To begin with, I don't really intend to go into story a lot. I like the story, I like the cast a lot, I don't really intend to talk about details of it. It has segments where it drags, but I generally like it, and that's about as far as I'll talk about it. Leave the story analysis to someone else.

One of the major issues that I had in Persona 3 when it came to time management was how it eventually just sort of stopped mattering, and way too early, for evening slots. This has been resolved in 4, where you have a lot more things to do in the evening with way more of the social links taking place at night than in 3, and way more non-social link activities that were worth doing, like the scooter rides. On top of that, the addition of social stats being earned by certain social links (courage for doing Devil for instance) or earning money through social links, alongside jobs and party members gaining abilities via social links, makes it feel like there's way more reasons to do social links than just the arcana burst bonus EXP. It gives me more things to consider in how I want to prioritize certain things, which helps keep it engaging throughout the game IMO.

Dungeon crawling isn't particularly interesting, at least compared to Tartarus. It's about the same. The survival element is about the same too, but the added fox to regain your SP makes SP management a bit less of a concern. Then again, it's also more valuable to do the dungeon in a single day than it was to do the same for Tartarus because your time slots are actually limited, and before you reach a high level with the fox it's not actually infinite SP unless you're willing to grind shuffle times, so I think it works well enough. I will say that I'm still not particularly a fan of how ambushes work. They're insanely valuable, because enemy groups - especially on hard mode - can be hyper lethal if they get the group on you. Yet, the only way to really ambush enemies is sometimes to wait a ridiculous amount of time for them to turn around. They tend to slither against the wall diagonally instead of going in a straight line, and then take a million years to turn around. Worse, they take forever to deagro if they see you, so you just have to accept that you don't have the ambush if they see you even once, which means even more waiting if you're trying not to be potentially death spiraled since combat can be very swingy.

I generally liked bosses more than Persona 3's, too. In Persona 3, the bosses tend to be very gimmicky and easily defeated once you learn that gimmick in Tartarus, or just be "slightly stronger regular enemies", while the full moon bosses are more like set pieces that are a bit of a joke in terms of power level. Persona 4 bosses, especially on hard, actually have hands. One of the bosses in particular (second to last dungeon's) felt a little bit overtuned, but that's about it, with the rest feeling good and satisfying.

Lastly, this game brought in party control, which I appreciate quite a bit. While I don't mind it as much as others in Persona 3, it really does help with coming up with strategies that the AI would simply never actually do if given the chance in Persona 3. I can already imagine AI Naoto spamming her shield ability and running herself OOM if left unattended. Really, the only complaint party wise is that the party still does not gain EXP outside of battle, which means that party members like Naoto who are more suited to clearing trash suffer a lot in boss fights. Do you want to use this party member? Well, that's fine, but you'll suffer during boss fights. Whereas party exp as in Persona 5 or even other RPGs of the time like FF12 allow you to adapt your party to your needs.

All in all, it was a pretty good experience. The time management aspect of things got better, the combat was either the same or better, and while dungeon crawling stagnated it wasn't particularly bad to begin with. A pretty enjoyable JRPG that I'd recommend to any fan of the genre.

Tears of the Kingdom is a really weird game to talk about, because I feel like I should enjoy it a lot more than I do. I ended up playing the game for 150 hours, I ended up getting all the shrines (though definitely not 100%ing...), but I don't know that I fully enjoyed those 150 hours. There was a lot of the game that was just downtime where I was going through the motions, and it was never straight up unenjoyable, but I also don't know if I'd say that the game has 150 hours worth of content - rather that's just how long it took me to go through it.

I feel like ToTK 's content gets less interesting as you play through it. Exploring the depths was fun at the start, when fog busting was novel and it hadn't gotten tedious yet, but it got tedious by the end of the game. While there are vehicles you can use, all it does is make boring content go by faster, as there's very little interesting to discover in the depths. It's basically just currency to upgrade your battery, armor you're never going to use, and resources. It overstayed its welcome. The same can be said of exploring the sky. It was novel at first, and then the sheer amount of copy pasted islands with similar puzzles got a little tiring. Even the labyrinths suffer from the same problem. The first time I found one, and explored it from start to finish, I was amazed. It was a super novel experience. And then all three are formated the exact same way, which eats away at how interesting it was to explore them.

Building stuff was interesting in theory, but in practice I found it took way too long. You could use autobuild, but even that isn't perfect since you needed to either spend zonite or take the parts out of your inventory ahead of time, which was a little tedious. Building anything new took forever, too. The time between finding a solution, and actually executing that solution, was too long. A lot of the time I just found myself finding other ways to travel (gliding, spamming the same plane model, horse) rather than building anything novel. That aside, I don't like that it allows you to clear puzzles in such a wide variety of probably not intended ways. The feeling of "Eh, definitely not the intended solution, but good enough." is just not one that I actually enjoy, especially when that solution is so often "just use a rocket/just use a generic fan + control stick vehicle/just build a long stick or bridge."

Combat is just as fundamentally broken as it was in Breath of the Wild. I enjoy it more, because I don't feel like it's a dark hole of resources I'll never get back thanks to the fusion system, but Zelda combat should just not be about RPG numbers, at least defensively. Offensively it's mostly fine since they mix in goobers alongside the big boys, so you still get to feel yourself becoming more powerful, but defensively it's just ridiculous. You can just upgrade the hylian set for nearly no materials and just... take no damage from enemies. And conversely, it means that whenever you're wearing something other than your hylian set, you take a ton of damage, more than is probably reasonable. And since it takes forever to upgrade armor outside the hylian set, I just end up not bothering. Hell, a lot of the utility ones barely feel like they matter. The one that lets you climb in the rain barely feels like it does everything, even with the full set.

Shrines were OK. Not much to say about them, there was a lot of them, most of them had creative ideas, but they were often too short to scratch the same itch as a dungeon would. Likewise, I don't really care for the dungeons in this game. I liked the approach and build up to the dungeons almost universally more than I enjoyed the dungeons themselves. The Divine Beast style of just finding 5 things then going back to the central room to fight the boss just isn't interesting to me. At least there's more variety aesthetically than there was with divine beasts.

Story wise, it feels like the game is being held back by the way that the game is set up. The story can be found out of order when it comes to stuff like Zelda's tears or the master sword, and then conversely they're so obsessed with the idea that they have to make sure you get the story in order-ish that the cutscenes for all temples are copy pated. It's not a bad story, I like it conceptually, I like elements of it, but I hate how it's told because of the open world nature of the game.

All in all, TOTK is just a really weird game for me. I had a really good time early on, and while it never fully lost its steam (I still completed it), I also feel like I'd have enjoyed it more if I just ended the game early rather than actually going for all shrines and map completion. There was just a lot of the time where I was coasting through the game rather than fully enjoying myself.

Before I say anything, let me get this out of the way. A lot of this review is going to be negative. You may be staring at the 4 star rating and going, huh, that's strange, why's it so negative if he gave it a 4? Well, I don't think it's bad, far from it I think it's really good. I really did enjoy it a lot. But there are just so many things where I'll go "Oh, this system is neat!" and it just has seventeen asterisks about the problems with it anyways. And I don't think they're necessarily nitpicks, I think they are legitimate criticisms, but they're just... Not enough to make it not fun? So overall, still a really good game, in spite of what I'm going to say.

I'd like to get the story out of the way first. When it comes to the actual plot, I find it just very hard to... Care. I like a lot of details about the world, about the characters, I think Paya is charming, Purah is fun, Urbosu is cool, Riju is sweet, and so on. I think the villagers are pleasant to talk to, Link's dialogue options are fun to play with, and the emergent story - if you treat BOTW like an 8 bit game where half of the story is the player's own actions - is fun. It's all building up to fighting Ganon, which you do on your own terms when you feel like it. That said, when it comes to what happens in the past, I just find it extremely hard to... Care? The past characters have very little screentime, very few lines of dialogue, you get an idea of their personality but the story just isn't about them, and that's okay but it still makes their scenes boring, with perhaps the exception of Zelda herself since she gets more scenes showcasing different aspects of her personality, and finding her journal in Hyrule Castle fleshes her out a bit. On top of that, the scenes can be gotten in a random order, and as far as I can tell don't really have variation based on when you find them to account for which others you've found, which makes them feel like they could have taken part in entirely different universes for all it matters. Lastly, while the emergent storytelling and the actual characters inhabiting the current world are cool, I wish there were more cool scripted moments. There's a total of like... 4. The build up to the secret beasts. 5 if you want to include Hyrule Castle. Immobilizing the beasts is cool, cinematic, involved, and reminds me of some of my favorite moments from the rest of the series, like the battle on the Eldin bridge in TP.

Moving on, I'll more or less just go over a bunch of systems. Firstly, weapon durability. I feel like this system is overstated both by people who dislike it, and people who do. I fall mostly on the former. It's cool that weapons breaking, early in the game, encourages you to fight with weapons you normally might not like bokobo clubs. Likewise, it's cool when you break your weapon midfight and have to scramble for a different one or change up your fighting style a bit. But this also just... Sort of stops happening, doesn't it? As you get better and better weapons that last longer, a bigger inventory, and especially the master sword, you just sort of stop being put in this situation, especially since unless you run out of weapons entirely, you can literally change your weapon midfight. So the benefits are very overstated, IMO.

On the other hand, I also feel the negatives are overstated, or at least mischaracterized. It's not like weapons are breaking so often that you don't feel you can use them without wasting them, in fact it was the other way around - I literally could not get rid of the weapons I found fast enough. Between shrine rewards, random weapons laying around, and enemy drops, I just constantly had a full inventory. In fact, I vividly recall having 4 flame greatblades at one point, and not because I was hoarding them, I just got them faster than they ran out. It made the weapon rewards just feel so lame. Personally, I'm not a big fan of pieces of hearts as rewards in other Zelda games to begin with since none of the games are hard enough to make "find 4 of these to take 1 extra hit!" compelling, and despite this they managed to make something less satisfying than that in the form of weapons I don't need that ask me to drop something else because I ran out of inventory spots like 3 flameblades away. It's even lamer if the weapon reward is worse than what I have instead of just the same/barely an upgrade, because then it's effectively no reward. Compare this to the feeling you get when you, say, upgrade your sword to the razor sword in Majora's Mask and it's night and day.

Moving on, exploration was relatively fun in its own right. The actual act of moving around the map is fun, the paraglider is a stroke of genius, and I really enjoy the way the map is designed to both guide you towards certain areas of it and have hidden areas just out of the way where you might not think to look at the first place. The notion that if you look around a corner, you'll find something, is never broken. I've heard some comparison of the towers to ubisoft towers before playing the game, but I really don't see it. They're prominent points you can see from a distance, but they aren't marked on your map, climbing them actually requires some thought at times (The bogs, the bogs!), and they don't reveal that much. They're very convenient warp points and oyu can see a lot, but a lot of things are around corners, hidden, or even just behind a mountain that you can't see past from the tower. Good high grounds to look out from, but far from the only ones. Really, the only problem I have with exploration are with the climbing mechanic, and the rewards.

Firstly, I do think that "exploring for its own sake" can be a reward on its own. If you find a cool looking area, a cool view, a ruin, whatever, that's cool. Finding a town that's optional and out of the way, all of that is cool. Even just the fact that you find a shrine or a korok is, for a while, cool. The problem comes when those rewards start feeling repetitive. It's not like you have 20 models of what a shrine exterior look like, or even less so the interior, and with the high amount of reward/test of combat shrines, a fair amount of the time I'll get inside of a shrine and it's just kinda... Boring, as a reward? Like, oh, I found a shrine, again, wish I found something cooler. I'm already not a huge piece of heart fan in other Zelda games, but even less so when almost every reward is a piece of heart. Koroks are particularly boring. Sure, you don't need to find all of them, but you also don't really benefit from finding a small amount, either. I found around 60 and I was already having to pay 10, 12 seeds for an upgrade, which is ridiculous. Your reward for finding this korok is 1/12th of an inventory slot that you don't even need because you're overflowing with weapons and unable to find ways to use them faster than you get them. Thanks?

Second, I think climbing gets less interesting as you go on. A lot of the paths I ended up taking was just, oh, here's a mountain here, let me take a straight line path to where I need to go. Why bother finding an interesting path when the direct path works? I think the main culprit is that sloped walls let you regen stamina if the slope is gentle enough, so often you end up being able to just climb walls that ought to be much harder to climb than they actually are, and it feels like by doing that climb you are robbing yourself of a path that could have been better to do straight. I just climbed to a tower to go into Gerudo, paragliding all the way past the desert because I had enough stamina to make it anyways. I climbed into Zora Domain, skipping much of the path that a friend told me he went through, which sounded a lot cooler than my experience. Of course, it’s not like I had to go the way I did, but it’s still what my experience ended up like. Actually, this is a recurring theme in BOTW. A lot of the time, I end up doing something that doesn’t feel like the “intended” way, and I’m not entirely certain how right it is, and it feels like the intended way was probably more fun but fuck it, it worked.

The above carries over into my experience doing shrines and divine beasts. A common feeling I had was that whatever solution I found worked, but it wasn’t necessarily a satisfying solution, or it made the puzzle feel so… Meh? Because it could be trivialized that way. I’m having flashbacks to a shrine where the puzzle was getting a ball into a hole by having it be carried by wind, which would raise a platform to let you complete the shrine. I just statised the ball, walked over, and finished the shrine, ignoring what felt like the actual intended puzzle. I’ve heard people say that the openness in how you can approach these problems is in and of itself neat, but for me I just wish it was a bit of a tighter experience once you do get to a challenge even if choosing where you go was open. This isn’t always the case, admittedly. If every possible solution feels right, then it’s not a problem that there are multiple solutions. Hyrule Castle is very open, but everything you can do feels right, so it doesn’t really hurt it to be open.

Moving on to combat, I don’t particularly love it when action actually happens. Working around combat is cool, seeing how to approach a particular camp of enemies, sometimes using stealth, sometimes picking off enemies, sometimes using the environment and so on, but the actual combat isn’t too interesting. Flurries are too easy to get and too effective, bullet time is insane when you can trigger it at will (ie enemies that let you float or such), and most importantly of all, food is so plentiful as to make any mistake completely meaningless if it does not lead to you getting one shot killed. The only limit on your food is how willing you are to deal with the tedium that is managing your inventory to cook things, and that’s just kinda sad. It also made making elixirs a little annoying so a lot of the time I just… Didn’t bother, and walked through a snowy area with whatever food I already had on me because the alternative was to teleport, make elixirs to deal with the cold, then teleport back, and walk back over. You can experiment to make better food, but why bother when generic meat with salt and maybe some rando fruits you found over the adventure will already give you a full heal?

Weather is in theory cool. It’s neat, in theory, that if it gets cold you have to put on warm clothes, vice versa with hot weather, that if it rains it’s harder to climb, that lightning affects metal weapons, etc. But in practice, I just find it annoying. You can switch your equipment at any time for 0 cost, so switching to warm or cold clothing isn’t particularly interesting, you just need to do it and then go on and play as normal, or use an elixir and once more just ignore the mechanic. Thunderstorms just make me unequip my weapons and either ignore combat, or use my bow. Hell, I’ll probably ignore the weather as a whole and just try to skip the thunderstorm if I can help it, since climbing during one is basically impossible, same reason I just… Skip rain. Visibility being poor doesn’t help. I’m not a particularly big fan of the armor system, either. It always feels incredibly binary, either you take way too much damage or you take no damage because of damage reduction being flat. I had a +3 upgraded basic hylian set and it was all I ever needed to make it through the game.

I’m sure there’s other complaints I could come up with. And as I mentioned above, this feels like a laundry list of complaints, and I don’t think it’s nitpicking, I think it’s genuine criticism. These are all issues, and I think all of them are relatively bad, but then when I think about the game… It all just comes together anyways? Sure, I have issues with the food and I think flurry is too easy to get, but then again, Zelda combat was always easy. It doesn’t really matter that I have infinite food, because in other games you wouldn’t take enough damage to need that much healing anyways. Sure, I think armor is lame, but it's at least lame in a very passive way where I can just ignore it. Sure, the shrines were a bit disappointing a fair amount of the time, but when they were, finding them in itself was fun at least. Sure, I wish finding things was a tighter, more controlled environment, like in the older games, but climbing feels good even if on a critical level, I think it’s too strong and lets you skip things you really shouldn’t skip. It just… Feels good. I still think these are problems, but I enjoy playing it anyways. Ultimately, this is more to get these problems off my chest than to convince whoever’s reading this to not play the game, because frankly you’ve probably already played this game, and if you haven’t, you probably should.

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.