Despite what some people want you to believe, the story is not terrible. It is an OK addition to the main campaign, explaining what exactly happened in the ending, and what the real nature of Nyx was. Everyone was kept decently in character (some being better than others) with their development from the main story preserved.
The gameplay though is a giant 25 hour slog which forces the player to grind for almost every boss, with hardly any story present in between it. The game dumps you with story at the start and at the end, only showing you 5 minute cutscenes in between 2 hour grind sessions for the majority of the runtime. There's blatantly not enough story to justify the 25 hours.
Really, just watch the cutscenes on youtube and be done with it. I doubt you want an equivalent of 100 extra Tartarus floors on a higher difficulty after playing the main story.

Persona 3 Portable is an excessively lazy port, done with little care or desire to create a better version of the original game. It all of it's gameplay changes are backported from P4, with little care to make them fit. The fact that knockdowns behave differently alone breaks most bosses, and while additions like skill cards and direct commands are welcome, they aren't enough to fix the game's fundamentally broken balance.
And that's just the pure gameplay, now it's already widely known that the visuals were not just downscaled, they were completely butchered. Get ready to NOT see any of the 3d scenes and animated environments and miss out on cool character details (did you know that Ken drinks out of a comicaly large mug?) and immersion, you are now a circle on a jpeg. And in the HD version, you are a circle on a terribly AI upscaled jpeg, with artefacts being so visible that you don't even have to look hard for them: most semi complicated world elements turn into a blurry mess. Not to mention the crunchiest audio possible. And the lack of anime cutscenes makes some of the best scenes in the game into an impossible to take seriously farce. Get ready to see the iconic awakening scene as an awkward 3D model clipping festival, with all of the suspence and excitement gone, as well as several other scenes misrepresented by horribly written flavor text. The fact that some people have the audacity to call that writing "VN style" is an insult to the concept of a visual novel.
The only "redeeming" part of this port is the female protagonist, who... Doesn't fit the game's themes and turns all the intentionally blue coloring into a disgustingly unfitting pink. Seriously, it's so bad that even the opening uses the color red for her. Enjoy reviving an important character (with NO gameplay benifit), ruining one of the best scenes in the game even further as well as dating an underage boy, since apparently that's what girls are into?... But hey, she is CUTE and has QUIRKY replies, so why should that matter, amirite sisters?
P3P is the sinlge worst way you can experience the game, and now it's also painfully obvious that its HD port is just Atlus double dipping to milk the maximum money out of the brand, with the actual proper remake coming later. But hey, look at other reviews! People love this. People are fine with this mess, and will gladly pay actual money for it. That's the fans which will eat up literally anyting named Persona, and will justify all the objectively terrible changes and plain laziness, because apparently self inserting as a cute girl makes it all worth it. With those people as their fanbase, I don't even blame Atlus for doing the minimal amout of effort when porting their classic games. And now people are already asking for a Persona 4 remake, because that's the game which definitlely needs it more than 1 or 2 apparently. Enjoy the world you created.

After so many years of listening about how apparently great classic persona was, I went ahead and played it... 7 years after initially playing P3F.
It's been a long grind, but it feels bad to excessively hate on P2 like I did P1 due to the story just being really well done, both the main one across IS and EP as well as an extra scenario in EP's PSP port. But the gameplay is still really bad, and considering that you need to endure about 60 hours of it across both games I can't seriously bump the score up any higher and go around recommending those games to people. The best praise I can get is that it's not as stupid and annoying as P1, and there's at least some semblence of logic present here.
I can only hope that Atlus decides to remake these games already, but right now? Proceed with caution, and play PS1 version of P2IS and PSP version of P2EP for the best experience.

terrible ideas at every corner. worst fusion system I've seen in a megaten game so far, mid plot, OK characters, dogshit dungeons, and a pointlessly convoluted but at the same time illogical and stupid combat system. if not for the word "persona" in the title this would be forgotten and abandoned but people still like to pretend that it's any good because they like the later entries.
but on the good side, the PS1 OST is pretty dope, sounds from both demons and characters are very cute and charming, and the story has some value. either way you'll probably get a way better experience if you read the manga adaptation as doesn't have skippable characters
oh, and snow queen quest is completely skippable. it's just a side story with no large impact on the main plot. you play it if you somehow want more of this ass gameplay after clearing SEBEC

I don't know what the devs were thinking inserting levels where you don't sneak in the game otherwise all about sneaking, where sneaking is the most fun part of it. One of them even houses multiple fetch quests which made me groan out loud because of how boring and repetitive it is.
The final stretch due to some strange decision is entirely combat focused with sneaking heavily discouraged. It's not terrible, just again, why deny the game the thing it's the best at?
And yes, Thieves' Guild is that bad. Just skip it, it's not worth it, and if you still decide to beat it despite all warnings like I did, you won't gain anything, not even any story. Just extra hatred for the world. Use a cheat code.
I hope the sequel's better, but it's still overall a decent game which is still very much worth playing today.

The most hilarious thing I can point out about RDR is that it's a sequel to game, which doesn't exist. Or more like, it didn't exist before, since RDRII is a thing now. But that doesn't really excuse the story structure of this one.
The majority of the game is spent on you hunting down some guys who you don't care about, to save your wife and son you also don't care about. Or more like, the protagonist surely does care about all that, but you as the player couldn't give less of a shit. What doesn't help is how most of the story you're just running in circles, with John Marston being treated like a naive schoolboy for most of the game. He constantly gets lied to and treated like a fool, and never even once we see an actual reaction out of him, with him just going along with doing stupid, life threatening and pointless jobs just for a chance to get a lead on some bandit who, again, the player doesn't know or care about.
The gameplay isn't much of a help either. Most of the missions are you just doing repetitive, boring things. Get ready for the same "ride shotgun and shoot waves of attackers", or "keep up an npc and shoot waves of attackers" or "shoot waves of attackers while hiding behind a rock". Not to mention that here Rockstar really likes to place mission markers sometimes in the opposite part of a map from where a mission actually takes place. You can imagine my frustration and annoyance, when I bothered to ride (or fast travel) from the opposite side of the map, only for a mission to start with a long shotgun ride which takes me exactly to the place I had to walk from. Rockstar just needed to insert their classic car talk here, even if it means actively hurting the game. And most of the Mexican missions are like that.
And oh yeah. The map. Is this just me, or did Rockstar overcorrect in their attempt to shrink things down to accommodate that there are no drivable cars in this game? Because honestly, all my immersion kind of disappears when I can travel between 2 widely different locations in just 2 minutes with barely any transition. And Blackwater? It's a joke, how could that ever be mistaken for anything resembling a city? And that while the story likes to treat it as such, meanwhile in my gameplay it's just 5 houses surrounded by nothing.
I honestly feel like all those glowing reviews and praise come from an alternate reality, where RDRII came out earlier than this, and all the boring missions got hotswapped with exciting setpieces that Rockstar was previously known for. Because this is just heavily, agressively mid.
P.S. fuck you Microsoft for bundling the HD versions of the games with the golden guns dlc which you can't turn off. they look ugly and unfitting.