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So since it was on sale and I was never gonna bother with the old PS2 version I decided to play the P3P otome game since for once in a Persona game I could be a female protagonist. Unfortunately coming into this after playing Persona 5 Royal and Persona 4 Golden left a LOT to be desired. Obviously newer games will be a lot more polished so it’s just an unfortunate play order for me and it was to be expected with an old game. That said I guess I am just hoping the following things get ironed out in the remake for next year.
I just want to clarify that when I think about “polish”, I usually am thinking more about stuff like “the battle UI in P5 is better because each menu option is assigned to a button rather than how in P3 you have to spin a radial menu for them.” Since the format of the game is basically the same throughout the series, there isn’t much that really changes there. Instead, the shortcomings in the game are more that since this was the first try, they hadn’t figured out yet what were the fun and unfun parts of the system and therefore had their priorities totally in the wrong places.
System
This is obviously the biggest pitfall. Overall the system is quite similar to Persona 4, more than 5. You basically run around different town areas (no nice P5 shortcuts) and try to remember what days people are available and what things (such as Purikura) will raise what stats for you. I didn’t mind this, and I was used to running around looking for people in P4. However the problem was, there was just NOBODY around. At the start of the game I was busy raising my 3 stats (only 3 in this game lol) so I had something to usually do. Once my stats were maxed out though, I found myself having absolutely nothing to do except sleep or >>>>GO TO TARTARUS<<<<.
Ohhhhhhh boy is Tartarus bad. On the surface it’s ostensibly the same as Mementos, but with some key minor differences that make it unbearable. The first part is that it’s loooooong. It’s about 250 floors, while Mementos was around 60. There are far fewer checkpoints and for some reason you can’t go backwards down the stairs, (only further up or all the way back to the lobby), so if you get a quest like “rescue someone on floor 100” you need to teleport to floor 90 and go up 10 floors rather than 102 and go down 2 floors. The other big one is that there’s a lot more wasted time in the battles. First off, there’s no way to skip fights when you overlevel like in P5, so unless the enemies try to flee from you (with doesn’t happen unless you’re massively overleveled) you’re going to need to fight them. The animations are a lot slower and the menus are more cumbersome, so that also makes each fight slower in terms of minutes and seconds even if they’re still the same number of turns. Then once you win the fight you have to watch the Shuffle Time animation (which like half the time gives no reward anyway), plus if you get the reroll and have to watch it again. One and a half weeks in, we used a trainer to give one hit kills (which is barely cheating anyway if we’re doing an AOE to knock them down and then the all out attack to finish them) and to increase the game speed to 3x so we don’t have to constantly sit through all that.
So Tartarus is the dungeon in this game. Rather than being a series of unique dungeons like in the other 2, this one is just one giant RPG tower with “gates” so you can basically only go up to a certain section before each date. Basically think of it like the Mementos portion of P5. Unfortunately that’s all you can do. Just Mementos. So the game expects you to basically grind out Mementos because you need a damn high level for the end boss if you didn’t ragequit that shit and used cheats to boost your chara to do 1 hit KOs. (Sorry but I was not gonna spend an hour fighting the final boss and his 12 14 phases!) The entire place is dreary, monotonous and the music sucks. It’s boring and lifeless and I kinda get it fits the “theme” of the game but maaaan at some point I just muted the music and put on Persona 4/5 BGMs to keep myself from going insane.
Oh and we also turned on a massive 10x multiplier for XP. The XP is GLACIAL in this game. There is almost nothing to do at night, so I think the game’s intention is for you to constantly grind Tartar Sauce (oh and almost everything every character says when you randomly talk to them in the dorm is “We should go to Tartarus again tonight.”) Even with this enormous XP multiplier our party member at the end of the game were around level 75, which is more or less what the game expects you to be. But the fundamental problem is simply that Tartarus is just not fun, so there was no way we would’ve spent dozens and dozens of additional hours in there like the game very clearly expected you to do.
What else I hate about it is the part where you have to rescue people. So say person is stuck on floor 150….but you can only teleport to floor 145 or 151. In Persona 5 you could just go to 151 and go backwards. But no, in P3 you can only go to 145 and you have to now go through 5 floors to get to the person. Once you find 1 person, you must take them back, and then start over AGAIN to find the next person. If you accidentally press the wrong option and go back to the start, welp time to start over AGAIN. Oh my god it was so fucking irritating I kept just throwing my controller over to Kanade because I just had no patience after being thrown back to the entrance twice in a row because I accidentally clicked the wrong choice after splitting the party.
The “split the party” function never showed up after P3, but honestly it didn’t need to be in the other games. The purpose of it in P3 is that the game kinda understands that you constantly need to go through floors that you don’t care about to get to the floors that you do so this kinda speeds things up. But it’s addressing the symptoms rather than the disease itself of Tartarus being too large and too monotonous.
Now one thing I did like with the format here is that while it still has the same “must complete a storyline battle by this deadline” structure as the later games, the battle happens on that day rather than how you are given a few weeks to complete it by then or you get a game over. As we all know, this led to the anticlimaxes of oneshotting a dungeon the day it opens and then sitting in your hands for the rest of the month. In P3 it makes it feel a lot more ominous that SOMETHING is going to happen next week.
So then the other annoyance I have are with the social links. There’s huge chunks of the game where you cannot do anything. For example the game forces you into a career fair where you spend 4 days cleaning toilets at a burger joint or doing volleyball practice with your club mates. That’s a huge waste of time and when you finally have time available – nobody’s around because it’s >>FINAL EXAM TIME<<. Or actually it’s not their day, or they are having a mental crisis and cannot go hang out with you. Then like the final month of the game everyone’s like “hey let’s all hang out on the same god damn day.” The biggest offender here is Shinjiro. I didn’t even know when I could find him to talk to him, then I found out too late, I only got him to rank 5 and he was rudely yeeted away from me to never be seen again. In the final month of January I had Yukari, Mitsuru and Aigis all asking me to hang out and in the end I was like 1 or 2 days short to max out all 3 and ended up only getting Aigis to rank 9 so I didn’t get my yuri route ending with her. 😂 Meanwhile I got to randomly max out characters like the dying park bench guy, shrine loli and old farts at the bookstore for no reason. Rip LIbrary Girl and Student Council dude though, maybe I will load a save and check out your stories later or something.
It’s also a huge problem because it completely undermines the central theme of the game! We’re supposed to think like “life is short and precious, treasure those fleeting moments before death” but meanwhile in the game we’re like “even though there’s only a month left before the possible end of the world, time to sleep for an entire week because it’s technically still winter vacation and the game will only let me interact with my party members if they’re in the school but not in they’re sitting in the lounge at the dorm .”
Social Links
So from what I saw, apparently Kotone’s route had way better social links than Makoto. It seems like they got the picture and they’re stealing all the good social link scenes from Kotone’s route into Makoto’s in Reload! I quite liked my interactions but as I mentioned above, I really wish I could talk to my team mates SOONER than the final month of the game. Half the time they’re just SITTING IN THE LOBBY DOING NOTHING. You go try to talk to them and the only thing outta their mouth is “let’s go to Tartarus!!!!!” (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ Even after I became Akihiko’s girlfriend, talking to him in the lobby was mostly just stuff about what’s going on and almost no acknowledgement that we were actually dating lmao. Actually because of this, I was basically allowed to pick romantic choices for Ryoji and Theo and have this weird 3P. Woulda been 4P with Shinjiro if he showed up early enough to max him and didn’t literally have a 3 week window! Could be 5P if you’re a huge pedo and pick the wrong choice for Ken. ಠ_ಠ Sorry Ken but you’re forever friendzoned. Come back when you’re a man, Little Sun.
I also want to point out that Shinjiro aside, we were within only a few points of maxing out every social link. Like if we realized sooner that some activities give much bigger stat boosts than others and therefore instead of working at the coffee shop for +1 charm we instead did the プリクラ or watched a chick flick at the movie theater for +4 charm that could very well have given us enough days to complete them. The reason this is important to point out is that even though the game has so much downtime where there was nothing to do we still nearly maxed out everyone without doing any kind of planning or following a guide, which goes to show how there is not really that much going on in the game. There’s a lot in the first month or two when you’re getting introduced, then a ton of dead air until around November when the story gets going again. The game doesn’t need to be as (over) stuffed as P5 but could have used both more (and more interesting) “forced” events throughout the game (like actually giving some kind of funny events when you’re stuck being a fast food janitor rather than just fast forwarding to the end of the week) instead of the pure dead air they happens a lot. It’s also especially jarring compared to P4 because in P4 the game is structured so that you get excited about holidays because you know that your friends will be free to hang out with because you know, no school! You know you’ve messed up the emotional response when you’re causing the player to get mad when you have summer vacation!
Anyway huge bummer that FeMC is not coming back for Reload because man I wanted more date scenes with Theo and would have been nice to have more cute scenes with Akihiko. Overall Akihiko felt like he had the most romantic stuff to do in game as everyone else basically yeets away the moment they hit rank 10 or because >>PLOT<<. Just make sure when you start the game you focus on spamming the Purikura at the mall to increase your charm cause Akihiko won’t date you unless you can make his fangirls fuck off with your gigachad glare.
::whispers:: Don’t prioritize your stats over your Social Links. You will rapidly realize that there’s so many days when school is closed or there’s tests or whatever that those are the days to spend leveling stats. You’ll still have plenty of time for eroscenes. And only do the best stat increasing activities, like don’t drink coffee rather than going to the arcade or movies
Final Thoughts
Not gonna spoil it or anything but that ending was really vague. In fact the entire story was really vague because I played FeMC route first and a lot of things were cut out because the PSP port didn’t have room to fit in things like animated cut scenes or include the final explanation of the ending that I had to look up on google. It was very vague and unsatisfying and after reading a summary of The Answer I’m honestly just hoping Reload will pull an FF7R and change the ending to be less crappy.🤣 So overall my favorite part of the game just the social links as usual is on par with Persona games but everything else basically sucked. I especially hated all the music in the game good lord it was so bad. Like some kind of cringey Japanese rap lol and I say this as someone who listens to the greatest Rap/R&B hits of 1999. The system was annoying and grindy and sorry but I don’t need to feel “miserable” from grinding to resonate with the characters, I just start to feel like “damn what a kusoge.” ಠ_ಠ
Despite the fact that this review is very harsh on the game, it’s really just because of terrible execution rather than because the underlying bones of the game are bad. So because of this, throughout the game we kept thinking “I bet they’ll clean this stuff up in the remake”. And then knowing Atlus we’re all assuming that then they’ll make Persona 3 Reloaded Golden Royal Tactica Dancing All Night Arena Strikers Ultimax that includes a non-bad version of the waifu route (hopefully it will have PS5 graphics so that all of the eroscenes can be on the level of FFXVI.)
You can check out our stream highlights of Theo and Akihiko’s dates here:
Bread Master Lee 
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