This is my third attempt at getting through Persona 3 and I finally was able to finish it. The quality of life features are very much appreciated. I also can see why this is people's favorite, a lot of the themes and writing still hold up.

There's two major things keeping this from being a 5 for me. Tartarus is still a slog, while combat has improved and Tartarus floors are smaller, at a certain point you're still climbing dozens of floors of the same stuff. The other, some of the emotional beats fall flat on their face when it's followed by cheery overworld music immediately after. Not sure if it was this way in the original, but some of the flashy fun stuff kind of hinders the dread of the world that exists.

While I do think this remake is somewhat unnecessary, Atlus still nailed it. A lot of amazing QoL changes that I didn’t even think would improve the experience that much (Linked episodes, removing some old annoying mechanics, Theurgy, etc). The OST is the only downgrade in my opinion. I felt like all the original tracks that were remade were missing the charm that really made them special in the first place (except for Changing Seasons). I wish there would’ve been some major changes made to Tartarus but it slowly started to grow on me, still not a good experience but not as miserable as it was in FES.

Overall, I still prefer FES (most likely just me being biased) but I can definetly see why someone would prefer Reload over it.