A review of Persona 3 Portable (Spoilers later on in the review)

Last year I encountered one of the greatest games ever made. That game was Persona 5. I plan on reviewing every single Persona game starting with 3 and ending with 5 and of course 1 and 2 innocent sin will be in here when I finish them. The first one I will be doing is Persona 3, the portable version to be exact.

Intro

The game takes place in 2009 in a city named Iwatodai and you play as Minato Arisato, a blue haired boy who recently transferred to a pretty empty dorm. There he meets Yukari Takeba, Mitsuru Kirijo and Akihiko Sanada who will be living in the dorm with him. Little does he know that at midnight a hidden time named the dark hour begins, transforming normal people into coffins. Very few people can be active at this time but you, Yukari, Mitsuru and Akihiko can. This unleashes the power of the persona within him which leads him on a long journey of friendship and death, the games main theme. The main team that is formed through these friendships is called S.E.E.S and consists of 9 members

Main gameplay

Gameplay is split up into different sections. I call these day time sections and dark hour sections. In a day time section you go to school, make friends and increase social stats. Biggest flaw with the day time sections in P3P is that they're all done in a point and click style, which decreases the exploration of Iwatodai itself and makes some events less special

School: In school you can do very few things and you'll mainly be answering questions, sleeping or listening to lectures. The questions are normally general knowledge and by general I mean extremely vague ones. These increase knowledge and are very useful for increasing said stat. Sometimes a teacher will begin a lecture where you'll be given two options. Either doze off, making your condition great (which I will go into later) or you can listen. Listening increases knowledge aswell but far more significantly. One of the biggest problems with the school time is that it's extremely repetitive and can get annoying really quick in this extremely long game. After School: After school you can talk to friends, buy items and increase stats. To talk to friends you just have to go up to them and talk to them and you'll start a social link, another important mechanic. A social link allows the player to have access to skill in battle with the case of team mates and with random people will power up the stats of a certain arcana. In these events you can talk to friends and give them certain replies. Some of the replies later on into a social link can reverse it, making it extremely difficult to chat with that person again. Shopping for items works as it does in any RPG where you go to a shop and purchase them. Same with weapons and armour. Some of the shops (namely the antique shop) allow you to spend gems on items like skill cards (which will be explored later on) weapons and normal health. You get these gems from battle. Increasing stats happens when you visit certain places and are the best way to increase social stats. The social stats you can increase are Knowledge, courage and charm and are needed when talking to people like Mitsuru which take max knowledge or Yukari who takes max Charm. Evening: During the evening you can sleep or go to Tartarus, which activates the dark hour

Dark hour: The dark hour is where the main gameplay loop takes place. To begin the dark hour you must visit tartarus, a 264 floor tower that S.E.E.S must reach the top of. To do this you must fight shadows (which can appear in many different forms) with your persona, a manifestation of the users personality, and can be used in battle. The main character is the Wild Card which means he can swap between personas. In battle you can do different attacks. These are Attack: this is a simple attack with your weapon Skill: This makes the user summon their persona allowing them to use skills. These are wind, fire, ice, light, dark, slash, pierce, bash, lighting, recovery, enhance, ailment, passive, navigation, fusion and almighty. The elemental skills can be used as weaknesses and the only persona with navigation skills is Fukka, who is the fifth member to the team. Dark and light skills are all instant kill skills but have a very low chance of success with the highest being the dark skill Die for me!, an exclusive skill to Alice which has an 80% rate to hit and Samsara which is exclusive to Daisoujou and has the same stats. Defend: Increases defense and stops weaknesses from damaging you Navigate: Let's you change party members behaviour in Battle and let's you analyse a enemy Persona: This skill is exclusive to the main protag and let's you change persona Those are the main skill during battle. In battle you can abuse weaknesses. A weakness is something that knocks the enemy down and deals massive damage. This could be a weakness to wind or fire or any other elemental skill. When all of the enemies in battle are knocked down you initiate an all out attack, an attack that deals massive damage to every enemy on the screen. As mentioned early during the day time sections there are statuses. Things like Great, good, tired and ill. All these do is change combat effectiveness. Velvet room :The velvet room is where you unlock new personas and do quests for Elizabeth, this games velvet room attendee. Fusions are simple to do and are pretty easy with a fusion calculator.

Shuffle time: After battle you might encounter Shuffle time which is a card game where the cards are hidden. You are shown them and one of two games will begin. One where the game shuffles them around and tells you to pick and one where the cards fly around in patterns and you just press x for the one you want.

The main gameplay loop is actually quite boring after a while and can become repetitive around the end of the game. The school stuff especially becomes tedious as around the end all of your social stats will be maxed out making the questions worthless and it just increases play time with meaningless trash you just don't care about. This is the same with tartarus and shuffle time. Once you get past level 76 you have already won the game basically. I got to level 90 which made me even more bored of this gameplay loop. Shuffle time gets in the way mutlple times when trying to speed through enemies and sometimes the choices you get are worthless to you. Another issue is that enemies can spawn right next to you, giving you no time to react to them and get an advantage. The best bit of this game to me is the velvet room surprisingly since it was just fun to feel smart, fusing all the personas into more powerful ones that would have special skills they couldn't get otherwise. The after school stuff is really dissapointing aswell with a major flaw being its point and click style (which isn't present in FES) since it makes exploration in Iwatodai bland and uninteresting almost instantly. The biggest problem with this I could find was with a scene in the game at the beach. You have to enter an area but the game doesn't clearly show where the area is. I spent minutes searching this area for even a hint of hope until I gave up and looked online. Turns out many had the same problem and the only solution was to turn on a mode that shows all the intractable objects which is just weak in my opinion.

Story (no-spoilers)

This is where P3P shines is its story. Persona 3 has the best story I have experienced in a game. Its not that generic man and other person have to grow together and like eachother. This one is far more unique. Simply it's about a group of teens fighting against uneven odds and death itself and having to bear with themselves the greef that death brings along. The game pushes the words memento mori into your face naturally and it drives home the games themes. All I can say for the non spoiler stuff is that it's story and characters are amazing and I suggest you buy the game just to experience the story.

Story (Spoilers)

The game really becomes depressing around the introduction of the character Ryoji, who makes everyone break down. The characters most effected by him are Aigis, the anti-shadow weapon and the main character himself. Ryoji is death and puts a great deal of weight on the crew. Mainly Aigis though. This is because of her connection with Ryoji which is that ten years before the events of the story Aigis fought Ryoji, sealing him away inside of a boy that was nearby. This boy was you. Once the 12th shadow is destroyed Ryoji is awakened from inside of him and plans to summon Nyx. He then decides he doesn't wish for S.E.E.S to suffer the next few months awaiting Nyxs return and offers his life for their loss of the dark hour and everything surrounding it. The team decline (if you want the true ending) and Ryoji warns them of Nyxs coming. This effects Aigis as she has no purpose anymore. She can't defeat shadows is the world ends. Everyone has a moment in the game where they are hurt yet need to better themselves for the sake of their friends. This to me is effective and is extremely well written and explained in the game itself. This is the first game that's made me cry during multiple cutscenes for characters I don't even personally like. This is because you like very character and the games ending really drives home memento mori. You can't escape death in the end, only seal it away. This is what the main character must do. Become the seal to stop Nyx. This is done with everyones hopes for your wellbeing healing you as you battle true Nyx before unlocking the power of the universe.

To me the story demonstrates extremely good writing and character development that no other game has been able to accomplish really and if the words "The Arcana is the means by which all is revealed..." can stick into my head then that shows it to me. If Yukari Takeba a character I don't particularly enjoy can make me cry just by saying "I wanna see him... I don't care about anything else! I just wanna see him again!" when talking about the main guy it really makes you think about how well these characters have been developed. You just have to play the game to understand what I'm talking about.

Presentation (Spoilers)

This is where the game loses major points. It's not presented very well at all. In fact the game only has one cutscene which is when the main character stand up to face nyx. That's it. The rest is presented in a visual novel style which really doesn't help in dramatic moments like characters crying or people being in the hospital. His also hurts events like school trips as the game just doesn't have cutscenes for scenes that really only work because of them. Trips instead of being fun romps with characters become bland wastes of time because you just don't spend time with them. This is all due to the games limitation of being on the PSP. These problems don't exist in p3fes but there are other problems in that game

Final score

While this game has extremely tear jerky moments, the lack of any really cutscene hurts this game massively, bringing my score down more than I want to admit. It's gameplay while being repetitive after hours of playing is still great fun that I can say I enjoyed in the end. I only have fond memories of this game and really want a remaster with the best bits from FES mixed with the best bits from P3P.

my final score is 7/10

I know this review became more of a guide at times but if you have any criticism you can give me I would gladly accept it. After all everything has its problems