up at least some of these people to make more progress with their, admittedly often pretty weak (though I will not accept any criticism towards Bebe), micro story. At least I can use those days to progress that one social link where you're supposed to protect a scammer with a doomsday cult from being beaten up by people he's stolen money from.
Revamped art style and rearranged music were honestly neither good or bad to me. I feel like people overestimate the grime of the original's aesthetics so this being more colorful doesn't really change much to me or ruin the tone that's being conveyed, and most of the music sounds basically the same, though with some notable exceptions being worse and others being better. It looks good (though it feels like these games probably could be a bit more graphically impressive, even if the art styles are always great), sounds great, so I'm personally pretty pleased with the whole audio-visual thing, and some of the new tracks are fantastic. The new voice actors also do an admirable job, mostly sounding like I remember the previous voice actors outside of Yukari who sounds like a completely different character though not really in a bad way, but she definitely took a while to get used to. Still romanced her, just like in the original. Starting to worry that I haven't changed at all in these eight years...?
Anyway, I'm starting to feel like I've spent too much time talking about this game (almost 2000 words, apparently), but I guess there's a lot to say about the things you care about, and I really do care about Persona 3 and like so much about it and its whole deal, but also find myself frustrated about a lot of decisions made both with the original, but also the remake and how it didn't really do enough to maybe iron out some of issues that have mostly been fixed in later games (though good on Atlus for removing the original's really weird transphobic "joke"). The entire epilogue, though? Goddamn, by far the best in the series, especially when you've maxed out all the social links like I did and you really get to take your time walking down this very melancholic memory lane with all the characters you've grown to at least tolerate and in some cases really like, before the inevitable ending (which I honestly wish wasn't so ambiguous even as someone who knows what's going on, but it's still really powerful), and then being left to ponder on life, death and this grand journey as the credits roll with that great song playing in the background. Few games have stuck the landing as well as Persona 3 does, and it's honestly worth the entire price of admission on its own.
Rest in piss Strega
It was also from an economic viewpoint a very good time to get into the series since it was before 5 and all the games were quite old at this point so even those PSP games that are so expensive these days could be bought for, like, $10 each. This meant that I could buy and play all 4 games within a pretty short time span, and I liked them all to some extent, but I think I might have been a bit burnt out by the time I got to 3 (I played them in order of 4, 1, 2 IS, 2 EP, and then 3 FES for last) and maybe just didn't really appreciate it to the extent that it deserved. I haven't gone back to it since then so I was really looking forward to Reload and whether I'd find new appreciation for what these days seems like the favorite Persona game for Cool People™.
Now that I've played Reload, platinumed it even, I can safely say that... It's still my least favorite of the modern Persona games. Not that it's bad – it's actually very good! – but it's just so infuriatingly uneven of an experience that I just couldn't enjoy it as much as I'd have liked. It has by far the best main story of any of the games after the 2 duology, and the whole memento mori theme of the game and how you shouldn't let fear of death keep you from living is honestly pretty inspiring, and really well done throughout both the main plot as well as the social links, often in a way that's surprisingly subtle for this series that really likes to hit the player over the head over and over again with what it wants to say with each game.
The party members are also about as strong as usual. I mean, Fuuka is sort of just there and Koromaru is very much a dog voiced by a human who does a pretty poor job at imitating a dog's noises, but the rest of them all get their time to shine, and manage to have lives outside of spending time with the protagonist, and actually grow bonds with each other during the journey which was nice to see. I do find though that their personalities can be a bit bland and therefore don't find them as fun to be around as the characters in later games, and it's a bit jarring how the game very clearly just turns Junpei into a different character whenever it needs someone to freak out about what's going on, and then just flip him back to the same "best friend" Persona trope character that he usually is immediately afterwards. Would have been nice if the other characters – especially Yukari who starts out the game very afraid of death and how that aspect of her is sort of just never really relevant again – could have shared his load a bit more, and if it these aspects could have seeped out a bit more than just during the big story moments. Still like them all despite this, and the remake adding new scenes for the boys (who don't get social links) is very much appreciated since they make me as a player grow closer to them.
The biggest issue I probably had with the original game was the, uh, JRPG part of it, for lack of a better term. Outside of the life sim, Persona 3 is mainly a dungeon crawler through the tower Tartarus that's just a whole lot of procedurally generated floors, and combat had you only control the protagonist and the entire rest of the party were AI controlled though you could set different behaviors. Tartarus was okay, and the AI certainly worked well enough for me to get through the game, but none of these things were ideal. Nor was the fact that characters would get fatigued after spending enough time fighting, which meant you'd have to retreat or fight with pretty severe drawbacks, and then go into to Tartarus with a whole different party set-up the next night since it took a while to rest up, which shouldn't be an issue, but characters outside the party wouldn't get any experience, and this was a pretty grind-heavy game so it just added a layer of annoyance to what already wasn't a great experience.
All of this has been mostly fixed in Reload, probably to the chagrin of some fans of the original who liked that kind of friction, but 100% for the better in my opinion. Tartarus is still pretty weak as a dungeon to spend most of the game in, but it at least changes looks and music a few times throughout the game to breathe a bit of new life into it when needed, party control is finally a thing (which it obviously was already in the PSP port, but that wasn't the version I played back in the day so this is new to me!), and fatigue is gone for good while leveling up characters outside the party is much less of a hassle so switching someone in is pretty painless now. From what I recall of the original, I still think I stuck with the same party here as I did back then, though, without even trying to (Yukari, Akihiko, and Aigis.) The combat is also noticeably easier than it used to be, and I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that since I do like at least some challenge in my turn-based RPGs, at least on bosses, and didn't really get any here. At least the combat system itself is basically just 5's, and that's about as snappy as it gets in a game like this which I appreciate greatly when there's so much combat to be had, but I can't help but feel like I've been a bit robbed of re-experiencing the true Persona 3 experience when the final boss doesn't kill me on its last phase after spending about 24 hours fighting it (I will probably never forget that The Arcana is the means by which all is revealed.)
Did I still have a good time going up all those floors, fighting all those enemies that didn't pose much of a threath whatsoever and sometimes looked suspiciously like Hulk Hogan? Yeah, I honestly did. I'd have preferred some tweaks to the difficulty and hand-crafted dungeons instead of what we got, but it still works and the developers do have a very strong sense of pacing (not something most people would probably associate with a Persona game) in the floors don't take long to get through, combat is fast-paced and there's always something to do on every floor, be that finding useful treasure, fighting rare enemies for more experiences, or gathering materials by smashing things. It's nothing amazing, but also not boring until maybe the final few floors and at that point the game's almost over anyway.
So there are a few small things that I'm not the biggest fan of in Persona 3, but the biggest issue is one that this remake probably could have fixed, but for some reason didn't. Probably the biggest draw of the modern Persona games to me is the life-sim aspect of them, and just getting lost in the day-to-day activities. As the first game in the series to have this structure, it's not super surprising that 3 sort of doesn't do this very well, but I'd forgotten just how poorly it manages to balance Tartarus with this. It's still as addictive as ever, but weak social links are a big issue (so many of them just revolve around saying yes to the worst suggestions people throw at you, and even the good ones rarely have enough of a story to really be interesting for the 10 parts they have), as is the fact that you can max out all of your skills fairly early in the game without any need of some guide to get an optimal playthrough.
Persona 3's biggest flaw, however, is just how many days there isn't anything to do. Since you have both days and nights and Tartarus can only be entered during night-time, there's a lot of just going to bed at least once, but often even twice a day since there isn't anything to do after a certain point and that month's whole Tartarus section can easily be cleared in a day or two. For a game about not being afraid to live life and sort of seize the day, I'm not sure just wasting day after day on doing nothing really goes hand in hand with that, and from a gameplay perspective it becomes pretty boring. It becomes even worse during the game's many school breaks since almost every social link is tied to a student and they only exist on school days, so those days are mostly spent just wasting away when you really should be able to call up at least some of these people to make more progress with their, admittedly often pretty weak (though I will not accept any criticism towards Bebe), micro story. At least I can use those days to progress that one social link where you're supposed to protect a scammer with a doomsday cult from being beaten up by people he's stolen money from.
Revamped art style and rearranged music were honestly neither good or bad to me. I feel like people overestimate the grime of the original's aesthetics so this being more colorful doesn't really change much to me or ruin the tone that's being conveyed, and most of the music sounds basically the same, though with some notable exceptions being worse and others being better. It looks good (though it feels like these games probably could be a bit more graphically impressive, even if the art styles are always great), sounds great, so I'm personally pretty pleased with the whole audio-visual thing, and some of the new tracks are fantastic. The new voice actors also do an admirable job, mostly sounding like I remember the previous voice actors outside of Yukari who sounds like a completely different character though not really in a bad way, but she definitely took a while to get used to. Still romanced her, just like in the original. Starting to worry that I haven't changed at all in these eight years...?
Anyway, I'm starting to feel like I've spent too much time talking about this game (almost 2000 words, apparently), but I guess there's a lot to say about the things you care about, and I really do care about Persona 3 and like so much about it and its whole deal, but also find myself frustrated about a lot of decisions made both with the original, but also the remake and how it didn't really do enough to maybe iron out some of issues that have mostly been fixed in later games (though good on Atlus for removing the original's really weird transphobic "joke"). The entire epilogue, though? Goddamn, by far the best in the series, especially when you've maxed out all the social links like I did and you really get to take your time walking down this very melancholic memory lane with all the characters you've grown to at least tolerate and in some cases really like, before the inevitable ending (which I honestly wish wasn't so ambiguous even as someone who knows what's going on, but it's still really powerful), and then being left to ponder on life, death and this grand journey as the credits roll with that great song playing in the background. Few games have stuck the landing as well as Persona 3 does, and it's honestly worth the entire price of admission on its own.
Rest in piss Strega