Persona 3 Portable (2023)

This marks my 3rd playthrough of Persona 3. Before this, I had beaten P3 FES and later P3 Reload. I really didn't enjoy FES but did like Reload thanks to all its additions and modernisiations. Now if Reload had the Female Protagonist, I wouldn't be here at all, but unfortunately...

I want to start by saying that the Female Protagonist content is all fun. That was what I was here for and it didn't disappoint. However there isn't actually as much new as I was expecting so I was pretty much just going through the motions while watching P3's story unfold for the 3rd time, but now in a lame visual novel style that really hurts the way the story is told (but hey, it's very quick to skip through at least). It also doesn't help that Reload uses Portable's script as a base and its story additions take ideas from the Female Protagonist content, making this even less exciting to go through.

Now P3 Portable's gameplay suffers in a lot of ways that FES's gameplay does. The Tactics-controlled party in FES was never my main issue with that game so while Direct Commands is of course a plus, it doesn't fix the fact that Tartarus overall is still torture to go through. I decided to play on Beginner just so I could rush through it all (not dealing with it again), and yet I was still feeling extremely bored and annoyed going through it. P3P does have a few more QoL changes, like being able to save during the day in school and being able to jump to the last explored floor in Tartarus, but it's nowhere near enough a jump high enough from FES to consider it "fun". How in the world can I still not manually inherit skills in fusion, or see if I'm about to rank up a social link beforehand?

I need to stress again that this is my 3rd playthrough of P3. I probably still wouldn't have liked it but I might've hated it a little less if I hadn't played FES before to have as a comparison point. However, I wouldn't bother with this even as a second playthrough honestly. Play P3 Reload, and then look up the female protagonist content on Youtube and listen to the banger soundtrack.

By the way, this remaster is really bad. Please mod it out at the very least if you insist on playing this.

Review taken from my Backloggd page.