Unlike my last few reviews, I find myself struggling to come up with "interesting" commentary on this game. I was considering giving it 4.5 stars, but as I thought more, I couldn't find anything about the game I disliked, wanted more or less of. I love platformers, and the gameplay here brings its A-game from start to finish. It's short, and so sweet I can barely fathom it.

If you're a fan of platformers, beautiful pixel-art, amazing music, and a story that will make you smile, there's few better places to look. Would recommend.

The Persona high didn't go away after I finished Reload, so I decided to sit down and get additional achievements for a full playthrough of 4. I'm very happy I did, because I feel like my opinions on this game have solidified really well.

I find the gameplay here fine. It has controllable party members and a dungeon format instead of a 100 floor tower or subway system, but it lacks anything that adds a lot of depth to the game. I don't blame Golden for this, as it's mainly just due to how long ago the game came out. The life sim aspects are as fun and addicting as any other Persona, and the music grows on me each time I hear it. (Heartbeat, Heartbreak in particular is great).

What makes 4 slightly worse than 3 and 5 in my eyes, unfortunately, is the writing. That statement alone probably turned anyone reading this away, but I ask you hear me out. I don't really agree with sentiments you'd find on Twitter (I find Kanji and Naoto's arcs to be the best in the game), but that said I do feel that this game is extremely, and I mean EXTREMELY, dated. A better way to describe my feelings is I feel as though two different people wrote this game: one that cared about a murder mystery featuring high schoolers and an overwhelmingly stressful atmosphere, and another who wanted to write the most generic slice of life anime you've ever watched, gross tropes and all.

The members of the Investigation Team are all individually very enjoyable. Its when they share scenes, usually in the added golden content, that their annoying sides come out. Teddie is a character that deeply upsets me. I find that he has some genuinely good emotional moments throughout Golden's runtime, but a vast majority of his lines are creepy as all hell. I fucking despise the pervert trope, it's the main reason I don't really watch anime at all, and Teddie's perv energy is so massive that it infects the other characters while he runs his mouth. Yosuke in particular loses all of his brain cells as Golden's story goes on. Not only is he regulated to pervert comic relief with Teddie, but he's also really fucking rude to Kanji, like to an unfair degree. This is getting informal, but the dude literally accepted his magical dark shadow self by admitting that he isn't gay, just afraid of rejection, and yet Yosuke still gives him shit. Like I thought the whole point was to support your friends in accepting themselves, bad and all. Why tear into the dude about something that isn't even true and clearly tormented him. It sucks even more because Yosuke's writing before Kanji's dungeon and in his S-Link is really solid, and I REALLY want to like him more than I do.

As usual, I went on a rant. I want to end by saying that I feel the setting of Inaba is the strongest setting present in modern Persona. I'm not sure how, but Golden does a great job of making the scenery feel comfy and safe. I also, despite the creepy writing, can tell how much each member of the Investigation Team cares for one another, and to me they form a better group dynamic than S.E.E.S. and the Phantom Thieves. It's just a shame that when you inspect closer, ironically, the darker parts of some of these characters are hard to ignore.

In light of the announcement that this is getting remade for Persona 3 Reload, I thought I'd mark my thoughts on The Answer here.

People get very upset over this addition to Persona 3, and I partially understand this anger. The gameplay for this epilogue is plagued by the same issues that the original Persona 3 faced, and then some. I consider Persona 3 FES a 5/5 game, however The Answer contains some issues with its gameplay that go beyond what was featured in the base game.

For one, the removal of the Compendium is a let down. It's not needed nearly as much as in base game, as there are no Social Links to buff your fusions and the runtime of this expansion is pretty short to begin with. The lack of the compendium, to me, simply makes the gameplay experience more grindy. The Abyss of Time, while not awful, can drag simply because The Answer offers players very few breaks from the "Tartarus procedurally generated dungeon crawl" present in base P3. Life sim and virtual novel elements do a good job of breaking up this monotony to prevent it from becoming stale in base, not much of that to go around in Answer.

Despite these flaws in gameplay, I find the story presented to be as special and touching as the one presented in base Persona 3, and a perfect conclusion to the narrative there. Each character's growth is showcased throughout the runtime of this epilogue, some characters (namely Yukari and Aigis) are made to grow even more, expanding upon and completing their arcs from the base game. I can't say much for spoiler reasons, but I find the representation and growth of each character as they search for "the answer" to life absolutely captivating.