Game Journal #64.5 - Persona 3 Portable Review

Hey guys! What's shakin'? Today, I finished playing Persona 3 portable with my friend. As it is a JRPG, I will be writing a review for it! You might not believe me, but every single JRPG I play is educational as a fellow game dev. I get to see what works, what doesn't, what I'd like to see in my own game, etc. And Persona 3 was sure helpful in that regard! This'll be a spoiler-free review, so if you want to play the game yourself, you don't have to worry.

Similar to my Persona 4 review, I'll have you guess my favorite character from the lineup below. Take a gander!

All the playable characters.

Did you guess? Don't scroll down without doing it!

Ok, did you guess the dude with the baseball cap? Well, guess what? You're WRONG! Junpei is my third favorite character. Second is Akihiko (the gray-haired guy in the back.) Considering there's only three guys left (and the blue-haired one in the front is the main character) it's pretty easy to decide who it is.

Ta-da, it's beanie-dude.

Yep, it's Shinjiro. Do I even have to explain why? Just take a look at his character design. It's so COOL! As soon as I saw him for the first time, it was a complete shot to the heart. He's just so cool looking! Not only that, but his in-game class type is also my favorite (the tank that takes 10000 hits and never dies, while being super strong.) The only caveat was that his accuracy wasn't the best, but I didn't mind because he was so strong that one hit could pretty much kill anything. So it was well worth the gamble. Not only that, but he was a crit king as well. Man, I loved having him on my team so much. Did I mention that you can romance him, too?

Just the best man being the best.

Yeah, I really love that you can play Persona 3 as a guy or girl. 99% of JRPGs have male leads (which I love lol) but that also means that any romance options in-game are from a guy's perspective. I don't mind playing as a guy and romancing girls, but it's indefinitely better the other way around. In fact, that's my other type of favorite game genre, otomes (female dating sim.) For the longest time I'd wanted an otome JRPG, but there were never any made because of the huge demographic gap (Men love JRPGs, women love otomes, but there's no overlap.) It really is rough being a grill that likes male-dominated things sometimes. But to my surprise, Persona 3 was pretty much exactly what I was looking for! So yeah, I played as the girl character and had a lot of fun.

Okay, on to the review of the game itself. As I mentioned previously, you can play as either a guy or girl (I chose girl.) As in any JRPG, you gradually amass a team of fighters that you take with you to explore a dungeon, and get stronger to defeat bosses. I've played some Persona before (I finished 4 and played some of 1) so I can compare it to those, too.

First of all, the battle system is great. It's similar to most JRPGs, but you can change the main character's moves/type resistances on the fly by changing which Persona you use. I think this option is one of the Persona series' biggest strengths. It keeps battling fun, fresh, and innovative. I spent a lot of time making new Personas so I'd get new moves/better stats. It's really fun seeing what you can make!

Secondly, I really liked the music. The dungeon had the same theme throughout the game, but as you progressed, the arrangement would change slightly. I thought it was interesting, and sounded great. The UI was also really nice. It was extremely simple and only used one hue (pink) but it did its job. I definitely took some UI screenshots to use as a reference.

Now for some negatives. Just like in Persona 4, if the main character dies, you lose. It doesn't matter if the rest of your party is healthy, if you die you instantly get a game over. I think this is stupid, will forever be stupid, and I will always list it as a con because IT MAKES NO SENSE AT ALL. You're telling me I can revive my teammates, but they can't revive me? What a load of bollocks.

Secondly, the game is WAY too short. While I technically put a lot of time into it (about 63 hours) a majority of that time was spent farming. If you don't know, farming is a colloquial term in JRPGs that refers to killing monsters to level up. The story itself was rather short, and a lot of parts felt rushed to me. Unlike in Persona 4, there wasn't much else to do outside of the dungeon. It was very barebones, and while I still enjoyed it, I wish there was more time that I could spend in the game.

Thirdly, the cast of characters. While I love Shinjiro (I think he's my favorite Persona character ever lol) I found that the main cast was a hit or miss. I liked everyone in Persona 4, but here... eh. Besides Shinjiro, Akihiko, Junpei, and Fuuka, I didn't feel much. I also hate Yukari. Very, very much. Wanna know why? Glad you asked.

Seeing this girl's face puts me in fight or flight mode.

This character is an absolute joke. She's an archer that can't hit anything. WHO HAS EVER HEARD OF SUCH A THING?! WHAT USE IS THAT?! What is a DJ if he can't scratch? What is a detective that can't solve anything? I'll tell you. USELESS. Is the joke that she's bad at archery? Was Atlus just trolling us all?! WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY?! ANY class you could have chosen, ANY one at all, and you chose to make the character with the worst accuracy an archer. I just...

Anyway, her hit rate is 88%. That's the same as Shinjiro, the massive tough-as-nails tank that takes 50 hits and does 1000 points of damage. "Oh then," you may say, "Yukari must also have something that justifies her low accuracy, right? It must be that way for balancing reasons." And guess what? You're wrong. There's NOTHING that justifies her piss-poor accuracy. Her strength sucks, her endurance sucks, her agility is decent but who cares when you die in one hit. Not only is she a glass cannon mage (my most hated class of all time) HER ACCURACY SUCKS TOO. So the ONE thing she could've been semi-decent at, the ONE thing that redeems a low-defense character (the ability to do large amounts of damage,) she doesn't even have. So yeah, I very much dislike her. Removed her from my team and never touched her again.

Her personality is also really grating to me. I didn't even bother doing her side quests because her dialogue was so annoying. Every other line is "UGH Junpei, you're so dumb," "I'm too scared to do this," just a bunch of annoyances. To put it simply, she's the type of girl that I'd never talk to in school. Just UGH. UGH!!!! Even her face is annoying. Every time I see it, I have vivid flashbacks of "MISSED" flashing on my attacks. Begone, thot. BEGONE!!! Regardless, as I said the game was too short, so it was hard to get attached to any character in particular.

Last on my list of grievances is the overall difficulty of the game. As usual, I played on the hardest difficulty possible for maximum enjoyment. It was challenging at times, and I enjoyed it. However, the game as a whole was NOT balanced correctly in terms of level progression. The second dungeon's midboss was brutally hard, so much so that I farmed and farmed and farmed to beat it. I enjoyed the difficulty, but then I went to the actual boss, and... I beat it in like, three turns. Talk about tonal whiplash.

This was a problem that I had for the rest of the game. For a large majority of it I was over-leveled, but there were these small pockets of difficult sections thrown in almost haphazardly. It gave me the feeling that the developers designed each section separately, and then put them together at the end without thinking of how they would linearly progress. Not only that, but the EXP was a joke. You could literally go from 30 to 256 just by going up one section. The gaps were way too large, and as a result it became frustrating to farm at some points because a boss was blocking the way, so you had to deal with poor EXP returns on every fight until you were strong enough to defeat it. It was deeply frustrating.

Boss-wise, the midbosses were much harder than the actual bosses. I found myself breezing through a majority of them (even the final boss, which... well, he didn't even have a second phase.) It was incredibly jarring to have so much trouble with an enemy that wasn't supposed to even be important, then getting to the actual boss and defeating it pretty quickly. And the EXP on them... the final boss only gave me 3k. 3k! Some of the earlier bosses gave 9k! WTH is wrong with the balancing on this game?! And you know how in JRPGs there are enemies that have a lot of defense, but killing them gives you a ton of EXP? Guess what? Persona 3 has them, only minus the EXP. So you spend all this MP and time killing an enemy, only for it to give you 20 exp afterwards. What an absolute joke.

Okay, okay, enough negativity. How does this game compare to Persona 4? Well, I like Persona 4 better. The characters are more fleshed out, there's more time to spend with them, everyone is useful in some way, and the bosses were challenging, but well thought-out. I still remember the Kanji boss fight... now that was a nice puzzle to solve. Additionally, the overworld is handled much better. Persona 3 is point-and-click, while Persona 4 is walkable. I prefer the walkability... but speaking of that, there's a balance that must be had with 3D and progression. Let me explain.

I've started playing Persona 5 with my friend, and while the game looks great, I vastly prefer Persona 4. Why? Everything is so SLOW. Most things that take place are 3D animated, and while I don't mind, everything just takes wayyyyy too long because of it. I read very fast, so having to slog through unskippable dialogue in a 3D cutscene is not fun. While Persona 4 had 3D models, the dialogue itself was like a visual novel. So you could skip and read as fast as you'd like. To summarize, Persona 3 had no 3D interactions, 4 had a mix, and 5 has mostly 3D. A mix is what the optimum should be to strive for.

Anyway, that's about all for my Persona 3 Portable review. Can I recommend it? Eh... yeah, I guess. It's fun. Persona 4 is better though, so I recommend playing that instead. Persona 5 looks promising, but the UI kinda makes my eyes hurt lol. There's just so much going on. Oh well, looks aren't everything.

In regards to my game, I'm glad I played Persona 3. Now I know to keep level progression and enemy difficulty scaling in mind when designing my dungeons. I also got some UI pointers too, so that's fun. All in all... I'd rate the game a 3/5. It's not bad, but there are better JRPGs out there. Persona 3 is just really, really tedious for not much payoff. The biggest redeeming quality for me was the otome aspect, but even that wasn't very fleshed out (there's only two guys worth dating lol.) So yeah. I'd moderately recommend it, but not really.

Stay tuned for more game stuff. I'm finally feeling like working on it again. We'll see.