Persona 3 was my first SMT game. To this day, I still haven't branched out into the rest of the mainline franchise, though I've played Persona 4, 5, and Persona 3 Portable along the way. I did this replay somewhat on a whim, but considering my opinion of the game has changed so much over the years I feel the need to write on it a little.
For some further context, I've done four playthroughs of Persona 3. My first playthrough was blind, but I received some help getting a hold of the mechanics by a friend who introduced me to it. I did a second playthrough where I went for max social link and achieved it, a new game+ playthrough so I could fight Elizabeth, and I've played Portable twice, both max social link following the guide. This current playthrough was another max social link attempt, and yet again following a guide, but when I messed up later in the game I just accepted I wouldn't get to complete the max social link run and settled for leaving some links reversed, and even one broken.
Let's start with the story. I'm not going to go into details about the plot or anything like that, but rather talk about the general flow. Rather than play an active role in the story, it feels like it's actually on the backburner for the first 4/5ths of the game or so. There are story events, there are plot reveals, there are things that you do in gameplay that theoretically advance the story, such as clearing out Tartarus, but in practice you're waiting for full moon events to happen with the occasional cutscene in between, and those full moon events are relatively self-contained. I actually think this is pretty good for the flow of the gameplay, since in some RPGs it can feel like you're being herded from cutscene to cutscene, but it feels a little too light on story events at times.
That said, the story events that do happen are rather compelling. The party members feel like people with their own reason to be with S.E.E.S., there are twists and turns and reveals that recontextualize character motivations or the state of the world, and though the villains are relatively lacking, the good guys are so good that it completely makes up for it. Going beyond that, the ending absolutely never fails to make its impact, even after having seen it play out five times by now.
Moving on from the main story to the social links, the fairly self-contained NPC and party member stories, I think they're mostly good but only a few truly shine. Some of them, like Sun, a dying young man who laments the hand he was given, are among the best in the series. Hermit, a conversation that happens entirely over an MMO, is hilarious and has a fun twist at the end. Yet on the other hand, it also has Magician and Moon, respectively a guy who's only motivation is wanting to bang his teacher, and a self-important gourmet king who is entirely unlikable throughout the entire thing, not even in a "fun to hate" way. The vast majority are somewhere in the middle, with more leaning towards the good than the bad, though.
Looking to your party's social links, it's notable that only female party members have them. I've heard it argued that the reason for this is that the team is simply less of a... well, group of friends than in the other Persona games. As such, the reason that Akihiko, Junpei, and Ken don't have social links with the protagonist is simply because they aren't actually all that much of friends and that's okay, because S.E.E.S. is together more as a matter of circumstance than because they actually care for each other. And to be fair, there is merit to this claim. Akihiko legitimately does feel rather distant, even near the end of the game. And to an extent, Mitsuru does too, outside of her social link. Yet, she has one, and Akihiko does not, and Junpei who feels like the biggest bro who has ever bro'd (after a point) does not have one.
Once you also account for the fact that social links with female characters lead to romance, and that it only leads to romance as there are no platonic options other than simply not doing social links with women, it's not hard to see why Mitsuru has a social link, but Junpei does not. And that is also something that bothers me about the regular social links. It just feels kind of sleazy that whenever you're with a girl, you're guaranteed to have her fall in love with you, something which is actively pushed towards by the game. Unless you simply do not do the social link, you will end up in a harem situation.
Lastly, social links in this game can reverse, and even break. If you neglect seeing a certain character for too long, their link will reverse and you will need to spend time to mend ties, and if it goes poorly it will go so far as to break. This is cool in theory, but once added with the stipulation that female social links get jealous (yes, really) speeding up that clock, it can get really annoying how you're forced to focus on just a few links at a time, and then are allowed to move on. There's no indication it's about to reverse, either, so you can't reload for it if you notice it after the fact unless you had a recent save.
Moving on to the gameplay, then. The social links mentioned above all take up a time slot in the game's calendar. You generally have two time slots per day, and activities have a strict timeslot during which they are available. Most of them also have day requirements. For instance, if you want to hang out with the aforementioned Sun or Hermit social links, they are only available during sunday afternoon, and there are only so many sundays throughout the game year so you better get on that and fast. On top of social links and story events, you have a few stats that need to be raised by doing various activities (drinking a coffee for charm, karaoke for courage, etc) which affects which social links you have access to.
The last activity that takes a time slot is visiting Tartarus, the game's 250 odd floors dungeon that you need to reach the top of by the end of the game, constantly getting floors added every time a full moon event happens in order to keep the goalpost moving as the game progresses. While you don't have to reach a certain floor by a certain date, other than reaching the top by the end of the game, you do have a few incentives to reach it. Elizabeth, the attendant to the velvet room (I'll get to it) gives you rewards for reaching the current limit every month before a certain deadline, rewards which range from good to great. Aside from that, full moon events are infrequent enough that if you do not make progress on Tartarus, you'll simply fall behind in levels and eventually struggle to complete the mandatory events. No matter how fast you progress through the tower, the game will not wait for you.
The problem comes in when you realize how time slots are actually distributed. Nearly all of your social links happen during the day, and there are only three social stats to max, which are all at night for the most part. Tartarus is also a nighttime event, and costs your evening to visit. As such, the way the game will generally progress is that in the early game, it's pretty great. You're spending all your days doing social links, you're spending all your nights either raising social stats or going to tartarus, and it's a pretty busy schedule. Then, as the game progresses, your social stats start being capped out. You'll cap out courage pretty fast, then charm, and then... Academics? But those only have an activity twice a week, which leaves you with 5 days to go to Tartarus if you so wish. And with only 2, maybe 3, maybe 4 if you're really struggling, Tartarus visits to get through a set of floors, you're ending up with a lot of free time. But you can't just autoskip that free time, so you have to tediously go to bed, confirm you don't want to study before bed, and move on to the next day with most of your evenings being empty time slots. Also, because your social links are so lopsided and almost all during the day, it makes the management of them nearly impossible to manage without a guide. Even with a guide, a single mistake in time management will snowball into making it impossible to actually get everything done. This isn't even something helped by a second, NG+ run either. The only thing that carries over social link wise is your social stats, but those are in the evening - the slot that isn't contested to begin with. It's just a very weird, tight schedule that nearly requires a guide.
Moving on to Tartarus itself, then. Over the years, a lot of criticism has been levied at it. It's a procedural dungeon that you need to chip at over the course of the month, with a tiredness mechanic limiting how much you can do in a single visit. As you progress through the game, it'll take longer and longer to get tired, and you can do more of a Tartarus run in a single go, although the runs also become longer to compensate. General criticisms of this dungeon boil down to it being relatively uninteresting in layout (it is, after all, procedurally generated) and on how grindy it feels. I never really felt that. While it's true that it's not as complex as Persona 5's dungeons, and I would call them better, Tartarus often feels like playing an NES RPG to me. It's perhaps an outdated design, but it's a process I enjoy nonetheless. You go down a hallway, try every fork, find treasure, find the exit and back out to go find more treasure. It's satisfying. And much like NES RPGs, specifically early FFs, there's a degree of resource management tying everything together. You only have so much SP (mana) to make it through the set of floors, and unless you make it all the way to a checkpoint, you'll lose your progress and have to do it again. Finding that balancing act of killing enemies fast enough (by spending your items and SP) while not spending so much that you'll run out of steam by the time you reach the next boss is just really, really satisfying to me. There is no better feeling than running out of SP exactly on the last battle you do before climbing the final set of stairs.
The second largest point of contention with the game's gameplay is usually going to be the lack of control over your party members. This is somewhat true, you cannot directly issue orders to your party members, you can however give them a vague idea of what you want them to do based on tactics that you give them. For instance, if you order them to knock down enemies in order to perform an all out attack once they are all downed, they will prioritize doing so when able and avoid doing anything that would get an enemy to stand back up. Supportive AI will cast heals when you're missing HP, use buffs and debuffs, and use healing items. Full assault will attack and pretend the party does not exist. In theory, this gives you a fair amount of control, just not direct. And in a way, that is pretty neat. It's unique. It's janky, but it's a fun puzzle to figure out how to get the AI to behave just the way you want it to, and when you're able to make it behave that way, it's genuinely fun to manipulate it.
The problem comes in not so much because it's hard to have predictable results with the AI, but rather because it's just tedious and outright unfun at times to make them do what you want them to do, or the most optimal move when accounting for the AI is just not a particularly fun one. To give an example, Yukari has access to AOE heal spells. She could cast it to heal the entire party, should she deem it necessary and her AI be set to supportive. But what is "necessary", exactly? How low must the party's HP be in order for her to heal the party? 30%? 50%? 70%? It's hard to tell, especially when there are multiple people that need healing. If one party member is at 30%, but the rest of the party is at 70%, she may opt to heal that single party member instead of casting the full party heal in order to, presumably, conserve SP - this is particularly frustrating as the player if you are planning to just... Give her more mana after the fact. It works for random mooks, but less so with boss fights. An associated issue is how this healing AI interacts with other party members. Say Yukari is slower than Akihiko and Mitsuru, who both have healing moves, and Akihiko decides to heal one party member. Yukari may then see "Oh, but one of them is at full hp", and ignore healing. It's frustrating. Likewise, Akihiko will prioritize healing above everything, even if Yukari could just cast an AOE heal after him, which means he won't use his incredibly valuable debuffs unless you specifically waste the protagonist's turn to heal the party before Akihiko moves.
In essence, I can predict what Akihiko and Yukari will do. It's not that hard. But what they will do is just frustratingly stupid at times, and it feels like you're fighting the AI more than the enemy sometimes. Other examples that come to mind are preferring single target spells over AOE spells when set to knock down, which can lead to them wasting a ton of SP on fights with multiple enemies they need to knock down. And that aside, needing to change tactics can just feel clumsy compared to just... Doing the attack. If Yukari will always click that wind attack to knock down an enemy, what's the problem with doing it myself? And frankly, switching tactics got tedious enough that I just sort of accepted she'd waste turns occasionally because hey, who cares, it's faster to let her mess around and just do the knocking down myself.
Combat is also incredibly swingy. There is the infamous example of the final boss charming a healer and getting full healed, but frankly that is relatively rare (and hilarious), so I don't mind too much. But missing a single melee attack in this game can lead to your character falling over and skipping their next turn, and when fighting bosses if you misread their weakness, or are just unaware of them having a particular element, or hell just get randomly crit at one point, that might change the fight from perfectly winnable to lost over a single turn. It's a bit much. It also encourages you to ambush anything you've never fought before to make sure you don't get taken off-guard, but ambushing itself is boring and involves lots of waiting.
So far, I've been incredibly negative on the gameplay, and if you'll look to the rating you'll see it's 4/5. The story certainly contributes, but without gameplay that I do in fact like, it would never be this high. The thing is, despite all of these flaws, I find it incredibly satisfying to crawl through Tartarus and reach floor checkpoints, and beat tough bosses, and the presentation of some of those story bosses is fantastic even if they end up being a bit of a joke sometimes. Hitting weaknesses and successfully shutting down enemies without them getting a turn off is a great feeling, and this is before even getting into how amazing persona fusion is as a system.
When you finish combat, you sometimes get dropped a new persona you can use. All party members only have one, but your character is able to switch between multiple once per turn. These persona can level up and learn abilities, but they gain exp hilariously slowly, often requiring four times as much as the protagonist to level up. When you consider that you won't always have the same persona out due to switching in combat, it's really hard to level them up through combat exp. This is where social links and fusion come in. When fusing two persona, you get a third that will start at whatever level that persona starts at, plus bonus exp based on how far the corresponding social link has been raised. This will make that persona learn its abilities much faster, not to mention a stat bonus. On top of that is skill inheritance, where the new persona has its base skills, yes, but can learn something that is passed on by the persona that fused into it.
This is an incredibly deep system, and you can make truly fun builds with a little creativity. There is no persona to my knowledge that learns all the party buffs, but through clever fusing you could consolidate them onto a single persona. There are certain skills like spell master that you may want to pass around as much as possible because of how impactful they are. And there is also the possibility of passing a skill throughout a fusion line, carrying it 10 fusions down the road. The possibilities are endless.
The only caveat is that the UI for it kind of sucks. Skills passed are random based on a weighting of the inheriting Persona's preferences, and if you don't get what you want, you just reroll by deselecting and reselecting the fusion. It's tedious. Latter games let you just inherit the skills you want at will, but this makes it annoying to pass fusions through if you want to make the best persona possible. You can often settle for "good enough" and be fine, but do you actually want good enough? It feels bad to settle for "okay" when you have a great plan.
In conclusion, then. Persona 3 has a pretty good story, with twists and turns that'll keep you engaged through at least the latter half. It starts incredibly slowly, but that justm eans there's more time for the gameplay to engross you as you'll be focused on that in the early game. The common criticisms of the game, such as Tartarus being boring to explore and the party members being AI controlled, have a kernel of truth to them but are vastly overblown, with the dungeon crawling in particular being a high point for me. The game weaves social links and traditional RPG combat masterfully, albeit the social links are too lopsided towards the daytime leaving half of your timeslots nearly useless past the mid game.
All in all, it's a really good experience, and despite encountering many issues this run, I still look back on it rather fondly.
For some further context, I've done four playthroughs of Persona 3. My first playthrough was blind, but I received some help getting a hold of the mechanics by a friend who introduced me to it. I did a second playthrough where I went for max social link and achieved it, a new game+ playthrough so I could fight Elizabeth, and I've played Portable twice, both max social link following the guide. This current playthrough was another max social link attempt, and yet again following a guide, but when I messed up later in the game I just accepted I wouldn't get to complete the max social link run and settled for leaving some links reversed, and even one broken.
Let's start with the story. I'm not going to go into details about the plot or anything like that, but rather talk about the general flow. Rather than play an active role in the story, it feels like it's actually on the backburner for the first 4/5ths of the game or so. There are story events, there are plot reveals, there are things that you do in gameplay that theoretically advance the story, such as clearing out Tartarus, but in practice you're waiting for full moon events to happen with the occasional cutscene in between, and those full moon events are relatively self-contained. I actually think this is pretty good for the flow of the gameplay, since in some RPGs it can feel like you're being herded from cutscene to cutscene, but it feels a little too light on story events at times.
That said, the story events that do happen are rather compelling. The party members feel like people with their own reason to be with S.E.E.S., there are twists and turns and reveals that recontextualize character motivations or the state of the world, and though the villains are relatively lacking, the good guys are so good that it completely makes up for it. Going beyond that, the ending absolutely never fails to make its impact, even after having seen it play out five times by now.
Moving on from the main story to the social links, the fairly self-contained NPC and party member stories, I think they're mostly good but only a few truly shine. Some of them, like Sun, a dying young man who laments the hand he was given, are among the best in the series. Hermit, a conversation that happens entirely over an MMO, is hilarious and has a fun twist at the end. Yet on the other hand, it also has Magician and Moon, respectively a guy who's only motivation is wanting to bang his teacher, and a self-important gourmet king who is entirely unlikable throughout the entire thing, not even in a "fun to hate" way. The vast majority are somewhere in the middle, with more leaning towards the good than the bad, though.
Looking to your party's social links, it's notable that only female party members have them. I've heard it argued that the reason for this is that the team is simply less of a... well, group of friends than in the other Persona games. As such, the reason that Akihiko, Junpei, and Ken don't have social links with the protagonist is simply because they aren't actually all that much of friends and that's okay, because S.E.E.S. is together more as a matter of circumstance than because they actually care for each other. And to be fair, there is merit to this claim. Akihiko legitimately does feel rather distant, even near the end of the game. And to an extent, Mitsuru does too, outside of her social link. Yet, she has one, and Akihiko does not, and Junpei who feels like the biggest bro who has ever bro'd (after a point) does not have one.
Once you also account for the fact that social links with female characters lead to romance, and that it only leads to romance as there are no platonic options other than simply not doing social links with women, it's not hard to see why Mitsuru has a social link, but Junpei does not. And that is also something that bothers me about the regular social links. It just feels kind of sleazy that whenever you're with a girl, you're guaranteed to have her fall in love with you, something which is actively pushed towards by the game. Unless you simply do not do the social link, you will end up in a harem situation.
Lastly, social links in this game can reverse, and even break. If you neglect seeing a certain character for too long, their link will reverse and you will need to spend time to mend ties, and if it goes poorly it will go so far as to break. This is cool in theory, but once added with the stipulation that female social links get jealous (yes, really) speeding up that clock, it can get really annoying how you're forced to focus on just a few links at a time, and then are allowed to move on. There's no indication it's about to reverse, either, so you can't reload for it if you notice it after the fact unless you had a recent save.
Moving on to the gameplay, then. The social links mentioned above all take up a time slot in the game's calendar. You generally have two time slots per day, and activities have a strict timeslot during which they are available. Most of them also have day requirements. For instance, if you want to hang out with the aforementioned Sun or Hermit social links, they are only available during sunday afternoon, and there are only so many sundays throughout the game year so you better get on that and fast. On top of social links and story events, you have a few stats that need to be raised by doing various activities (drinking a coffee for charm, karaoke for courage, etc) which affects which social links you have access to.
The last activity that takes a time slot is visiting Tartarus, the game's 250 odd floors dungeon that you need to reach the top of by the end of the game, constantly getting floors added every time a full moon event happens in order to keep the goalpost moving as the game progresses. While you don't have to reach a certain floor by a certain date, other than reaching the top by the end of the game, you do have a few incentives to reach it. Elizabeth, the attendant to the velvet room (I'll get to it) gives you rewards for reaching the current limit every month before a certain deadline, rewards which range from good to great. Aside from that, full moon events are infrequent enough that if you do not make progress on Tartarus, you'll simply fall behind in levels and eventually struggle to complete the mandatory events. No matter how fast you progress through the tower, the game will not wait for you.
The problem comes in when you realize how time slots are actually distributed. Nearly all of your social links happen during the day, and there are only three social stats to max, which are all at night for the most part. Tartarus is also a nighttime event, and costs your evening to visit. As such, the way the game will generally progress is that in the early game, it's pretty great. You're spending all your days doing social links, you're spending all your nights either raising social stats or going to tartarus, and it's a pretty busy schedule. Then, as the game progresses, your social stats start being capped out. You'll cap out courage pretty fast, then charm, and then... Academics? But those only have an activity twice a week, which leaves you with 5 days to go to Tartarus if you so wish. And with only 2, maybe 3, maybe 4 if you're really struggling, Tartarus visits to get through a set of floors, you're ending up with a lot of free time. But you can't just autoskip that free time, so you have to tediously go to bed, confirm you don't want to study before bed, and move on to the next day with most of your evenings being empty time slots. Also, because your social links are so lopsided and almost all during the day, it makes the management of them nearly impossible to manage without a guide. Even with a guide, a single mistake in time management will snowball into making it impossible to actually get everything done. This isn't even something helped by a second, NG+ run either. The only thing that carries over social link wise is your social stats, but those are in the evening - the slot that isn't contested to begin with. It's just a very weird, tight schedule that nearly requires a guide.
Moving on to Tartarus itself, then. Over the years, a lot of criticism has been levied at it. It's a procedural dungeon that you need to chip at over the course of the month, with a tiredness mechanic limiting how much you can do in a single visit. As you progress through the game, it'll take longer and longer to get tired, and you can do more of a Tartarus run in a single go, although the runs also become longer to compensate. General criticisms of this dungeon boil down to it being relatively uninteresting in layout (it is, after all, procedurally generated) and on how grindy it feels. I never really felt that. While it's true that it's not as complex as Persona 5's dungeons, and I would call them better, Tartarus often feels like playing an NES RPG to me. It's perhaps an outdated design, but it's a process I enjoy nonetheless. You go down a hallway, try every fork, find treasure, find the exit and back out to go find more treasure. It's satisfying. And much like NES RPGs, specifically early FFs, there's a degree of resource management tying everything together. You only have so much SP (mana) to make it through the set of floors, and unless you make it all the way to a checkpoint, you'll lose your progress and have to do it again. Finding that balancing act of killing enemies fast enough (by spending your items and SP) while not spending so much that you'll run out of steam by the time you reach the next boss is just really, really satisfying to me. There is no better feeling than running out of SP exactly on the last battle you do before climbing the final set of stairs.
The second largest point of contention with the game's gameplay is usually going to be the lack of control over your party members. This is somewhat true, you cannot directly issue orders to your party members, you can however give them a vague idea of what you want them to do based on tactics that you give them. For instance, if you order them to knock down enemies in order to perform an all out attack once they are all downed, they will prioritize doing so when able and avoid doing anything that would get an enemy to stand back up. Supportive AI will cast heals when you're missing HP, use buffs and debuffs, and use healing items. Full assault will attack and pretend the party does not exist. In theory, this gives you a fair amount of control, just not direct. And in a way, that is pretty neat. It's unique. It's janky, but it's a fun puzzle to figure out how to get the AI to behave just the way you want it to, and when you're able to make it behave that way, it's genuinely fun to manipulate it.
The problem comes in not so much because it's hard to have predictable results with the AI, but rather because it's just tedious and outright unfun at times to make them do what you want them to do, or the most optimal move when accounting for the AI is just not a particularly fun one. To give an example, Yukari has access to AOE heal spells. She could cast it to heal the entire party, should she deem it necessary and her AI be set to supportive. But what is "necessary", exactly? How low must the party's HP be in order for her to heal the party? 30%? 50%? 70%? It's hard to tell, especially when there are multiple people that need healing. If one party member is at 30%, but the rest of the party is at 70%, she may opt to heal that single party member instead of casting the full party heal in order to, presumably, conserve SP - this is particularly frustrating as the player if you are planning to just... Give her more mana after the fact. It works for random mooks, but less so with boss fights. An associated issue is how this healing AI interacts with other party members. Say Yukari is slower than Akihiko and Mitsuru, who both have healing moves, and Akihiko decides to heal one party member. Yukari may then see "Oh, but one of them is at full hp", and ignore healing. It's frustrating. Likewise, Akihiko will prioritize healing above everything, even if Yukari could just cast an AOE heal after him, which means he won't use his incredibly valuable debuffs unless you specifically waste the protagonist's turn to heal the party before Akihiko moves.
In essence, I can predict what Akihiko and Yukari will do. It's not that hard. But what they will do is just frustratingly stupid at times, and it feels like you're fighting the AI more than the enemy sometimes. Other examples that come to mind are preferring single target spells over AOE spells when set to knock down, which can lead to them wasting a ton of SP on fights with multiple enemies they need to knock down. And that aside, needing to change tactics can just feel clumsy compared to just... Doing the attack. If Yukari will always click that wind attack to knock down an enemy, what's the problem with doing it myself? And frankly, switching tactics got tedious enough that I just sort of accepted she'd waste turns occasionally because hey, who cares, it's faster to let her mess around and just do the knocking down myself.
Combat is also incredibly swingy. There is the infamous example of the final boss charming a healer and getting full healed, but frankly that is relatively rare (and hilarious), so I don't mind too much. But missing a single melee attack in this game can lead to your character falling over and skipping their next turn, and when fighting bosses if you misread their weakness, or are just unaware of them having a particular element, or hell just get randomly crit at one point, that might change the fight from perfectly winnable to lost over a single turn. It's a bit much. It also encourages you to ambush anything you've never fought before to make sure you don't get taken off-guard, but ambushing itself is boring and involves lots of waiting.
So far, I've been incredibly negative on the gameplay, and if you'll look to the rating you'll see it's 4/5. The story certainly contributes, but without gameplay that I do in fact like, it would never be this high. The thing is, despite all of these flaws, I find it incredibly satisfying to crawl through Tartarus and reach floor checkpoints, and beat tough bosses, and the presentation of some of those story bosses is fantastic even if they end up being a bit of a joke sometimes. Hitting weaknesses and successfully shutting down enemies without them getting a turn off is a great feeling, and this is before even getting into how amazing persona fusion is as a system.
When you finish combat, you sometimes get dropped a new persona you can use. All party members only have one, but your character is able to switch between multiple once per turn. These persona can level up and learn abilities, but they gain exp hilariously slowly, often requiring four times as much as the protagonist to level up. When you consider that you won't always have the same persona out due to switching in combat, it's really hard to level them up through combat exp. This is where social links and fusion come in. When fusing two persona, you get a third that will start at whatever level that persona starts at, plus bonus exp based on how far the corresponding social link has been raised. This will make that persona learn its abilities much faster, not to mention a stat bonus. On top of that is skill inheritance, where the new persona has its base skills, yes, but can learn something that is passed on by the persona that fused into it.
This is an incredibly deep system, and you can make truly fun builds with a little creativity. There is no persona to my knowledge that learns all the party buffs, but through clever fusing you could consolidate them onto a single persona. There are certain skills like spell master that you may want to pass around as much as possible because of how impactful they are. And there is also the possibility of passing a skill throughout a fusion line, carrying it 10 fusions down the road. The possibilities are endless.
The only caveat is that the UI for it kind of sucks. Skills passed are random based on a weighting of the inheriting Persona's preferences, and if you don't get what you want, you just reroll by deselecting and reselecting the fusion. It's tedious. Latter games let you just inherit the skills you want at will, but this makes it annoying to pass fusions through if you want to make the best persona possible. You can often settle for "good enough" and be fine, but do you actually want good enough? It feels bad to settle for "okay" when you have a great plan.
In conclusion, then. Persona 3 has a pretty good story, with twists and turns that'll keep you engaged through at least the latter half. It starts incredibly slowly, but that justm eans there's more time for the gameplay to engross you as you'll be focused on that in the early game. The common criticisms of the game, such as Tartarus being boring to explore and the party members being AI controlled, have a kernel of truth to them but are vastly overblown, with the dungeon crawling in particular being a high point for me. The game weaves social links and traditional RPG combat masterfully, albeit the social links are too lopsided towards the daytime leaving half of your timeslots nearly useless past the mid game.
All in all, it's a really good experience, and despite encountering many issues this run, I still look back on it rather fondly.