 Persona 3. People often jokingly call this the first Persona game and they kind of have a point. This game marked the beginning of a new direction for the Persona series that 4 and 5 would end up falling very closely. It was a hugely ambitious game that introduced new mechanics that the series still uses to this very day. The game originally released on the PS2 in 2006 and it got an updated version a year later called Persona 3 FES that had an added epilogue and then it got another updated version a year later called Persona 3 Portable for the PSP which had, well, a whole bunch of stuff that will touch on in a bit. Now they're porting this version to pretty much every modern platform and with this new release many might be wondering if it's worth picking up. Well the answer to that is complicated. Persona 3 is an amazing game that hasn't been done justice. It really did lay down the foundation for the whole series. If it isn't considered the best game of all time it will most certainly secure to spot as the most emo game of all time because in this game you play as a guy who shoots himself in the head. Except instead of dying you summon your persona. This is the most mid-2000s RPG ever made. It has one of the coolest styles and soundtracks of any game I've ever played. The music is like a mix between pop and hip-hop and it just suits the game's tone so well. Persona 3 answers the question of what happens if you stay up past your bedtime. As you play as a member of Cease, a squad of students at Gekokan High School who are tasked with investigating the dark hour. A hidden hour after midnight where shadows attack the streets all while the citizens of Port Island are blissfully unaware. Some nights in the game you'll want to explore Tartarus, a mysterious tower that appears every night during the dark hour and seems to go on forever. This is where you do your routine training because every full moon a huge boss will appear and you have no idea what to expect. So the game is all about balancing your time between high school life and fighting shadows to prepare for the big day. This game's story is really deep and honestly might be the best story of the entire Persona series. It is so interesting and dark and I really like how the characters defy expectations. For example, instead of meeting some random guy who all of a sudden becomes your best friend for literally no reason, Persona 3 instead has Junpei who is a jealous, vindictive punk who obviously wants to be the main character of the story and he has this weird air of resentment towards you for a huge chunk of the game. So you're the hero again, huh? And this is just one example. The characters in this game have layers to them. They are all very complex and have their own lives that don't revolve around you which makes P3 unique compared to other RPGs. The team also has an interesting dynamic of seniority unlike most JRPGs as the main character along with Yukari and Junpei are the underclassmen who are new to fighting the shadows and are kept in the dark about a lot of things while Akihiko and Mitsuru are older and clearly have more experience taking on more of a leadership role. Some of these characters are super unique. They have complex relationships with each other and are oftentimes at odds with one another. These characters are very complex and they go through a ton of development over the course of the story. The characters in this game actually have flaws and they show it and as for the obligatory annoying talking animal, you know, since this is a JRPG, this time you don't have a talking cat who tells you to go to sleep at night. No, instead you have a dog and it's it's just a regular as dog that can use a persona like that dog. It doesn't talk or anything so it's instantly superior. There are so many crazy characters like this in the story that the game keeps throwing at you. It has a very unique and memorable cast and you'll frequently counter many of them when you go to school during the week. So at school you do things like wowing your classmates with your first grade English skills and you hang out with various characters to build up your social links. The game has a lot of clubs to choose from and just a whole bunch of quirky people around town hang out with. You will rarely find yourself with nothing to do. The social links in this game are also really great. There are a ton of them and it isn't always easy to unlock them. Sometimes you have to look out for rumors of strange people around town or even progress one social link to find another. For example, I wanted to date a hero in the game so I joined a student council just to get acquainted with her and then I never went back to any student council meetings again because I don't give a shit about student council. Two people who play this game might have completely different social circles just because of how hidden some of these characters are and the social system in this game is great mostly because the dialogue choices you make actually matter this time. In P3 if you act like a jerk or say something rude, you don't just miss out on some brownie points like in the other games. Oftentimes you can actually reverse the social link and the character won't be your friend anymore. This can happen frequently depending on the choices you make and the game really captures the awkwardness of trying to reconcile a broken friendship perfectly as you have to make a real effort to mend things and it is crazy that they tone down this feature in Persona 4 and outright removed in Persona 5 because it added some real consequence to your actions which I really like. It's almost like you create your own sub-story based on the mistakes you make and how you deal with the aftermath which really makes us feel like a real RPG. Persona 3 actually has a lot of cool features that were later removed in Persona 4 because they made the game too hard. In P3 you and your party members have status conditions which can range from feeling good to being tired or even getting sick. If you grind and tartar is too long your party members can actually get tired which will make them less powerful and eventually cause them to go back to the dorm and it will take several days of resting up until a lot of characters fit to fight again which will usually force you to instead use a character that you don't normally fight with while they recover. I really like this mechanic. It essentially makes the player have to diversify their lineup and not benching in one for too long which is a problem many RPGs have struggled to confront to this very day. There's just loads of features in this game that were removed in later entries. You can actually split up your group and send your teammates to independently search the dungeons for items and the next staircase and they can fight shadows by themselves which is an awesome feature that cuts down on exploration time. If you need to study for your in-game exams you can even pull all nighters which will in turn make you sleep deprived which is awesome and something Persona 5 was sorely missing. Even going to the bathroom is important in this game as it helps improve your status. These are all features that made the game way more realistic and gave you some curve balls to deal with. And curve balls is what P3 is all about. In this game nothing ever goes according to plan. You'll very often have to adapt to unpredictable circumstances. Sometimes you might want to go explore tartarists and certain characters will actually not be in the mood. Maybe Yukari will have to go to a friend's place to study or Akihiko has to go to the store to get something and those characters will just not be available and you have to make do without their help. Even when you take on the monthly boss the characters you meet training up might not be available for some story reason and you'll be forced to use someone you didn't even bother training. This game is hardcore and I actually love how often the game screws with you. Like what other game just takes away some of your characters like that? I can't think of any. And you know what hardcore is the best way to describe this game. P3 is more of a hardcore experience than Persona 4 or 5 because of these challenges put in front of you. Grinding in tartars is not for the faint of heart. I swear the floors go on endlessly and you only get access to a safe point at each mini-boss which could be over 10 floors apart at times. In Tartars you fight these shadows and make your way up floor by floor and if by some chance you get killed well you just lost potentially hours of your life because you get sent back to the main menu and have to reload your last save. I have wanted to throw my console out of the window on multiple occasions where I tried my luck and got one shot at by an enemy right before the next save point essentially wasting my entire night playing the game. It is actual bullshit. This game is hard. I mean this game is so hard that it infuriates me sometimes. And remember how I said there's a boss every month? Well I hope you have plenty of backup saves early in the month because if you get to the boss under leveled you will not only have to watch over 30 minutes of unskippable cuts in just to get another try. You could also be potentially soft locked in the game because they don't just let you reverse back a week like in p4 and p5. You're just screwed and you might have to restart the entire thing. That's not to mention that in p3 fes you can't even control your party members. They fix this in portable but in the original game it was so frustrating because you had to rely on your party ai and they weren't particularly smart. They couldn't even figure out how to do basic things like explode enemy weaknesses or chain attacks and they heal you at the worst possible times. That's definitely one thing I really don't like about the original game. The game's hardcore difficulty even extends to the women of the game. If you thought persona 5 was bad with its arbitrary stat requirement to get a girlfriend, here some of the girls straight up tell you that they don't want to be caught dead with you in public if your charm stat is too low. It is absolutely brutal. The game is honestly really good. It has the potential of being the best persona game if it wasn't for a few little quality life improvements that persona 4 made. Persona 4 almost feels like an expansion to p3 considering how similar they are. They reuse a lot of graphical assets and sound effects from this game and it just felt like a more polished version of p3 but it also made things easier and straight up removed some features so I'm conflicted. I mentioned earlier that they remade persona 3 on the psp as persona 3 portable. This is the version we're getting on xbox, switch, playstation and pc. Many people have debated for years on which version of persona 3 is the best. FES or portable and I'm here to tell you that I am on team FES. I think it's better than portable. Let me explain. Portable added a ton of new features to the game and corrected many of the problems I have with original but it comes at a price. First off the big one you can play as a girl in this game and it's like they made a whole new game just for the girl. Everyone's dialogue is different you can actually start social link with Jumpei and Akihiko among other exclusive characters whereas you couldn't in the original and some social links can be started earlier like Yukaris which originally took a few months to access. They really did a good job with making the experience feel unique. Additionally you can control the party members when fighting which is a huge advantage for this version because of how bad the original AI was and since this came out after persona 4 they included a lot of persona 4's little gameplay additions such as how follow-up moves worked and the UI is a lot cleaner. There's a lot of little quality life aspects they improved which I appreciate but I still think for the most part it's overall a worse experience. The biggest thing holding this game back is that they removed the 3D graphics from when you explore Port Island and replace it with a point and click interface. Yeah they removed the game's graphics. You can still run on Tartarus but when you come back to the real world everything is just still images of the environments that you have to click on and the cutscenes are all these visual novel style scenarios where you have to imagine what's going on. I hate this so much. The game doesn't have the full anime cutscenes from the original anymore. It just has a bunch of slideshows of still png's. When I play a game I want to you know play the game. I want to run around the city as my character and see what's going on and interact with people in the environment. What they did here is bullshit. They are essentially removing a huge part of the experience and presentation with this and why because the PSP couldn't handle it? Like am I really supposed to believe that? You're telling me they got Grand Theft Auto Vice City working on the PSP but they couldn't do persona 3? Are you kidding me? That's just ridiculous. This has always been my biggest issue with the game and it's a shame because this version added so much in terms of the actual combat. So to answer the initial question of whether or not I think this game is worth it. Persona 3 is an amazing game with an amazing story. It has the makings of a masterpiece and could be the best game in the series. There's just so much potential. However, this version they're porting over is very limited in its overall experience. I think this game deserves better honestly. If you really want to play it and you're okay with everything I just told you then go for it. But personally I would rather play the original version. This game honestly deserves a remake. It has so much going for in terms of its deep narrative, characters, and its hardcore challenge that makes me think it's the rawest and most experimental game in the whole Persona series which is why I like it. If they remade this game keeping the feel of the original while also improving the little problems it has it could very well be the best game in the entire series. If you enjoyed this look at Persona 3 and want to know more about the series be sure to check out my thoughts on Persona 4 right here. I think you'll enjoy it. I'll see you there.