Persona 3 FES is my favorite JRPG of all time so Persona 3 Portable had some giant shoes to fill, that was an impossible task at the end of the day. I never knew it existed back when my psp was still functional and hearing about the changes made me skip it when I thought about emulation. Fast forward to now in 2023 where I'm playing this rerelease. Its been awhile since I've last played FES though I was with my brother during his initial journey through it. I had one of the biggest smiles on my face when Want To Be Close played for the first time during this playthrough.
Story wise it is pretty much the same no matter the route with some minimal changes here and there, but one very large change if you max a specific S-link on the FEMC's route that I hate cuz it ruins a massive emotional moment. I still think this has the best story of the Persona games I've played, which is 2 through 5, and you'll still get that here despite that massive mistake. Tartarus is something you either love or hate. Think of it like Mementos in Persona 5 for all you new fans but you're going up instead of down. Music is still fantastic though FEMC has several different tracks from Male MC's route. She does not get the best JRPG battle theme of all time, Mass Destruction, so her route is automatically inferior although Way of Life and Time are fantastic tracks exclusive to her. She does however get a link with best boy Koromaru so that another positive for her. In general you get to see a lot of new interactions with the cast, both female and male, with her and her very different personality from the Male MC, which in turn gives you a new perspective on his own growth. Male MC is still unfortunately auto dating every girl he maxes out just like in the original but FEMC isn't forced into a relationship when max ranking with the guys prospect. Don't know why they couldn't have done that their either. You had VAs back in the studio for new lines for the female route already. Controlling the party members is the main reason why people place it higher. Yes, it is nice to do so but the game was clearly not designed for it or the persona 4 bonus actions that were added. The ai in FES is also not as unwieldy as the Marin Karin memes lead you to believe. Anyone who uses that excuse never played FES and/or never touched the tactics menu to adjust her and cried about it. Its not up for debate. The MC's are also locked to a single weapon now instead of Male MC being able to use multiple types like in FES. Male MC is locked to one handed swords, albeit they are different from Mitsusru's one handed swords, and FEMC is locked to Nagitama. At the very least FEMC's is a brand new thing. Depending on who you ask, it not having the Answer is a good thing. I am one of those people. I HATE The Answer. I think it ruins a lot of Persona 3's ending.
What I think it does the worst is presentation. The anime cutscenes from the ps2 release were removed which removes a lot of the tone and every big moment is neutered. At the beginning of the game they actually recreated the awakening scene with the psp models, so they could have done it but instead they gave up. Instead the rest of those cutscenes are full on visual novel like, meaning the character models are not acting out the scene alongside the dialogue boxes. Instead of having a full on scene, you stare at a static background shit while a sound effect plays and/or the character images. Sure did love just seeing a big JPEG shake violently during the big moment instead of an actual animated scene. This completely kills the moment. You also cannot walk around the maps outside of dungeons, its just an image of the location you are in like the school and using a cursor. Many will say "oh it doesn't matter" but I disagree as it is another case of the tone and progression of the world removed cuz things change along with the story. In a genre where story is the main focus and an rpg, it needs to be visually stimulating which I do not think VN style ever is. PSP limitations were an excuse for it back then, it is not one anymore. At the time of playing there is also not a way to select the skill inheritance so you're gonna be backing out of fusions until the right ones are selected. If you want more than one? Good luck getting both, instead see if you can get skill cards and save yourself some sanity. However if you wanna get skill cards copied, you gotta mash cancel as the inari randomly selects from your pool. Why they couldn't have implemented a menu selection I have no idea and it takes 5 in game days to get your card as well.
These presentation hits do more harm to the game for me than the improvements it gives and thats why, despite the most important things like the story and characters being mostly the same, I will never place Persona 3 Portable above FES. The best version of Persona 3 would be FES with the Portable content and changes added in. However, I have heard that FES' source code is a mess so we are stuck with Portable without a full on remake. I'll take that excuse over the poor archival issues that have been increasing in number these past few year.
I would very much recommend to not use this as your first experience with Persona 3, play FES first then play Portable as FEMC however I can't control what you do. If you wanna have a diluted experience, you are only doing yourself a disservice.
Story wise it is pretty much the same no matter the route with some minimal changes here and there, but one very large change if you max a specific S-link on the FEMC's route that I hate cuz it ruins a massive emotional moment. I still think this has the best story of the Persona games I've played, which is 2 through 5, and you'll still get that here despite that massive mistake. Tartarus is something you either love or hate. Think of it like Mementos in Persona 5 for all you new fans but you're going up instead of down. Music is still fantastic though FEMC has several different tracks from Male MC's route. She does not get the best JRPG battle theme of all time, Mass Destruction, so her route is automatically inferior although Way of Life and Time are fantastic tracks exclusive to her. She does however get a link with best boy Koromaru so that another positive for her. In general you get to see a lot of new interactions with the cast, both female and male, with her and her very different personality from the Male MC, which in turn gives you a new perspective on his own growth. Male MC is still unfortunately auto dating every girl he maxes out just like in the original but FEMC isn't forced into a relationship when max ranking with the guys prospect. Don't know why they couldn't have done that their either. You had VAs back in the studio for new lines for the female route already. Controlling the party members is the main reason why people place it higher. Yes, it is nice to do so but the game was clearly not designed for it or the persona 4 bonus actions that were added. The ai in FES is also not as unwieldy as the Marin Karin memes lead you to believe. Anyone who uses that excuse never played FES and/or never touched the tactics menu to adjust her and cried about it. Its not up for debate. The MC's are also locked to a single weapon now instead of Male MC being able to use multiple types like in FES. Male MC is locked to one handed swords, albeit they are different from Mitsusru's one handed swords, and FEMC is locked to Nagitama. At the very least FEMC's is a brand new thing. Depending on who you ask, it not having the Answer is a good thing. I am one of those people. I HATE The Answer. I think it ruins a lot of Persona 3's ending.
What I think it does the worst is presentation. The anime cutscenes from the ps2 release were removed which removes a lot of the tone and every big moment is neutered. At the beginning of the game they actually recreated the awakening scene with the psp models, so they could have done it but instead they gave up. Instead the rest of those cutscenes are full on visual novel like, meaning the character models are not acting out the scene alongside the dialogue boxes. Instead of having a full on scene, you stare at a static background shit while a sound effect plays and/or the character images. Sure did love just seeing a big JPEG shake violently during the big moment instead of an actual animated scene. This completely kills the moment. You also cannot walk around the maps outside of dungeons, its just an image of the location you are in like the school and using a cursor. Many will say "oh it doesn't matter" but I disagree as it is another case of the tone and progression of the world removed cuz things change along with the story. In a genre where story is the main focus and an rpg, it needs to be visually stimulating which I do not think VN style ever is. PSP limitations were an excuse for it back then, it is not one anymore. At the time of playing there is also not a way to select the skill inheritance so you're gonna be backing out of fusions until the right ones are selected. If you want more than one? Good luck getting both, instead see if you can get skill cards and save yourself some sanity. However if you wanna get skill cards copied, you gotta mash cancel as the inari randomly selects from your pool. Why they couldn't have implemented a menu selection I have no idea and it takes 5 in game days to get your card as well.
These presentation hits do more harm to the game for me than the improvements it gives and thats why, despite the most important things like the story and characters being mostly the same, I will never place Persona 3 Portable above FES. The best version of Persona 3 would be FES with the Portable content and changes added in. However, I have heard that FES' source code is a mess so we are stuck with Portable without a full on remake. I'll take that excuse over the poor archival issues that have been increasing in number these past few year.
I would very much recommend to not use this as your first experience with Persona 3, play FES first then play Portable as FEMC however I can't control what you do. If you wanna have a diluted experience, you are only doing yourself a disservice.