Just in time to be behind the times, I have completed my first Persona joint. Like many others, I found myself rolling my eyes at the initial announcement of a Persona 3 remake. The main function of a remake, after all, should be to remake a game with a solid core concept, but which stumbled in execution. "People like 3, it's the first good one. Why not remake 1 or 2?". Having played it, I've changed my tune; this is a prime remake candidate. So much of the heart here is fantastic, but the game fails to totally balance on its rollerskates without the children of the village coming around and spitting gum in its hair.
The game, I would say to a problematic degree, completely divorces its JRPG battling system from its Social Sim system. Every so often JRPG will ask to come to their son's piano recital or Social Sim will suggest they all visit Olive Garden together, but it never coalesces in any meaningful way. Still, it's a good thing Social Sim has primary custody, because it's by far the stronger half. There's a variety of characters to interact with, most of whom have their own, surprisingly compelling narratives. Availability or lack thereof on certain days, while frustrating from a gameplay perspective, does serve to make the characters feel more autonomous. In fact, the way the game weaves its side characters throughout and with one another really helps to make the entire environment seem alive. While I'm in Fuuka's bedroom looking at her Warhammer collection, I know Kazushi could be out running, Yukari's shopping at the mall, and Kenji's retreated back into his goon cave.
All that being said, the social links themselves are unfortunately entirely contained within their own confines. It does undercut the feeling of developing a connection when me and Yuko have a flurry of a honeymoon romance over the span of a week and a half and then we become as strangers; nay, worse than strangers, for we could never become acquainted. Having some incentive to continue interacting with or even acknowledging these people's existence would go a long way. In addition to that is the obvious problem of the forced harem. The MC, in my reality named Roscoe Slippy (Roscoe-kun, if you will), is apparently hornier than Fuuka at Best Buy and is therefore incapable of resisting the urge to pork anyone and anything that so much as compliments his pog collection.
The constantly ticking school year does a great deal to liven up the characters and their dynamics. Having events crop up throughout the year to shake things up by affecting availability, location, etc does a good job at highlighting the passage of time (even though being put in "no girls or Kenji allowed" gay baby jail for a month during summer break made me want to scream). It's really effective, semi-organic gameplay storytelling when, for example, everyone becomes demotivated to go to Tartarus or hang out for a week after a major tragedy. You feel like they have something going on outside of you. By the end of the game, it actually feels like you've gone through a great deal with these people, and you have a whole journey to reminisce on with them, except for maybe the weird, implied Yukari shower sex that never comes up again, probably shouldn't reminisce on that.
The actual plot plot is so so. The actual effect or threat of the shadows is never terribly well explained, nor is the entire deal with Strega. Takaya is the ultimate hater, seeming to base his entire goal off of just being anti-whatever we're doing. It kind of feels like there should be a bit more to his agenda then showing up a couple times to shake his fist at me before getting his teeth pushed in by a Hanged Man-infused skateboard. As was probably made clear earlier, the highlights, and indeed focus, of the plot, both story-wise and thematically, are undoubtedly the character moments throughout. It was fairly off-putting when, within one month, the game marches out a conga line of four new characters, all of whom seem to be auditioning as the quirky side character who goes on to star in their own spinoff sitcom on ABC (Congratulations Aigis!). In spite of that, by the end of the game, they do somehow flesh out and endear me to each and every member of SEES, giving them all climactic character moments that manage to weave into not just the core plot, but each other. The only exception I would throw out there is perhaps Shinjiro; I would've liked a tad more characterization from him, though I understand he's supposed to be a quiet loner-type. Indeed, the strong characterization is woven throughout so much, right down to those wonderfully fun little videos of Ken's milky little rat hole or Stupei talking to his baseball hat like it's the Green Goblin mask, that it makes me wonder who would ever favor a non-party romance. Sorry, Yuko, you can walk me through the genetic breakdown of our super-spawn another time. And Chihiro, you can... do whatever you would've done if I touched your social link. Made Youtube video essays about your favorite Buñuel, idk.
The real rub, the ultimate tragedy of Persona 3, is of course Tartarus. Let's not mince words: Tartarus is not very good. Rather, Tartarus is the physical manifestation of humanity's collective desire to die. Tartarus is the final hell in at least a half dozen different forms of Buddhism. Tartarus is what Amish parents warn their kids awaits them in the big city and what fundamentalists tell you will happen if you masturbate. Tartarus is... not very good. All that being said, it's really nothing quite so grand. The truth is just that Tartarus is boring. You walk through literally hundreds of near-identical randomly generated rooms, grinding random enemies without context or particularly urgent purpose. I'm sure this ranks very highly amongst electrode-riddled rats being programmed to run on wheels for chunks of cheese, but as a human being who appreciates a slightly stronger sense of accomplishment than a bit a brie or a crumb of camembert, it leaves me a little cold after the 2nd hour, positively homicidal by the 20th, and innovating new forms of mental transcendence by the 80th (or just listening to a podcast).
It's true that the structure of Tartarus goes a long way towards making every visit feel like the video game equivalent of trying to buy a coffee by digging pennies out of the crack behind a urinal, but I would argue the combat system itself is also to blame. Perhaps controversially, since every SMT/P game seems to be identical in this regard, I don't think the combat in this game is great. To start with a positive, I actually really appreciate the move names. It may seem like a weird thing to highlight, but the typical moves are designed with what is essentially their own language. Ma- or Me- indicates AOE, -la or -lao indicate medium power, -dyne is high power, etc. At a glance, it's often possible to figure out what a move does, even if you've never seen it before. I almost just wish it was consistently applicable.
Ok, that's enough niceties, now let me bicker. Generally, I have three major issues with battles, which each kind of flow into the next. First up is a bit multifaceted, but broadly manifests in how easy it is to end up stun-locked. I fully understand any of these kinds of criticisms can be easily dismissed by furious "git gud" keyboard mashing, telling me that even Hitler understood the meta better than this, but I genuinely don't know how I'm supposed to deal with just flat out having my turn skipped two, three, four times in a row. Multiple times I would go from full health to zero without getting to take an action. Perhaps it's my fault for deploying paper when my enemy is clearly so scissors-coded, but until Fuuka winds up her crank-powered Shinigami eyes, I really have no way of knowing what types are ok. Beyond that, though, I recall one boss fight in which I would cycle between Being Feared > Getting Knocked Down By a Crit Because I'm Feared > Getting Back Up > Recovering > Getting Feared Again. Things like that, where the game seems to arbitrarily decide you're going to lose now because you got unlucky is kind of maddening, especially in a game with absolutely no autosaves. That's not even mentioning what seems to be some bizarre damage variance, where an enemy I've smeared into concrete 100 times by that point suddenly gets the powers of the Pirate King and belts out a nuclear home run that insta-flattens me without so much as a "Be careful!".
Leading on from that, Point #2 is to do with status effect moves, which make up a generous portion of the catalogue. Let me just say this flat out: Any ability in any game which has an effect akin to "Activate: Win the Game. Accuracy: 10%" is incredibly poorly designed. The status effects in this game are almost always guaranteed to miss, in which case Cupid Baby is just standing there like a dork shouting "Magic Missiles! Magic Missiles!", but if they do connect, they completely change the course of the fight. Or at least they do when the enemy uses them; when I connect with a paralysis or a fear, the enemy looks at me like I just gave them a Chick Tract in a public bathroom and goes on like nothing happened. For whatever reason, Poison in this game not only eats a fat chunk of health each turn, it lasts forever, unlike, say, that Nintendo series that ripped off Palworld, meaning you either muscle your way through the rest of the fight, or you waste an entire turn on an antidote. If your whole party is poisoned, forget it. Something like Rage or especially Charm is even more significant by depriving a character of their turns (I blazed my way through a good section of the harder midgame fights abusing Dreamfest). Before I give the impression of these grand sweeping plays, I will reiterate that 90% of the time you just end up standing there like an idiot while metal Hulk Hogan body slams Stupei.
The third and final point apparently varies by version. In FES, at least, there's criticism to be directed at the autonomous decision-making of your party members. Now, I actually don't mind your teammates making their own decisions; it goes a long way towards emphasizing that I am Roscoe-kun, not some amorphous presence mouth-breathing down Roscoe-kun's shoulder telling him to kill Spider-man. On top of that, there are ample techniques that allow you to control what their priorities should be. Unfortunately, the issue is that your party members are just often kind of stupid. Whether it's Yukari set to support deciding to drop a single-target heal on herself while the entire party is ready to drop from a moderate gasp or Mitsuru obsessively spamming Marin Karin to no avail like a seductive Sisyphus, allies will frequently make very obviously ineffective decisions that force me to spend my turns playing catch-up. In fact, it frequently proved to be most effective for me to be the dedicated towel boy bringing everybody juice boxes. It must just come down to how certain characters were programmed; Akihiko is consistently laying shadows out while Mitsuru's busy shaking her can-cans for a table with hands.
Ultimately, these problems seem niche because they kind of are; combat relies on a pretty straightforward typing-system that makes the majority of encounters pretty trivial. Then, when your guard is down, one of these problems rears up and wipes an hour of progress because you didn't bother to save. It's less unmanageable and more frustrating and tedious, like Tartarus as a whole.
Of course, I can't move past the combat without talking about the series' namesake, the Persona system. Frankly, it's incomprehensible. I know there are rules, I know the game explains the rules, but it still comes across like I'm doing advanced trigonometry in ancient Assyrian. I was honestly just randomly mixing and matching Personas until I saw one that had moves I wanted. Seriously streamlining and clarifying how any of that works should be a priority for the remake. As for the Persona designs, they range all the way from the most bizarre thing I've ever seen (good) to alot of Guys. I could never discard any system that lets me craft Mothman and, frankly, I also just got a kick every time an eldritch abomination of flesh and teeth came out with the move Sexy Dance.
What else? Some random things worth mentioning: I love how expressive the character portraits are, especially on Stupei and Fuuka. The voice acting ranges from solid to that perfect level of bad that's both super endearing and super memorable (also Fuuka). Giving more to do in the evenings would be appreciated, as I spent the last couple months seeing how much I could fill a bucket with drool between 5 and 12 PM, although that partially comes down to me mis-allocating my time early on. The little bits of visual flair here and there are pretty nice, though of course seem positively quaint compared to Persona 5 or, indeed, the remake of Persona 3. It's also impossible to discuss a Persona game without mentioning the music; there's some great tracks. I'd like it even more if this 80-hour game had more than four of them. There are songs here that will be burned into my brain forever, though there was often a disconnect with the intensity of the music in more mundane scenes.
In short, this is one of those games that sticks with you. Not because it's perfect, far from it, but it's got so many wonderful little details, and oozes so much heart that it's impossible not to appreciate it at its best. If the remake is able to retain that while cleaning up some of its more egregious blemishes, you'll be dealing with a true home run.
EDIT / ADDENDUM: From ~03/05/24 to 03/17/24, I have now played through The Answer, a task I wasn't sure I was up for at first, given its reputation as Grind City. Having completed it, my feelings are generally more mixed than with The Journey, but far from overwhelmingly negative. The thought process for this rump sequel feels like the Persona dev team had an idea for the beginning of the story, an idea for the end of the story, and left everything else to the junior intern who had replaced his keyboard keys with Dubble Bubble.
Things start off with a strong sense of intrigue; a mysterious, new location (in the form of an admittedly on-the-nose metaphor), a likable new character who knows more than she's letting on, and more of Yukari being an asshole to everyone than you could ever ask for. Even the gameplay loop is initially, while not improved, as least presented in more palatable, shorter chunks of endurance, as opposed to The Journey's grinding slog through more inhuman monstrosities than a tour of England.
Unfortunately, that lasts for about two hours. The 20 after that are tedious beyond belief, as the sections become longer and combat frustrations really start to rack up. I'm not aware the degree to which I'm right versus experiencing Tartarus trauma flashbacks, but the fights somehow felt even worse here. Accuracy is a joke; anecdotally, it felt sub-50% on average, with fights looking more like softball games at a school for the blind and deaf. Critical hits also felt substantially more common, with even Sensei Metis's mastery of the four elements not saving her from getting leg sweeped by a pair of dice. Combine the constant stun-locks with the increased damage from being locked into Hard Mode, and even mundane fights could very easily spiral into a bloodbath.
Outside of the fights... oh wait, there is nothing outside of the fights. Bufudyne-ing your way through a particularly tough boss feels distinctly soul-crushing when the reward the game offers you is to immediately go do it again. Your only breaks from Persona Mystery Dungeon are shopping and fusing Personas. Equipment upgrades in The Answer feel extremely needlessly iterative, having to go back and forth across the Loading Screen Event Horizon so that I can check each party member's equipment > go buy new stuff > go back to equip > sell the old stuff so I can buy more > go back and equip > and so on, all so Queen Mitsuru can be clad in the most luxurious samurai sandals (+60 defense), instead of those disgusting peasant clompers she was stuck with before (A mere +58 defense). As for the Persona fusing, it's fundamentally the same, except for the loss of the Compendium, making the actual Personas you end up with feel even more like letting Mothman take the wheel.
Upon clearing a dungeon, you are presented with a brief cutscene, featuring universally pointless flashbacks to scenes that are either a) completely uninteresting or b) something we have already seen and learn nothing more about here. The only mildly interesting exception was Junpei. The brief exchanges afterwards occasionally offer some more engaging back and forth, but it's actually kind of hard to lock in for a two-minute cutscene after spending the last three hours devoting my mind and will to either nirvana or carcinization, whichever came first.
What's really frustrating about The Answer, though is the last few hours; unfortunately, they're actually pretty good. I WISH I could write this off as a failed expansion when so much of it was so obnoxious. However, after all of that, the game suddenly sparks to life with actual character dynamics / conflicts for every SEES member (except Fuuka, whose role in this expansion is to say "Aigis...", "Metis...", "Yukari...", "Akihiko...", etc.). Well-written dialogue delivered in service of an actual theme and progressing the mystery of the plot that's been stagnant for 20+ hours is the sweet oasis in the Desert of Doors. It's true the cutscenes do meander on the same points, especially given the core themes of finding strength in friendship and hope are ultimately the exact same things Roscoe Slippy just spent 80 hours getting drilled in. However, the addressing of grief in the context of death in a more direct way than the original game did is a welcome twist on that discussion, and by the end I was well and truly moved. Aigis in particular had a pretty beautiful arc, and the ultimate payoff for Metis was handled wonderfully. I can't write off anything that manages to strike me right through the heart with its ending cutscene (I had Kohryu's Scales on Metis). Side note, by the way: The animated cutscenes are all much longer and better animated in this than in The Journey, for some reason.
Even if it wasn't so strong, by god, seeing more of these characters that I had grown so attached to really was enough for me. I can't help but think about a version of The Answer that either trimmed down the gameplay sections or seriously beefed up the character moments in amongst the trudging. I'm not even asking for Social Links, mind you. Some cutscenes of characters talking about how they're feeling, or even just having a light-hearted gag conversation would've been so much more motivating than having all the characterization totally backloaded.
I generally hate the idea of pretending like watching a game's story on Youtube is comparable to actually playing the thing, but this is probably the closest I've ever come. Mind you, I would NEVER say that about The Journey, but in The Answer, it really feels like the actual gameplay does so little to inform the story that I can almost recommend just skipping it entirely (almost - I'm still not quite that blackpilled). Ignoring that there's a remake on the horizon and focusing only on this, the FES version, The Answer is a medicine. It's gross and hard to get down, but in the end, it's healing. I have to recommend it, but I wish I didn't have to feel bad about it.
The game, I would say to a problematic degree, completely divorces its JRPG battling system from its Social Sim system. Every so often JRPG will ask to come to their son's piano recital or Social Sim will suggest they all visit Olive Garden together, but it never coalesces in any meaningful way. Still, it's a good thing Social Sim has primary custody, because it's by far the stronger half. There's a variety of characters to interact with, most of whom have their own, surprisingly compelling narratives. Availability or lack thereof on certain days, while frustrating from a gameplay perspective, does serve to make the characters feel more autonomous. In fact, the way the game weaves its side characters throughout and with one another really helps to make the entire environment seem alive. While I'm in Fuuka's bedroom looking at her Warhammer collection, I know Kazushi could be out running, Yukari's shopping at the mall, and Kenji's retreated back into his goon cave.
All that being said, the social links themselves are unfortunately entirely contained within their own confines. It does undercut the feeling of developing a connection when me and Yuko have a flurry of a honeymoon romance over the span of a week and a half and then we become as strangers; nay, worse than strangers, for we could never become acquainted. Having some incentive to continue interacting with or even acknowledging these people's existence would go a long way. In addition to that is the obvious problem of the forced harem. The MC, in my reality named Roscoe Slippy (Roscoe-kun, if you will), is apparently hornier than Fuuka at Best Buy and is therefore incapable of resisting the urge to pork anyone and anything that so much as compliments his pog collection.
The constantly ticking school year does a great deal to liven up the characters and their dynamics. Having events crop up throughout the year to shake things up by affecting availability, location, etc does a good job at highlighting the passage of time (even though being put in "no girls or Kenji allowed" gay baby jail for a month during summer break made me want to scream). It's really effective, semi-organic gameplay storytelling when, for example, everyone becomes demotivated to go to Tartarus or hang out for a week after a major tragedy. You feel like they have something going on outside of you. By the end of the game, it actually feels like you've gone through a great deal with these people, and you have a whole journey to reminisce on with them, except for maybe the weird, implied Yukari shower sex that never comes up again, probably shouldn't reminisce on that.
The actual plot plot is so so. The actual effect or threat of the shadows is never terribly well explained, nor is the entire deal with Strega. Takaya is the ultimate hater, seeming to base his entire goal off of just being anti-whatever we're doing. It kind of feels like there should be a bit more to his agenda then showing up a couple times to shake his fist at me before getting his teeth pushed in by a Hanged Man-infused skateboard. As was probably made clear earlier, the highlights, and indeed focus, of the plot, both story-wise and thematically, are undoubtedly the character moments throughout. It was fairly off-putting when, within one month, the game marches out a conga line of four new characters, all of whom seem to be auditioning as the quirky side character who goes on to star in their own spinoff sitcom on ABC (Congratulations Aigis!). In spite of that, by the end of the game, they do somehow flesh out and endear me to each and every member of SEES, giving them all climactic character moments that manage to weave into not just the core plot, but each other. The only exception I would throw out there is perhaps Shinjiro; I would've liked a tad more characterization from him, though I understand he's supposed to be a quiet loner-type. Indeed, the strong characterization is woven throughout so much, right down to those wonderfully fun little videos of Ken's milky little rat hole or Stupei talking to his baseball hat like it's the Green Goblin mask, that it makes me wonder who would ever favor a non-party romance. Sorry, Yuko, you can walk me through the genetic breakdown of our super-spawn another time. And Chihiro, you can... do whatever you would've done if I touched your social link. Made Youtube video essays about your favorite Buñuel, idk.
The real rub, the ultimate tragedy of Persona 3, is of course Tartarus. Let's not mince words: Tartarus is not very good. Rather, Tartarus is the physical manifestation of humanity's collective desire to die. Tartarus is the final hell in at least a half dozen different forms of Buddhism. Tartarus is what Amish parents warn their kids awaits them in the big city and what fundamentalists tell you will happen if you masturbate. Tartarus is... not very good. All that being said, it's really nothing quite so grand. The truth is just that Tartarus is boring. You walk through literally hundreds of near-identical randomly generated rooms, grinding random enemies without context or particularly urgent purpose. I'm sure this ranks very highly amongst electrode-riddled rats being programmed to run on wheels for chunks of cheese, but as a human being who appreciates a slightly stronger sense of accomplishment than a bit a brie or a crumb of camembert, it leaves me a little cold after the 2nd hour, positively homicidal by the 20th, and innovating new forms of mental transcendence by the 80th (or just listening to a podcast).
It's true that the structure of Tartarus goes a long way towards making every visit feel like the video game equivalent of trying to buy a coffee by digging pennies out of the crack behind a urinal, but I would argue the combat system itself is also to blame. Perhaps controversially, since every SMT/P game seems to be identical in this regard, I don't think the combat in this game is great. To start with a positive, I actually really appreciate the move names. It may seem like a weird thing to highlight, but the typical moves are designed with what is essentially their own language. Ma- or Me- indicates AOE, -la or -lao indicate medium power, -dyne is high power, etc. At a glance, it's often possible to figure out what a move does, even if you've never seen it before. I almost just wish it was consistently applicable.
Ok, that's enough niceties, now let me bicker. Generally, I have three major issues with battles, which each kind of flow into the next. First up is a bit multifaceted, but broadly manifests in how easy it is to end up stun-locked. I fully understand any of these kinds of criticisms can be easily dismissed by furious "git gud" keyboard mashing, telling me that even Hitler understood the meta better than this, but I genuinely don't know how I'm supposed to deal with just flat out having my turn skipped two, three, four times in a row. Multiple times I would go from full health to zero without getting to take an action. Perhaps it's my fault for deploying paper when my enemy is clearly so scissors-coded, but until Fuuka winds up her crank-powered Shinigami eyes, I really have no way of knowing what types are ok. Beyond that, though, I recall one boss fight in which I would cycle between Being Feared > Getting Knocked Down By a Crit Because I'm Feared > Getting Back Up > Recovering > Getting Feared Again. Things like that, where the game seems to arbitrarily decide you're going to lose now because you got unlucky is kind of maddening, especially in a game with absolutely no autosaves. That's not even mentioning what seems to be some bizarre damage variance, where an enemy I've smeared into concrete 100 times by that point suddenly gets the powers of the Pirate King and belts out a nuclear home run that insta-flattens me without so much as a "Be careful!".
Leading on from that, Point #2 is to do with status effect moves, which make up a generous portion of the catalogue. Let me just say this flat out: Any ability in any game which has an effect akin to "Activate: Win the Game. Accuracy: 10%" is incredibly poorly designed. The status effects in this game are almost always guaranteed to miss, in which case Cupid Baby is just standing there like a dork shouting "Magic Missiles! Magic Missiles!", but if they do connect, they completely change the course of the fight. Or at least they do when the enemy uses them; when I connect with a paralysis or a fear, the enemy looks at me like I just gave them a Chick Tract in a public bathroom and goes on like nothing happened. For whatever reason, Poison in this game not only eats a fat chunk of health each turn, it lasts forever, unlike, say, that Nintendo series that ripped off Palworld, meaning you either muscle your way through the rest of the fight, or you waste an entire turn on an antidote. If your whole party is poisoned, forget it. Something like Rage or especially Charm is even more significant by depriving a character of their turns (I blazed my way through a good section of the harder midgame fights abusing Dreamfest). Before I give the impression of these grand sweeping plays, I will reiterate that 90% of the time you just end up standing there like an idiot while metal Hulk Hogan body slams Stupei.
The third and final point apparently varies by version. In FES, at least, there's criticism to be directed at the autonomous decision-making of your party members. Now, I actually don't mind your teammates making their own decisions; it goes a long way towards emphasizing that I am Roscoe-kun, not some amorphous presence mouth-breathing down Roscoe-kun's shoulder telling him to kill Spider-man. On top of that, there are ample techniques that allow you to control what their priorities should be. Unfortunately, the issue is that your party members are just often kind of stupid. Whether it's Yukari set to support deciding to drop a single-target heal on herself while the entire party is ready to drop from a moderate gasp or Mitsuru obsessively spamming Marin Karin to no avail like a seductive Sisyphus, allies will frequently make very obviously ineffective decisions that force me to spend my turns playing catch-up. In fact, it frequently proved to be most effective for me to be the dedicated towel boy bringing everybody juice boxes. It must just come down to how certain characters were programmed; Akihiko is consistently laying shadows out while Mitsuru's busy shaking her can-cans for a table with hands.
Ultimately, these problems seem niche because they kind of are; combat relies on a pretty straightforward typing-system that makes the majority of encounters pretty trivial. Then, when your guard is down, one of these problems rears up and wipes an hour of progress because you didn't bother to save. It's less unmanageable and more frustrating and tedious, like Tartarus as a whole.
Of course, I can't move past the combat without talking about the series' namesake, the Persona system. Frankly, it's incomprehensible. I know there are rules, I know the game explains the rules, but it still comes across like I'm doing advanced trigonometry in ancient Assyrian. I was honestly just randomly mixing and matching Personas until I saw one that had moves I wanted. Seriously streamlining and clarifying how any of that works should be a priority for the remake. As for the Persona designs, they range all the way from the most bizarre thing I've ever seen (good) to alot of Guys. I could never discard any system that lets me craft Mothman and, frankly, I also just got a kick every time an eldritch abomination of flesh and teeth came out with the move Sexy Dance.
What else? Some random things worth mentioning: I love how expressive the character portraits are, especially on Stupei and Fuuka. The voice acting ranges from solid to that perfect level of bad that's both super endearing and super memorable (also Fuuka). Giving more to do in the evenings would be appreciated, as I spent the last couple months seeing how much I could fill a bucket with drool between 5 and 12 PM, although that partially comes down to me mis-allocating my time early on. The little bits of visual flair here and there are pretty nice, though of course seem positively quaint compared to Persona 5 or, indeed, the remake of Persona 3. It's also impossible to discuss a Persona game without mentioning the music; there's some great tracks. I'd like it even more if this 80-hour game had more than four of them. There are songs here that will be burned into my brain forever, though there was often a disconnect with the intensity of the music in more mundane scenes.
In short, this is one of those games that sticks with you. Not because it's perfect, far from it, but it's got so many wonderful little details, and oozes so much heart that it's impossible not to appreciate it at its best. If the remake is able to retain that while cleaning up some of its more egregious blemishes, you'll be dealing with a true home run.
EDIT / ADDENDUM: From ~03/05/24 to 03/17/24, I have now played through The Answer, a task I wasn't sure I was up for at first, given its reputation as Grind City. Having completed it, my feelings are generally more mixed than with The Journey, but far from overwhelmingly negative. The thought process for this rump sequel feels like the Persona dev team had an idea for the beginning of the story, an idea for the end of the story, and left everything else to the junior intern who had replaced his keyboard keys with Dubble Bubble.
Things start off with a strong sense of intrigue; a mysterious, new location (in the form of an admittedly on-the-nose metaphor), a likable new character who knows more than she's letting on, and more of Yukari being an asshole to everyone than you could ever ask for. Even the gameplay loop is initially, while not improved, as least presented in more palatable, shorter chunks of endurance, as opposed to The Journey's grinding slog through more inhuman monstrosities than a tour of England.
Unfortunately, that lasts for about two hours. The 20 after that are tedious beyond belief, as the sections become longer and combat frustrations really start to rack up. I'm not aware the degree to which I'm right versus experiencing Tartarus trauma flashbacks, but the fights somehow felt even worse here. Accuracy is a joke; anecdotally, it felt sub-50% on average, with fights looking more like softball games at a school for the blind and deaf. Critical hits also felt substantially more common, with even Sensei Metis's mastery of the four elements not saving her from getting leg sweeped by a pair of dice. Combine the constant stun-locks with the increased damage from being locked into Hard Mode, and even mundane fights could very easily spiral into a bloodbath.
Outside of the fights... oh wait, there is nothing outside of the fights. Bufudyne-ing your way through a particularly tough boss feels distinctly soul-crushing when the reward the game offers you is to immediately go do it again. Your only breaks from Persona Mystery Dungeon are shopping and fusing Personas. Equipment upgrades in The Answer feel extremely needlessly iterative, having to go back and forth across the Loading Screen Event Horizon so that I can check each party member's equipment > go buy new stuff > go back to equip > sell the old stuff so I can buy more > go back and equip > and so on, all so Queen Mitsuru can be clad in the most luxurious samurai sandals (+60 defense), instead of those disgusting peasant clompers she was stuck with before (A mere +58 defense). As for the Persona fusing, it's fundamentally the same, except for the loss of the Compendium, making the actual Personas you end up with feel even more like letting Mothman take the wheel.
Upon clearing a dungeon, you are presented with a brief cutscene, featuring universally pointless flashbacks to scenes that are either a) completely uninteresting or b) something we have already seen and learn nothing more about here. The only mildly interesting exception was Junpei. The brief exchanges afterwards occasionally offer some more engaging back and forth, but it's actually kind of hard to lock in for a two-minute cutscene after spending the last three hours devoting my mind and will to either nirvana or carcinization, whichever came first.
What's really frustrating about The Answer, though is the last few hours; unfortunately, they're actually pretty good. I WISH I could write this off as a failed expansion when so much of it was so obnoxious. However, after all of that, the game suddenly sparks to life with actual character dynamics / conflicts for every SEES member (except Fuuka, whose role in this expansion is to say "Aigis...", "Metis...", "Yukari...", "Akihiko...", etc.). Well-written dialogue delivered in service of an actual theme and progressing the mystery of the plot that's been stagnant for 20+ hours is the sweet oasis in the Desert of Doors. It's true the cutscenes do meander on the same points, especially given the core themes of finding strength in friendship and hope are ultimately the exact same things Roscoe Slippy just spent 80 hours getting drilled in. However, the addressing of grief in the context of death in a more direct way than the original game did is a welcome twist on that discussion, and by the end I was well and truly moved. Aigis in particular had a pretty beautiful arc, and the ultimate payoff for Metis was handled wonderfully. I can't write off anything that manages to strike me right through the heart with its ending cutscene (I had Kohryu's Scales on Metis). Side note, by the way: The animated cutscenes are all much longer and better animated in this than in The Journey, for some reason.
Even if it wasn't so strong, by god, seeing more of these characters that I had grown so attached to really was enough for me. I can't help but think about a version of The Answer that either trimmed down the gameplay sections or seriously beefed up the character moments in amongst the trudging. I'm not even asking for Social Links, mind you. Some cutscenes of characters talking about how they're feeling, or even just having a light-hearted gag conversation would've been so much more motivating than having all the characterization totally backloaded.
I generally hate the idea of pretending like watching a game's story on Youtube is comparable to actually playing the thing, but this is probably the closest I've ever come. Mind you, I would NEVER say that about The Journey, but in The Answer, it really feels like the actual gameplay does so little to inform the story that I can almost recommend just skipping it entirely (almost - I'm still not quite that blackpilled). Ignoring that there's a remake on the horizon and focusing only on this, the FES version, The Answer is a medicine. It's gross and hard to get down, but in the end, it's healing. I have to recommend it, but I wish I didn't have to feel bad about it.