I actually despise this game so fucking much holy shit what a slog, its crazy how these TROGLODYTES will tell you this shitstain is somehow an improvement on the original and FES because they took inspiration from Persona 4's garbage ass mechanics because they can't deal with the ai you can remove with a pnach file, literally all of the atmosphere and cinematic flare is drained from a game in which those aspects are some of its greatest strengths because all of the ways in which P3 achieved those highs such as its wonderfully moody cutscenes are reduced to blurry images and descriptions; all that's being done is the story being communicated, and that's where it ends. The emotional moments don't hit at all because they're replaced with these ugly fucking sprites and the gravitas is erased, the gameplay is actively less fun than FES, the point and click overworld fucking sucks and drastically worsens the experience, don't get me fucking started on the female protagonist who gets a "SHE'S BETTER THAN THE MALE ROUTE!" because again they tried to steamroll the game with persona fucking 4's ideas, her party links don't add shit and the fact that you can revive a dead character, removing the impact of their death and ruining multiple others arcs is a disgrace, actively ruins any reference to the event after the fact and any impact it could have - this is what i consider one of the biggest issues with Portable, it has no respect for the identity or themes of Persona 3. All of the ""improvements"" to make it more like P4 just make the game worse, it just blindly adds things like social links for the party because ooo P4 did it without considering it properly, they don't even work with the fucking story - Junpei feels far more emotionally mature far earlier than he should for example. Akihiko's adds nothing, Ken's is centred around pedophilia for some reason, why does Koromaru have a social link. Also the remaster is bad, the backgrounds look smeared in Vaseline and the fact that some of the basic UI is very clearly AI upscaled to smudge detail is funny as fuck. This game being the most accessible way to play Persona 3 pisses me off to no end and i hope we get a remake to make it truly irrelevant. Any points I will give it are because it has some of P3's good elements like the characters and the music, but make no mistake FES is the only way you should be playing Persona 3