I remember how I was playing this game during a cold, rainy spring, coughing my lungs out due to my allergy. These conditions added so much atmosphere and joy to my playtrough, so I'll remember it forever.

The first Silent Hill game in the series is, in my opinion, the best in terms of atmosphere and locations. It's a scary, inconvenient, stressful and gloomy game, which makes you love itself for these traits of it.

Harry is probably my favorite character in the series (though he can fight for this title with Heather), and I enjoyed his journey as much as I only possibly could.

Silent Hill 1 has something unique behind it, which lacks in the second and third games, and this something notably highlights the game out from the other ones.

Much better than P5R, for sure. What an absolutely heartbreaking game.

I've never played original P3 nor its expansioned versions, so that was my first experience.

I really liked the plot, it's much better than the one from P5R. There's no dumb fillers, the game doesn't feel artificially stretched, and the characters don't annoy you. P3 cast makes you attached to it easily, and every character feels actually well-written and nice.

The gameplay's fire too, but I bet P5R gameplay will never be surpassed, at least untill P6 release for sure.
Tartarus wasn't boring, which actually surprised me, but near to the end I started rushing through it, stopping only to kill some enemies and gain some EXP for my team just because I got tired of it a bit.

The ending made me cry for ~17 minutes straight, and, in my opinion, if the game manages to make me emotional that hard, guess it definitely has something good behind it.

To be honest, this game felt really personal to me, and I still don't know the exact reason for that. My last year was kind of a painful one, though it had many good moments too. I've experienced a serious «loss» for the first time back then, so maybe that's why P3R seemed such close to me... Not to mention that I played this game when I felt kinda empty in my life.

Maybe the correlation with my personal feelings made this game so good in my eyes, or maybe it's actually that great in general — I don't know. The only thing I know for real is that this game brought me so much positive emotions, so much warm feelings and fun, so I don't even know if any other game would ever bring me something similiar to that.
...On the other hand, every game is an unique adventure, right? So why think about it?

I know I may look like a psychofan, but there's nothing I can do with myself. Persona 3 just appeared on the right moment of my life, and I'll remember this game forever because of it.

"An idiot admires complexity, a genius admires simplicity, a physicist tries to make it simple, for an idiot anything the more complicated it is the more he will admire it, if you make something so clusterfucked he can't understand it he's gonna think you're a god cause you made it so complicated nobody can understand it"
-Terry A. Davis, RIP.

People weren't ready for this game, it didn't deserve this much critical panning. Sure, it went through development hell, having to change multiple publishers to settle down for an exclusivity deal with Nintendo at the end, but i'd argue that it delivered. Tomonobu Itagaki's main purpose for this game was its multiplayer (which unfortunately is dead) it actually did very well in Japan, even having the multiplayer filled with people so much that they made a "Devil's Third Online" on PC that was JP-Exclusive. Itagaki notes on his FB Account that he wanted to get as many people in its multiplayer mode. He also noted many things like how he was done with Ninja Gaiden & DOA but he wanted to continue Devil's Third. Its almost been 9 years since this game's release and with Wanted: Dead coming out this year and his heir Yoshifuru Okamoto doing a great job overall, its safe to say Itagaki will make a comeback sooner or later.

The reviews that note it down as a poorly made game with poor mechanics are absolutely clueless on how to play this game. It literally is simple, you've got your shooting, sliding, blocking, parrying, dodging, jumping, quick attacks and heavy attacks. However, despite all of this, in every goddamn video I've seen that pans this game as the absolute worst or shrugs it off as a "so bad its good" title, they always end up hiding behind covers and shooting with the gun... Yeah, let us just ignore the fact that this is a literal Gun-Fu game, where you're literally encouraged to use the melee as much as you're encouraged to use the gun. The game even throws you in a lot of different enemy types and bosses for you to switch up your playstyle. But nope, everyone is going to approach the combat with as much disinterest and disaffection as possible. Then later complain how much it sucked. These are the same people that play games in so-called "Journo" baby mode.
"Itagaki professes a liking for simplicity of inputs, he states too many inputs would result in the loss of the gaming experience."
-From Tomonobu Itagaki's Wikipedia page
Itagaki doesn't care for complexity, it has been apparent ever since DOA & Ninja Gaiden and that's where the beauty of his game design kicks in, the simplicity. There's no need to memorize movesets because all of it naturally gets revealed to you, you know exactly how to approach a threat, and to eliminate it. In Devil's Third especially, one of my favorite combat strategies was to slide towards the enemy while hip-firing, then cancelling it with a slash and getting that sweet glory kill. Another great mechanic was the ability to leap kills and being able to throw your melee weapon at the enemy, I was just so hooked to the gameplay and the endless combat scenarios, I couldn't stop at all. All of these abilities are presented to you by the man himself so you can play experimenting with different approaches as it was intended. Not just sticking to one method of gameplay like an absolute cretin. It genuinely infuriates me to see people refer to this as a "Gears of War" clone or a "TPS COD", when it has absolutely nothing in common.

Devil's Third's story felt like a riff on Metal Gear, which seemed to be the case for any Japanese game releasing during that era. It involves heavy on the nose Buddhist themes, as if the Sanskrit tattoos written all over our main protagonist, Ivan, wasn't an indication already. You have loading screens filled with Buddha statues, and not to mention a Buddhist take on a "revenge" story, with the main antagonist's ultimate masterplan literally being the concept of Nirvana in itself, is nothing short but one hell of a ride. The boss encounters are especially to live for, your final stand-off with Isaac Kumano is genuinely breathtaking sequence, that I feel a certain game company for sure took some artistic liberties in putting it in their own title. :)

Tomonobu Itagaki to this very day is still proud of what he's done. When asked about the hysterical criticism, his answer was: "The fans loved it." And that's what Itagaki truly cares for. As if these Metacritic obsessing, ratingheads would understand.

"To all my fellow gamers. No matter how the world changes or times pass, our love for games and our passion will never die. Thank you all for waiting so long for this moment."
-Tomonobu Itagaki, End Credits of Devil's Third.