This was my first experience with Persona 3 in any form, I played both Persona 4 Golden and Persona 5, and I still have to play Royal.

The soundtrack is just as good as ever, from what I understand they covered some of the original soundtrack and added a few more, Persona consistently has some of the best soundtracks in gaming, and this one is no exception.

The gameplay was excellent, adding in a lot of the quality-of-life features from the other games, but still staying true to the original game, it does not have as many elements as the newer ones, nor personas, despite that it has gameplay that is a bit better than original Persona 5, because of the Royale features. Climbing the tower was interesting and reminded me a lot of mementos from Persona 5, It was a bit of a drag towards the end of the game, but it did not prevent me from finishing it.

The Social Links were hit or miss for me, some were among the best in the series link, the Sun social link and the Aeon social link being amazing. While some were really juvenile, one entails you watching your classmate ask out one of the teachers and navigating their relationship, and if you do not encourage him and go along with it, then you do not get any points towards the social link. Your male S.E.E.S teammates not having social links was a bit of a bummer, but Atlus tried to alleviate that by having link episodes, where you hang out with your teammates and learn more about their character, once again they really stuck with making the story part of it as close to the original as possible. I enjoyed all of the S.E.E.S social links and I am glad they added a platonic conclusion to their social links, since in the original you had no choice but to romance them.

The Life Sim elements were great, they had less attributes to level up, my only critique is that knowledge is extremely slow to level, some S.E.E.S social links require to level an attribute to the highest level, which prevents you from starting their social link till the last part of the game, I wish leveling your S.E.E.S social links was a bit more gradual throughout the game, cause it feels a little rushed to do their social links in the last month of the game. You can do activities with them after school, like watching movies, watering plants, cooking etc., as well as doing group study sessions during exam seasons, which helps alleviate that feeling of their relationship with the MC going a bit too fast, but once again this is from the original game, so they stuck to the source.

Storywise, this is probably the best Persona story I have played out of 3,4,5. It tackles themes of depression and finding your reasons for living, the characters you interact with all have their own traumas and struggles, and a lot of them overlap, including the MCs. And ultimately, your character is the one who is helping people find their reasons to keep going despite their trials and tribulations, and then after all of that the MC ends up sacrificing himself to save the world, which while it is a cliche on its own, adding on the emotional weight of building relationships with all of the character in and out of your team, makes this such an excellent ending. The credits roll when the MC closes his eyes after willing himself to keep his promise to make it through the end of the school year with all of his friends. Most of the social links also involve you making plans for after the events of the game, which adds so much more weight to this ending. With all of those factors, this makes this ending one of the best game endings I have experienced, and they are remastering The Answer, which is sort of an epilogue that involves your friends coming to terms with losing one of their close friends and how each character deals with it in different ways. I am very excited to play this and hope it impacts me as much as the main story did.