I'm not "done" playing this game, but I really have just hit a point where I don't have much fun playing the game anymore, and am just sticking it to hang around with friends.

There's a million reasons why I could go into why it's kind of draining, but I'll just sum it up, it's just shallow, it's the Call of Duty of ARPGs, the gameplay is too easy and boring, it's laggy, there's a lot of clunkiness and the game is full price yet shoving MTX up your ass, with plans for paid DLCs in the future.

The nice things I can say of the game start and end with the visuals, it's a beautiful game, but there's no substance anywhere else, the story sucks, the characters aren't interesting, the cutscenes are boring and the pacing is glacial.

Just play D2 or even D3, this just isn't worth your time in it's current state.

Disclaimer: I played this through Hitman: World of Assassination, but you probably will be too as the original isn't available digitally anymore, and WoA is the same but better.

I was genuinely really surprised what I got here with Hitman, I expected a downgrade from the more old-school style im-sim-esque gameplay with a modern hand-holdy aspect to it, but what I ended up with was a love letter to those older types of game that tries and succeeds well enough to form a middle-ground between the two.

To start off, the game only guides you around if you, yourself actively choose to do the scripted kills, called the "Mission Stories" these can range from again, the scripted kills to just being your entry/disguise, and a lot of the time these are introduced to you by just eavesdropping on conversations other NPCs are having.
If I had to give one criticism about the aforementioned system though, it's that these are often available, and some (AFAIK) are for the most part meant to be accessed through just selecting them in the pause menu and it'll tell you them right off the bat, It would have been a lot nicer if you couldn't do this, but your ability to find them was far easier, either placing them closer to the entry point or highlighting them in your "Hitman Vision"

Another system I very much enjoyed was the mastery system, allowing you more unlocks to approach the area in a different way, let it be to help you get inside faster or start with a disguise, or give you some gear to get you around trickier areas, or just some tools to help you get to the next "Mission Story" it encourages having the game show you the ropes for a level, and you can either do more of the scripted stuff on a replay, or with your newfound tools, try experimenting by just doing whatever, just finding a good opportunity and taking out the target with a clean strike and zipping out of there, it's really good for encouraging replay value in a way that doesn't feel forced.

To add onto the replay value, there's challenges rewarding you for doing all sorts of things in a level, difficulties that make things a little more challenging by doubling down on guards and cameras, punishing more bloody kills by losing your disguises, and you've only got one save, there's also particular challenges rewarding you for doing things like beating it with only killing your target and not disguising ever, and also not being spotted ever, there's a lot to do for every single mission and it does a good job of getting you to learn the ropes while you're not experimenting.

And as a little extra note, the game is jam packed with a bunch of easter eggs or little references that pump the game full of some soul, you can tell that they had a lot of fun developing these games just the same as they did with the originals.

Onto the criticisms though.

As mentioned before, the "Mission story" system could do with more focus on discovering them rather than just hitting a button to be lead to the objective markers.

The story is absolutely dull, nothing is really happening, or at the very least nothing feels like it's happening, because it's just a bunch of cutscenes that don't impact the missions at all, other than a scene on the second to last mission, and it gets a bit dull only assassinating targets who have done bad, come on, it's a HITMAN game, I'd expect to at least start off with a few morally grey missions of just corporate sabotage, taking out suits by sneaking through office buildings.

There's this system called "Elusive targets" which is absolutely terrible, limited time targets that are gone forever (or at least a while) if you mess them up, The game has a lot of replay value as is and making them all permanent, including their rewards, wouldn't be a problem, I don't see any appeal for this.

Some of the levels in the middle of the game are a bit boring, particular the one set in Morocco and especially the one set in Colorado.
The one set in Morocco has a bad problem with just kind of squeezing you in tight locations with you having to navigate an overpopulated clusterfuck to try and find a way through, probably just having to jump to a "Mission Story" and it becomes really difficult to take some of the disguises, particularly the guy putting up flyers, because you have to follow him around for AGES before he's in a decent spot, which you're only getting away with due to bad NPC placement, which gets spotted soon after, not that it matters when you're gone (another criticism, why don't NPCs that you steal the outfit of get upset and compromise your outfit for everyone they're related with once they're woken up?)
The Colorado one is just stuffing you in this open hell-hole where you have to take out FOUR targets, 2 of them aren't too hard, the mission stories they have are easy enough to set up, and the third just stumbled upon my distraction I had accidentally set up when I was taking care of two guys I needed to KO and get past, so I just killed him and stuffed his body in a bush, but the fourth one? what a fucking pain in the ass, and I was doing the "Mission Story"
So first, you have to go listen to the guy's conversation about the Interpol badge, then you have to wait for the planets to align to steal it from him, because before you KO him, you have to wait for the guy just across from him to walk away, make sure the target and their entourage isn't coming, wait for his buddy to turn around, throw a weapon at his buddy, immediately choke the guy with the badge, snag it, and book it immediately, that's the hard part done.

Now you have to get to the target and talk to her to meet you at a specific location, but if you were using "The Point Man" disguise, you're just not allowed anywhere near the house, so you have to wait for her to finish whatever she's doing there or go back and get the "Militia Elite" disguise, once you talk to her you tell her to meet you by a lake, you go through this drawn out conversation, she does this annoying trope that a lot of mission stories have, where eventually they just say "Ok You beat the mission story, all guards fuck off" and then sit around for like 20s before returning to the giant group of people effectively failing the mission story.

Normally that isn't a problem, but I had accidentally landed it with some guy across the lake looking right at us, so I had to wait until he turned around, which just so happened to be right as she finished talking, Thankfully I still had the prompt to push her in the water, but now her guards that were nowhere near me are... hunting me down? And only her guards, I guess when she's not in that scene she's scripted to have her guards react to any kill event like a "push" so you can't cheese it by just having the guards look the other way, but it's way too greedy, she's flagged for this the MOMENT she finishes her scripted "stand by the edge of the water animation"
Thankfully I had a save, so I just timed it right before she finishes the animation and finished the mission easily.

Continuing from the AI though, my final criticism is that the AI just kind of has a lot of issues, a lot of the civilians are effectively props that sometimes react to gunfire (and even then not enough) but it's no big deal, it's really taxing to render in a hundred civilians.
My problem is more the weaknesses of the guard AI, my major complaints involve just how they handle distractions and pathing, it's really easy to cheese dealing with guards, as if you throw something, and they don't watch you throw it, whoever was closest to the object thrown will walk straight to it, no matter what.
I abused this on the final mission to snag a disguise from one of the Yakuza, the target was walking with her 2 bodyguards, I threw a shovel in the room on the left, all 3 were alerted, one guard walked in, I immediately knocked him out and stole his disguise and the other 2 just didn't care that he never returned.
Then when I kind of fucked up the "Mission Story" by pushing the target off a ledge in front of her security, I just hung off the ledge and they just couldn't figure out how to deal with that, they just pathed into the room and just stared at walls, didn't try to go shoot through the window to get me, or to stand next to the ledge and shoot down at me, just stared at a wall and at best just compromised my disguise, which I could easily replace.

And one last nitpick on the AI, the way the AI just stops and says "GET OUT OF MY FACE" if you stand close to them for too long, it's pointless and annoying, so often it'll happen just because you're waiting for them to go through dialogue, or waiting for an NPC to pass by, and it just wastes time because they stare right at you, spend 7 seconds saying "go away" and then turn back around, and it'll interrupt their dialogue and sets them back like, a sentence or two, it never really did anything major but my lord was it annoying every time it happened, which was a lot.

I really recommend Hitman: WoA with my experience so far of the first game's levels though, it's a comfortable in-between of old games like Thief, mixed with some sense of direction and levels that actually look like places of modern era, I enjoyed my time with it and it's one of the few games that makes me want to go back and replay the levels once I'm done going through them one at a time.

Utterly miserable, all the writing doubles down on everything that was shit from the first and any note of something interesting has been eradicated, the first game struggled with not talking about vapid bullshit metatext when what it had going for it regularly was quite interesting and thought-provoking, and now it's just been boiled down to obnoxious "HOLY FREAKIN COW EVERYTHING IS FREAKIN SCARRRYYY MY MOM IS LIKE A DEMOONNN"
Whereas the first one lead me on something interesting and then let me down, I could barely stomach 10 minutes with such a fucking horrible opening, just low-fi beats to study to bullshit for people who beat off to one or multiple of things like psychological horror, mental illness and "failgirls"

This is one of the few times I genuinely feel like I have had the reverse of what I usually expect to feel from art, I don't feel like I've grown, I feel like my perspective on the world has been reduced, I can only hope this was made to cash in on the people who went "OMG SO RELATABLE" to the first game.

Good writing of mental health, while still managing to be interesting, but my god the writing of the actual game is atrocious, leave the metatext stuff at the door, I really do not care about it.

It just comes off as super pretentious, I've interacted with a thousand different people who have this bad coping mechanism of acting like their mental illness makes them a quirky personality that everyone loves to interact with, and it's always so incredibly insufferable and this game pretty much personifies it, I can't get into the game's main character because I just see all those people I knew, It feels like if the game went on for any longer I'd be reading through the bi-daily vent post from them about how everything sucks but phrased in a way to be just pointlessly complex filled with absolutely obnoxious commentary on culture and society.

Really great 2D platformer, possibly one of the best ever, Honestly just have a lot of fun running laps around tracks with mods that let you do infinite laps, and normally I don't like going away from the linear path to just beating the game, it's just too addicting to see how fast you can race across an entire level.

Don't like the bosses though, not one bit, and there's a lot of content cut from the beta versions of the game I wish were in the final one, or at the very least accessible as an extra or a DLC with the old versions in it.

No workshop support is kind of a bummer, but the game is light enough to make modding easy, and these days Gamebanana has plenty of tools to make modding easy (though their site layout is still a bit bad) and I've heard rumors of an official level editor, so no huge deal.

I love what this game does to Zack, honestly he's my favorite character in FF7 after his characterization in this game, and this is 100% worth playing and ties in well with the original game.
Every scene that involves building on the story from the original is great, and the emotional scenes really get to me, especially the ending.
...But man oh man, EVERYTHING that was made up for this game with the copies and Genesis the pretentious poet just feels soooo terrible, it's just this overwritten shlock with a wannabe Sephiroth, and it just sucks because you already know how it ends, it didn't exist in the first game so it all has to go poof and not matter by the end, and it doesn't, Angeal at least provides the basis for Zack's growth, but everything with Genesis is pure fluff filler.

The combat is just okay, I've heard it's way better in the remaster, so unless you hate his new voice actor, like me, I'd give that a whirl instead, it fixes up the problem like the attack system being a bit too slow and clunky, and the fact that hitting attack makes you run straight to the locked on enemy, whoever the fuck that may be and just swings, and running to attack is instead a dash to attack.
The DMW is completely fucking insane, just a constant roulette wheel spinning that will stop your gameplay for 10s if it's close to getting something good so it can play a limit break, it's totally luck based so you might get like 6 in a row or nothing for 5 minutes, this system is honestly terrible but at least it's patched up in the remaster to not lock you in place as much, and I can't say I'll be missing the game locking up to show me a roulette wheel and pictures from the cutscenes in the game.
Progression is also atrocious, you can ONLY level up from rolling the same numbers in the DMW, not from killing mobs, and the levelling is glacial anyhow, so if you fall behind you're just going to be getting level checked by attacks that deal more damage than you have health, it's really obnoxious, but again, the remaster fixes this.

100% worth the play for FF7 fans, more so than any of the remakes, and 110% if you want to play the remakes, but I'd recommend the remaster simply because of how much better it plays, even if Zacks' voice acting is awful.

Corn Kidz 64 is a love letter to classic 3D platformers, and is made with nothing but love.

The game oozes with the 90's kids cartoon style with the main characters Seve and Alexis looking like they were ripped straight out of some particularly grunge-y one, and the worlds feel ripped straight out of N64 game that says "COOL" somewhere on the back of the box.

The game plays pretty great, the platforming is pretty tight, the worlds although there's only 3 of them are filled with detail to make sure they last, and there's enough secrets to look for to make it just not laser focused on your main objective, in-fact the game's "Level" system forces you to find some of them to progress forwards, kind of like a badly telegraphed Mario 64 Star Door, though it could have been done better by designing it more like that, instead of having like 200 cubes, have about 50-70 and the doors require that specific amount, the level thing makes it feel like it's used for extra abilities, or just as a bonus, so it kind of tripped me up when I found out they were required.

There are some issues with the gameplay, for one there's only one real major world, with the first one being kind of a tutorial level with some things to do in it, and the other being exclusively a final level gauntlet, and the camera angles can screw over your platforming a lot, there probably should have been an extra reach to a lot of the platforms to make up for the fact that you'll probably be a bit imprecise due to the weird camera angles.

There was only a single boss-fight, but that's not much of a complaint because it fits in pretty well for a 3D platformer, revolving around dodging attacks then platforming to win, but having to aim stuff without a reticle and with a very awkward aiming system sucks almost as much as it did in OoT.

Sometimes finding out where to go in the level the game revolves around, the Hollow, gets a bit confusing because of how obtuse some things can be, It's not too bad and it does serve the old-school style very well so it's only a minor complaint.

There's not much else to say about the game though, It's so old school that the music is just alright and the story is almost non-existent, but that's not a problem.

I ended up liking this ever so slightly more than Pseudoregalia, so if you liked that, or even just like any 3D platformers at all, you'll probably like this.

Everyone has already said their thoughts on this game before, so I'll get into what really stuck with me with the game, it has nothing to do with the addicting gameplay, or the killer soundtrack, it's what two of the major characters represent, Jacket and Biker.
SPOILERS for both the first and the second game.

If you know anything about this series, you know what Jacket represents, he's committing horrible acts of violence, just following orders.
For the 50 Blessings operatives, this either is out of nationalism like Jacket and Jake, or out of fear of the threats 50 Blessings has otherwise like Richter, even though at one point said threats were probably lies.
For the players this is just how the gameplay goes, you're presented in the level and your goal is to kill all these enemies, so you should do it.

Yeah, yeah, it's a pretty dull "VIOLENCE IS BAD?!?!" thing, but it's executed quite well in practice with the ambience as you walk through the viscera you've left behind in your wake on your way to your not-Delorean, and it was very profound for its time.

What interests me more is Biker, though.
Biker is a very interesting character, especially how he ends up in the second game, that it's kind of an unrepresented criticism of player behavior, the one who can engage with the game past just the gameplay, but still refuses to engage with it as a piece of media because they're too busy looking for answers.
For Biker it absolutely consumes him, until he's faced with what probably is the ghostly figure of Richard, who I can only assume in the events of 2 represents death and finality, that he's powerless and he's wasting away in the process, and continuing in senseless violence isn't going to get him the answers, nor the retribution he wants.
For the players, they'll look up and down combing through the story piecing together events, when really there's not much to it, it's not all this intricately put together plot, it all just revolves around these characters and what they mean, the real answer is that the violence just to find out what's behind it all, what happens after the collapse of the Russo-American Coalition, what happens after the nuke, isn't worth it, you shouldn't be engaging with the violence just as senselessly as someone just doing it for "the fun of it" because you want to know "what will happen"

I love Hotline Miami, I love how the series pieces together story, gameplay and symbolism, into a total crowd-pleaser, and Hotline Miami 2 ends the series off well.

Please never make another one of these, Nothing official, no fan-games, if you really want to use the level editor, go ahead, but what should be taken away from the game is how our culture is strongly connected to violence, and how violence will always lead to more violence, the series has said what it needs to say, the gameplay is too connected to what the game is trying to tell about violence, let it rest.

Maybe it's just me, but some "cozy/wholesome" games can feel quite exhausting, It just feels patronizing having stuff that not only is pretty simple and filled with friendliness, but just bends over backwards to make sure everyone is having a comfortable time, everybody loves you and also gives you their preferred pronouns and nobody ever gets mad at you, I get it, some people really get into this stuff but stuff like this always reminds me of being a kid and feeling like my intelligence was insulted because people will spend far too long treating like you can't walk 5 ft without falling on your face, so this ends up just feeling like an exploration game where if you ever sprain your ankle, you'll get a band-aid and a juicebox.

It's not a bad game though, the art is cute and the characters are a bit interesting, even if all of the ones that are clearly in their teens to 30s are the same design but with a different style of clothes that could be interchangeable between all of them, and all of the kids are like, kids show shallow, where their only goals in life are to say hi to friends and ask someone to get their ball for them.

The game is a nice time-sink if you don't mind these kinds of atmospheres, but it just drains me.

Really short game, just a simple rhythm shooter along the likes of BPM, with the difference being this one is an actual game and BPM is a crappy low effort roguelike with a shitty filter applied to hide that all the assets aren't original to the game.

Gameplay is short but sweet, guns feel nice, hits feel satisfying, but the health system kind of sucks, why design a system where you have health if you have Doom 2016-esque system where every finisher refills most of your health, it feels totally out of place and only done because it was in Doom.
This becomes notably apparent when the game can't decide whether it wants you to take no hits, punishing you by reducing your multiplier greatly if you get hit once, or a game where you're supposed to take a few shots, with enemies spamming projectiles that can get hard to see in the chaos and focus on the beats.

Bosses are pretty boring and generic, not much to say about them.

Levels are alright in the beginning, but a bit dull, being a lot of large Doom Eternal style arenas, but near the end of the game the level design just hits the fan with small hallways where you're packed in with a bunch of enemies and it stops being fun because you're just dealing with 8 waves in an area you couldn't dream of not getting hit in, you probably won't die but it's not going to be a fun time.

A major thing that kind of holds the game back for me is that the soundtrack is just kind of... boring, it doesn't feel focused enough on being intense and more on just being a standard metal track or whatever, and it doesn't have the benefit of something like BPM where the soundtracks are just heavily focused on their repetitive beat patterns so you can get a good rhythm going.

Worst of all, the game has a nasty habit of crashing if too much is going on, particularly when you explode a door or an object, my playthrough was about 3 hours and I crashed about 4 times, that's pretty unacceptable especially in a game with no checkpoints.

However the game is fun enough, and is good for what the price is, so if you like unorthodox rhythm games it's worth trying for the style and just to support the developers.

Puzzle Agent is a really charming puzzle game by Telltale and Graham Annable, The game is basically Professor Layton by way of Twin Peaks, and is from a simpler time when Telltale was just coming up with point and clicks after Lucasart's game division shut down.
Apparently Graham is well known for his comic series Grickle where The Hidden People and his art-style comes from, but I've personally never heard of it.
However, his art style is really charming and is a major aspect of what makes this game so memorable, even with the short runtime it's hard not to fall for a failure of a Dale Cooper wannabe who has a knack for puzzle solving, and the general style of the game is great.

However, if you look into it more than just a short one-sitting puzzle time-waster then you'll start to notice a lot of flaws, starting with just the puzzles, they tend to be all over the place, you'll have some fairly interesting ones, but especially in the second half of the game you're just getting thrown the same puzzle again but now it's harder, or now it's themed differently.
Often the puzzles are really poorly explained or unclear or just plain tedious to figure out rather than interesting, and it can be really annoying to be docked in your score heavily just because there was a rule to the puzzle never told to you.
Lastly the tile spinning and jigsaw puzzles end up being very trivial, as for the tile puzzles you can just spin them until the picture lines up decently, and for the jigsaw ones you can easily just accidentally click things together just moving things around, next thing you know you've got the answer in front of you.

Story wise it's interesting, but it feels like Puzzle Agent 2 should have been the games second half, rather than just ending, I assume it was just because the game was a shot in the dark, and they only continued on because sales were high enough to make a sequel worthwhile, but it just leaves the first game really shallow, you start getting into the depths of the mystery, and then the game just ends on a massive cliffhanger.
And often it feels like the mystery is just implied rather than actually being there, paper thin ideas of "oooo what's actually going on behind the scenes" when there's not enough going on to make it seem anything more like, yeah, this character has an explained mystery and this one is just cryptic for the sake of it.

There's also 3 jumpscares that happen during the puzzles, the first time it got me pretty good and was a nice way to startle the player without feeling cheap, but when they do it a second time it just feels cheap, and the third time it's barely even a scare and more of just a cutscene, so I didn't really mind it all that much.

Regardless though the game is still super memorable off of it's charm alone, and I seriously recommend anyone who enjoys puzzle games like Professor Layton to give the game a shot, it's not to the quality of Layton's adventures but it's cheap and short, and you'll probably come out greatly enjoying some part of it.

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.