While i can appreciate and respect this game a lot for what it did for the persona series and leading to 2 of my favourite games of all time (4 golden and 5 royal), i didn't connect with this game as much as the others. This was mainly due to a lot of aspects that mainly come from this game, which i'll discuss now.
While this is the first game that introduced social links, and the stories themselves are fairly well written with me only really feeling weird about like 2 characters of the whole bunch, my main complaints revolve around features they added to this system in 4, mainly being that outside of fusion bonuses there are no rewards for doing social links, and that i found it annoying that i couldn't do any links with male characters. The second point wasn't too much of an issue in the second half of the game compared to the first because the characters developed more and i liked them a lot more, but this led to me fucking hating junpei from the start of the game until like august of september when his character started to actually develop outside of being jealous of the MC, which made me like him a lot more.
Tartarus fucking sucks. I didn't like the dungeons in 4 coming from 5 as the repetitive nature of the layouts and enemies i found really annoying, but the themes each dungeon had made going through each one at least somewhat bearable. But Tartarus is litterally a giant fuck you tower that repeats the same structure for the entire game. My complaint with this games gameplay is not the fact you can't control party members attacks (as while it is fucking annoying I can at least almost control what they do when fighting enemies and it actually made grinding easier for me as it was almost purely automatic in the end game with my setup basically killing every enemy in 1 or 2 turns), it is that actually bringing myself to go to tartarus outside of getting to the top of a block (which i usually do in the first couple nights i can go) is a damn near impossible feat when I'm essentially just replaying the same fucking levels for 30 minutes or an hour so my party can be like 3 or 4 levels higher than they normally would be.
I will admit that I was spoiled major points specifically relating to the ending of the game, which also factored into me not caring for the story probably as much as I would have going blind into it, but the side narratives of the story because of this I found to be extremely compelling and I really appreciated seeing the growth of characters over the course of the game.
There are some other nitpicky things about this game that rubbed me a bit the wrong way, but all of these mainly boil down to complaints that the other persona games did better in later entries.
Overall while I did like The Journey of persona 3, I will probably never ever in a bagillion years play through it on fes ever again, and this has made me more than ever interested and excited to play through reload as I feel that a lot of the problems I have with this game will be fixed there.
While this is the first game that introduced social links, and the stories themselves are fairly well written with me only really feeling weird about like 2 characters of the whole bunch, my main complaints revolve around features they added to this system in 4, mainly being that outside of fusion bonuses there are no rewards for doing social links, and that i found it annoying that i couldn't do any links with male characters. The second point wasn't too much of an issue in the second half of the game compared to the first because the characters developed more and i liked them a lot more, but this led to me fucking hating junpei from the start of the game until like august of september when his character started to actually develop outside of being jealous of the MC, which made me like him a lot more.
Tartarus fucking sucks. I didn't like the dungeons in 4 coming from 5 as the repetitive nature of the layouts and enemies i found really annoying, but the themes each dungeon had made going through each one at least somewhat bearable. But Tartarus is litterally a giant fuck you tower that repeats the same structure for the entire game. My complaint with this games gameplay is not the fact you can't control party members attacks (as while it is fucking annoying I can at least almost control what they do when fighting enemies and it actually made grinding easier for me as it was almost purely automatic in the end game with my setup basically killing every enemy in 1 or 2 turns), it is that actually bringing myself to go to tartarus outside of getting to the top of a block (which i usually do in the first couple nights i can go) is a damn near impossible feat when I'm essentially just replaying the same fucking levels for 30 minutes or an hour so my party can be like 3 or 4 levels higher than they normally would be.
I will admit that I was spoiled major points specifically relating to the ending of the game, which also factored into me not caring for the story probably as much as I would have going blind into it, but the side narratives of the story because of this I found to be extremely compelling and I really appreciated seeing the growth of characters over the course of the game.
There are some other nitpicky things about this game that rubbed me a bit the wrong way, but all of these mainly boil down to complaints that the other persona games did better in later entries.
Overall while I did like The Journey of persona 3, I will probably never ever in a bagillion years play through it on fes ever again, and this has made me more than ever interested and excited to play through reload as I feel that a lot of the problems I have with this game will be fixed there.