To get the first things out of the way, this is definitely the definitive edition of Persona 3, excluding the bonus content, half of which is coming soon, and half of which is permanently trapped to P3P, but I don't care for those things personally.
Just about everything is improved from the original, QoL, pacing, character writing, voice acting, content, gameplay, etc. with only two marks against it, the soundtrack has a good few worse tracks, and the aesthetic doesn't have the melancholy of the original and leans far too much into P5's pop-art style, as well as replacing a lot of 2D cutscenes with really awkward looking 3D mocap ones.
It's really a gold standard for how to do a remake, it's a game that needed one majorly because it was bound to an incredibly boring outdated loop, and doesn't lose much of its original gameplay (mainly because it's turn-based and doesn't have the ability to change the fundamentals)
HOWEVER, the pricetag for the game is INEXCUSABLE, this is not a $70 game, Persona 5 was a $60 game, and this isn't even half of what Persona 5 was effort wise, you'll constantly bump into cut corners, reused assets, or just broken animations (you go into a dance club, and there's 17 people just frozen in place? what the fuck?) and they have the audacity to sell the DLC for almost 50% of the base game's price and they don't include it with the deluxe editions of the game, this is an incredibly greedy move especially for such a relatively low budget project.
Anyways, onto my thoughts on the actual game
Starting off with the bad stuff, the gameplay.
It's a turn-based JRPG, so I've just come to expect the gameplay to be outdated and mediocre, and surprise! It is, it's leaps and bounds better than the original, but you're still going to deal with the shitty combat the Persona series has, where it's basically standard JRPG combat mixed with shitty Pokémon mechanics, Stats always feel like they're a waste, most effective way to gather your personas is to just make sure you have a persona that can hit every weakness, and then having 1 mega persona you dump all your stats into, eventually combining it into another mega persona, it feels very unintuitive and clunky.
The game's setting for basically the entirety of the actual RPG fighting part of the game is fucking horrible, it is a giant tower of boring RNG setpieces that only get slightly interesting layout and variety wise about halfway through the game, and only pick up just a little bit more near the end, it's 260+ floors of this shit, it's pure padding and it's only due to all the conveniences and boosted progression in the remake that I was even able to stomach it, this would have been awful in the original.
Then you get onto the stuff that gets introduced gradually, your early-game progression is tedious and dull, but around the late-midgame it starts to pick up in the variety category and you'll probably start to have builds coming together.
However it all feels rather meaningless because... The bosses suck, like all of them suck outside of maybe 1 or 2 having an interesting set piece going on. Every major boss is just a giant tank with 1 shitty niche to it (heart boss constantly charms, boss in factory has a lot of charge-ups and electricity attacks, etc.) and some are just fucking annoying and dumb (boss that has no weaknesses until you limit break, boss that spawns minions every few turns and also constantly uses an ability that gives them 3+ moves on their turn) And this doesn't end up changing in the late-game, it actually gets worse! Spongy bosses who will have NO problem having insta-kills that have a good chance of just killing your entire party if not just you (leader dying is an instant-loss for no good reason, get with the times) and then with the last 2 bosses in the game, have fucking health-gates! So you don't know what you're supposed to be planning towards until it actually happens, Twice I had a party wipe because I combined a limit break with a damage-up only for the 25% health left going down to 20% because of a health-gate, only to be instakilled due to bad luck before I could end up finishing them off regularly, what bullshit is this? I ended up getting really taken out of the experience because of this and if not for those last 2 bosses, I would have put it closer to an 8/10.
Anyways, the regular gatekeeper minibosses between floors are a lot more fun, they're not amazing but they're far more of a challenge than a timesink.
EDIT: Extra note I forgot, the AI is horrible, what they do is basically total RNG, they'll gladly dump spells into your ally that get completely blocked, that they should KNOW get blocked because they've used them on them 2 turns earlier, and it just makes me think "is this why they get overtuned in other areas? because the AI is such dogshit?"
The visuals are very nice, the style really works and model wise easily tops Persona 5, which I didn't really think would have been possible any time soon, the UI is super stylish, but as mentioned before, it doesn't fit the game super well and could have used less bright blues and more muted colors, the final month of the game actually adapts a style more like this and it is a bit too far in the other direction for general use throughout the game, it is probably what they should have aimed closer for.
Most major cutscenes have been replaced by 3D mocapped ones instead of the old 2D ones, and it just looks... weird, I get the exact same vibes I do from Sonic 06, having these stylized unrealistic proportioned characters move with such human weight just doesn't look right, they're meant to have snappy and slick movements that matches their style, but it wasn't the end of the world.
You can kind of tell that a lot of non major character models were either recycled content from older games/poorly made though.
Finally, onto the story, It's hard to really put thoughts onto a story of a JRPG that takes place over such a long duration of time, so I'll try to just mainly focus on some general notes and my thoughts on the themes of the game.
To start, I'm going to just kick the writing down a little for something I don't like in any localized game, Don't have your characters say things that only really sound good in Japanese, hearing people call people [NAME]-kun and Senpai in English sounds completely and totally awful, It's some "all according to keikaku" shit where you can easily use English words or tones to replace it, but don't have it for reasons I can only imagine are spite or pretentiousness.
The theme of the game is death, but the very childish way Persona games are written makes it hard to have such stakes in the very bleak subject matter when it constantly needs to keep the viewers in the flow by constantly beating you over the head with every single thing, every single moment it's talking about death, death is hanging over your head, a social link is talking about someone they know in bad health or that has passed away, the evokers are supposed to evoke suicidal imagery as it is the characters confronting their fear of death to summon their Personas, etc. and it just really makes it kind of awkward, it's why focusing on the death and the grief of death as a topic is something that is best saved for very adult media that focuses more on a small group of people, rather than brief strokes on many different characters.
If you want a better, or rather alternative take on this subject matter, play The World Ends With You, it not only plays better but focuses on something a lot more adaptable to a JRPG-esque story, focusing on finding the value in life and change, it's a different side of the same coin that Persona 3 is on.
Onto the more character specific writing, the members of SEES feel like most of them get fleshed out quite a bit, though things like Junpei in the first half of the game can be poorly written, feeling mistreated (rightly so) and then they solve that by.... he just gets over it??? Okay?
Apparently there is a good chunk of these moments fleshing out the characters that are new to the remake, so I'm glad they're there.
The character's archetypes can feel a little dull, but personally I prefer that to a lot of what happens in 4 & 5 as out of the 3, this is the one that DOESN'T have a weirdly sexualized female character, though they're not without their writing flaws, they revolve a bit too much around "dere" personalities, though when it comes to social links they're a lot better about it.
Speaking of the social links, I've never been super huge on the writing for a lot of them, as it's effectively like 3-5 minutes of dialogue stretched out into 10 separate hang-out days, the stops can feel really awkward, but their stories are enjoyable enough, though I wish the "power of friendship!" moment with your social links at the final battle lasted longer than the scene of the entire party each getting out 1-2 anime grunt sounds out each, but at least there's a little bit of dialogue for each social link you maxed out at the end of the game.
Not huge on how gung-ho the series is about students loving teachers and teachers loving students, AFAIK in all the scenes it's depicted in, it's legally not pedophilia in Japan, but it's still like, totally weird.
Anyways, overall it was a pretty solid experience, something I'd definitely recommend to any JRPG fan or anyone who wants to get into the Persona series, almost as good of an entry-point into the genre as Persona 5, though the runtime of this game is much shorter than 5, so at least it respects your time much more.
Obviously Persona 3/4/5 are all worth playing for any fan of JRPGs or video game stories in general, but I recommend anyone who enjoyed this game to try out The World Ends With You.
Just about everything is improved from the original, QoL, pacing, character writing, voice acting, content, gameplay, etc. with only two marks against it, the soundtrack has a good few worse tracks, and the aesthetic doesn't have the melancholy of the original and leans far too much into P5's pop-art style, as well as replacing a lot of 2D cutscenes with really awkward looking 3D mocap ones.
It's really a gold standard for how to do a remake, it's a game that needed one majorly because it was bound to an incredibly boring outdated loop, and doesn't lose much of its original gameplay (mainly because it's turn-based and doesn't have the ability to change the fundamentals)
HOWEVER, the pricetag for the game is INEXCUSABLE, this is not a $70 game, Persona 5 was a $60 game, and this isn't even half of what Persona 5 was effort wise, you'll constantly bump into cut corners, reused assets, or just broken animations (you go into a dance club, and there's 17 people just frozen in place? what the fuck?) and they have the audacity to sell the DLC for almost 50% of the base game's price and they don't include it with the deluxe editions of the game, this is an incredibly greedy move especially for such a relatively low budget project.
Anyways, onto my thoughts on the actual game
Starting off with the bad stuff, the gameplay.
It's a turn-based JRPG, so I've just come to expect the gameplay to be outdated and mediocre, and surprise! It is, it's leaps and bounds better than the original, but you're still going to deal with the shitty combat the Persona series has, where it's basically standard JRPG combat mixed with shitty Pokémon mechanics, Stats always feel like they're a waste, most effective way to gather your personas is to just make sure you have a persona that can hit every weakness, and then having 1 mega persona you dump all your stats into, eventually combining it into another mega persona, it feels very unintuitive and clunky.
The game's setting for basically the entirety of the actual RPG fighting part of the game is fucking horrible, it is a giant tower of boring RNG setpieces that only get slightly interesting layout and variety wise about halfway through the game, and only pick up just a little bit more near the end, it's 260+ floors of this shit, it's pure padding and it's only due to all the conveniences and boosted progression in the remake that I was even able to stomach it, this would have been awful in the original.
Then you get onto the stuff that gets introduced gradually, your early-game progression is tedious and dull, but around the late-midgame it starts to pick up in the variety category and you'll probably start to have builds coming together.
However it all feels rather meaningless because... The bosses suck, like all of them suck outside of maybe 1 or 2 having an interesting set piece going on. Every major boss is just a giant tank with 1 shitty niche to it (heart boss constantly charms, boss in factory has a lot of charge-ups and electricity attacks, etc.) and some are just fucking annoying and dumb (boss that has no weaknesses until you limit break, boss that spawns minions every few turns and also constantly uses an ability that gives them 3+ moves on their turn) And this doesn't end up changing in the late-game, it actually gets worse! Spongy bosses who will have NO problem having insta-kills that have a good chance of just killing your entire party if not just you (leader dying is an instant-loss for no good reason, get with the times) and then with the last 2 bosses in the game, have fucking health-gates! So you don't know what you're supposed to be planning towards until it actually happens, Twice I had a party wipe because I combined a limit break with a damage-up only for the 25% health left going down to 20% because of a health-gate, only to be instakilled due to bad luck before I could end up finishing them off regularly, what bullshit is this? I ended up getting really taken out of the experience because of this and if not for those last 2 bosses, I would have put it closer to an 8/10.
Anyways, the regular gatekeeper minibosses between floors are a lot more fun, they're not amazing but they're far more of a challenge than a timesink.
EDIT: Extra note I forgot, the AI is horrible, what they do is basically total RNG, they'll gladly dump spells into your ally that get completely blocked, that they should KNOW get blocked because they've used them on them 2 turns earlier, and it just makes me think "is this why they get overtuned in other areas? because the AI is such dogshit?"
The visuals are very nice, the style really works and model wise easily tops Persona 5, which I didn't really think would have been possible any time soon, the UI is super stylish, but as mentioned before, it doesn't fit the game super well and could have used less bright blues and more muted colors, the final month of the game actually adapts a style more like this and it is a bit too far in the other direction for general use throughout the game, it is probably what they should have aimed closer for.
Most major cutscenes have been replaced by 3D mocapped ones instead of the old 2D ones, and it just looks... weird, I get the exact same vibes I do from Sonic 06, having these stylized unrealistic proportioned characters move with such human weight just doesn't look right, they're meant to have snappy and slick movements that matches their style, but it wasn't the end of the world.
You can kind of tell that a lot of non major character models were either recycled content from older games/poorly made though.
Finally, onto the story, It's hard to really put thoughts onto a story of a JRPG that takes place over such a long duration of time, so I'll try to just mainly focus on some general notes and my thoughts on the themes of the game.
To start, I'm going to just kick the writing down a little for something I don't like in any localized game, Don't have your characters say things that only really sound good in Japanese, hearing people call people [NAME]-kun and Senpai in English sounds completely and totally awful, It's some "all according to keikaku" shit where you can easily use English words or tones to replace it, but don't have it for reasons I can only imagine are spite or pretentiousness.
The theme of the game is death, but the very childish way Persona games are written makes it hard to have such stakes in the very bleak subject matter when it constantly needs to keep the viewers in the flow by constantly beating you over the head with every single thing, every single moment it's talking about death, death is hanging over your head, a social link is talking about someone they know in bad health or that has passed away, the evokers are supposed to evoke suicidal imagery as it is the characters confronting their fear of death to summon their Personas, etc. and it just really makes it kind of awkward, it's why focusing on the death and the grief of death as a topic is something that is best saved for very adult media that focuses more on a small group of people, rather than brief strokes on many different characters.
If you want a better, or rather alternative take on this subject matter, play The World Ends With You, it not only plays better but focuses on something a lot more adaptable to a JRPG-esque story, focusing on finding the value in life and change, it's a different side of the same coin that Persona 3 is on.
Onto the more character specific writing, the members of SEES feel like most of them get fleshed out quite a bit, though things like Junpei in the first half of the game can be poorly written, feeling mistreated (rightly so) and then they solve that by.... he just gets over it??? Okay?
Apparently there is a good chunk of these moments fleshing out the characters that are new to the remake, so I'm glad they're there.
The character's archetypes can feel a little dull, but personally I prefer that to a lot of what happens in 4 & 5 as out of the 3, this is the one that DOESN'T have a weirdly sexualized female character, though they're not without their writing flaws, they revolve a bit too much around "dere" personalities, though when it comes to social links they're a lot better about it.
Speaking of the social links, I've never been super huge on the writing for a lot of them, as it's effectively like 3-5 minutes of dialogue stretched out into 10 separate hang-out days, the stops can feel really awkward, but their stories are enjoyable enough, though I wish the "power of friendship!" moment with your social links at the final battle lasted longer than the scene of the entire party each getting out 1-2 anime grunt sounds out each, but at least there's a little bit of dialogue for each social link you maxed out at the end of the game.
Not huge on how gung-ho the series is about students loving teachers and teachers loving students, AFAIK in all the scenes it's depicted in, it's legally not pedophilia in Japan, but it's still like, totally weird.
Anyways, overall it was a pretty solid experience, something I'd definitely recommend to any JRPG fan or anyone who wants to get into the Persona series, almost as good of an entry-point into the genre as Persona 5, though the runtime of this game is much shorter than 5, so at least it respects your time much more.
Obviously Persona 3/4/5 are all worth playing for any fan of JRPGs or video game stories in general, but I recommend anyone who enjoyed this game to try out The World Ends With You.