Emulated. Its pretty interesting how wildly different this is from Persona 1, which I finished not too long ago, but still feels distinctly like a game of the same series. The now staple school life aspects of the Persona series were introduced here, and the combat has changed a bit. Instead of every party member having 3 personas, now everyone but you has 1, you can have up to 12. Its an interesting change I'm not sure I like. You don't have as much control over your party member now. In fact, in the original release and the improved FES you can't even control your party in battle. Thankfully the devs realized that was dumb and you can control them here. Persona 3 in general has a trend of giving you less control over things you previously could, all of which were bad ideas that were changed in later sequels. You can't even choose what skills your party member they keep or change when they level up now, they automatically do it themselves, which is a change I definitely don't like. You can't manually choose what skills the personas you fuse have either, you have to pray and hope the RNG gives you the ones you want.

Little niggles aside, I did like this game, and found the story pretty engaging, the characters were likable enough and the music was great, as is tradition of the Persona series.