For many years I’ve held Persona 3 in high regard as one of my favorite JRPGs of all time. With the upcoming release of Persona 3 Reload on the horizon, I wanted to give this game one more run before the remake comes out and play it with a fresh perspective after having not played it in about eight years. Coming back to this game after so long, there’s still a lot about it that I really love and respect, and finishing it still left me in an emotional mess. Despite that, however, this playthrough reminded me of many aspects of the game that don’t really sit well with me today, things that I hope Reload is able to improve upon.
Persona 3’s biggest draw to me has always been its story. The game has one of my favorite casts out of any JRPG I’ve ever played. I love how all of the characters grow and develop throughout the entire game. They all have emotional and generally very well-handled character arcs. Though some characters like Akihiko and Ken finish their character arcs a lot sooner and end up being flat for a good chunk of the story, I still think that the game overall does an excellent job with all of its characters, especially in comparison to the Persona games that come after it. One of my biggest problems with Persona 4 and 5 is their general story structure, and how each character goes through their arc before becoming flat for the rest of the game after completing their corresponding dungeon, only getting minor additional character development through their Social Links. Persona 3 isn’t like that at all. Up until the very end of the game, the cast is met with very personal challenges that they are able to overcome and learn from, which is what makes this cast and story resonate with me so much. Then there’s the game’s ending, which to date has made this one of the only games where I’ve actually cried while playing. It’s beautiful, tragic, and wraps up everything extremely neatly.
Aside from the story, another aspect about the game that I admire is how all of its unique systems are linked with one another. The combat system, Persona system, and Social Link system are all intertwined with one another in a way that’s extremely cohesive. Social Links affect the strength and progression speed of your Personas, which affects how efficiently you’re able to perform in combat. It’s very difficult to talk about one system without talking about another, and while that makes writing this review a bit more challenging, I think it makes for a very satisfying gameplay loop, as it constantly feels like you’re improving upon something in some fashion with every action you take on an in-game day to day basis.
The combat system is pretty standard for most JRPGs, though I really like Persona’s spin on it as it leads to more interesting decision-making. While you’re typically trying to find out the enemy’s weakness and exploit it, doing so allows you to knock your opponent down, causing them to lose their turn as well as take another turn for yourself. Knocking down all enemies on screen allows you to do an All-Out Attack with your party, which deals massive damage to every enemy on screen. However, this aspect of the combat also applies to yourself and your party members as well (though enemies can’t perform an All-Out Attack), which is why you need to make sure that you have the right Persona and party members when fighting enemies and especially bosses.
While aiming to get an All-Out Attack and wipe out the enemy as fast as possible is the general strategy, that strategy doesn’t always work nor is it always applicable at all times. There may be times where the spell you cast to knock the enemy down with misses, which gives the enemy a chance to retaliate. You might just not have a Persona or party member on hand who can exploit the enemy’s weakness, or the enemy might not have any weaknesses at all (which is the case for most bosses). Instead, you’ll have to form a strategy around what physical/elemental attacks your Personas and party members are strong and weak against and engage in more of a back and forth turn-based confrontation.
One of the most criticized aspects of the game is how it handles party members in combat. You don’t directly control what your party members do. Instead, your party members are controlled by AI. You are able to issue them general orders via the Tactics menu, however. You can assign party members specific enemies to target, tell them to focus on exploiting the enemy’s weakness and knocking them down, have them concentrate on healing/supporting the party with buffs or debuffs, etc, but you can’t select a specific ability of theirs during their turn. Personally speaking, this doesn’t bother me very much. For the vast majority of my play time, party members generally behaved as one would expect them to and did the most logical action during their turn. There were a few key instances where I found the AI consistently making decisions that aggravated me, though.
The first and more minor instance is that whenever you’re fighting a boss and you haven’t had the chance to analyze its weakness yet, Ken and Koromaru will almost always waste a turn trying to cast an instant-kill Hama or Mudo skill that will never ever work because bosses are always immune to them. There are also times where characters that don’t have a dedicated healing spell will give someone low on health a healing item. On paper, this isn’t a big deal, but in practice, wasting a turn to give someone an item that only heals a small amount of HP can be very frustrating, especially if they could’ve spent that turn knocking an enemy down, or you or someone else in the party is capable of healing people for more HP the very next turn. The biggest outlier however is one character in particular: Mitsuru. When Mitsuru is in your party, you need to be especially vigilant when it comes to assigning tactics to her, otherwise she will almost always waste a turn and magic casting either Marin Karin (a charm spell) that doesn’t work 90% of the time, or later in the game, she’ll cast Mind Charge instead, which can be more helpful since it boosts the damage of magic attacks, but isn’t really necessary since it’s generally more efficient to just knock the enemy down and do an All-Out Attack as fast as possible.
Still, despite the occasional frustration, I do think that a lot of people’s criticisms towards not being able to directly control your party members is fairly overblown. I actually like this system a lot, it makes the characters feel a bit more real. I understand that it’s not super popular, since the ability to directly control your party members was re-introduced in subsequent Persona games. Even though AI party members is still an option in those titles, the security of being able to directly pick which skill of my party members to use in any given situation is just too tempting to pass up on, and I fully admit that I likely wouldn’t ever use AI party members unless it was the only option I had.
The Persona system is both simultaneously easy to understand as well as very esoteric. If you’re just trying to play through the game normally, and you’re not trying to create a specific Persona, it’s fairly simple to just test and see what the results are of specific combinations of Personas. As long as it makes a Persona with a specific skill you’re looking for and is of an Arcana whose corresponding Social Link you’ve made a lot of progress in, then you’re generally good to go. However, if you’re trying to create a specific Persona for something like Elizabeth’s Requests or if you’re looking for one to help with a particularly difficult sub-boss in Tartarus, I do not see how you are supposed to reasonably be able to do so without some sort of guide. There are just far too many combinations and no real in-game way to tell what makes what. As long as you’re just sticking to the main game and not doing anything optional, you don’t really need a specific Persona for anything though. You’re generally able to make do with what you have as long as you’re consistently fusing Personas that are near your current in-game level.
The Social Link system is very conflicting, for a multitude of reasons. While the system itself I think is great and is an excellent way to tie-in gameplay elements with the thematic elements of the narrative, coming back to this game I initially thought that the narrative quality of the Social Links was generally very poor. In order to progress certain Social Links in the fastest and most efficient way possible, you’ll be required to constantly reinforce the beliefs and choices of the character whose Social Link you’re currently working on, even if they’re very poor, like Kenji or Hidetoshi. However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that was kind of the point. As opposed to my original playthrough I decided to use a guide to see how best to progress through the Social Links, and I found the dialogue choices that would progress them the fastest are the ones where you have to kiss up to them at all times. This resulted in some Social Links being incredibly boring, with little to no conflict to them. I think this is the game’s way of saying that no friendship or relationship is ever perfect, most relationships have conflicts to them, and what’s most important is being able to overcome those conflicts and emerge from them with a stronger bond. Now, that could just be me reading too deep into the Social Links on a thematic level, admittedly. However, the Social Links do still have serious problems, some of which have already been addressed in future Persona titles, and some that I hope the remake rectifies.
The most obvious problem with them is that you can’t fully complete a female character’s Social Link without dating them. You have no option to just be friends with them. Thankfully, this was something that has already been handled in future Persona games, and I have no doubt that will carry over to the remake as well, but this was a very baffling oversight that wasn’t even addressed here in FES, the second version of Persona 3. An even bigger issue is that there are various Social Links that either involve or allude to romances with extremely uncomfortable age gaps. Kenji is a sixteen-year-old high school student whose entire Social Link is about his oblivious pursuit of his completely one-sided romance with his teacher. Maiko is a nine-year-old girl dealing with parents who are going through a divorce, and at the end of her Social Link, she falls in love with the high school age Protagonist, and you don’t have the option to directly say “no” to the idea of the two of you becoming “a mom and dad together”. One of the most problematic ones is “Maya”, the MMO player who is revealed to be an adult in the Protagonist's life with a crush on him. I really do hope that the remake rewrites these, “Maya”’s especially, because these are just not acceptable, especially in this day and age.
Tartarus is where that previously mentioned intertwining of systems is on full display. It’s a single 264 floor dungeon that you spend the entire game climbing. It’s here where you build up you and your party’s levels so that you’re strong enough to face the boss that appears at the end of each in-game month. Tartarus has always had a very mixed reception, and my most recent playthrough really opened my eyes to its problems. I think it’s biggest issue is that it’s not clear how much time you should be spending in Tartarus before you face the boss at the end of the month. The game does suggest you try and make it to the top of a block of floors before each fight, specifically via Elizabeth’s Requests, but even if you do make it to the top of a block, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you fought enough enemies and that you’re strong enough to fight the end-of-the-month boss. Persona 4 and 5 solved this problem by letting you fight the monthly bosses at any point within a certain period of time, giving you a deadline to defeat the boss as opposed to only allowing you to challenge and defeat a boss on one specific day. Given the narrative concept of Persona 3, you can’t really do that here, but hopefully Reload will give you some idea of what level you should be at to face those end-of-the-month bosses.
In addition to that, the sheer length of Tartarus and the unchanging layouts of its floors can grow rather tiresome and repetitive over the course of the game. The longer you play, the more of a grind it is, as more party members get added, which means you need to level more party members up, which means you need to spend more and more time in Tartarus. I do like the decision making that Tartarus forces, as you have to consider whether or not it’s worth challenging every Shadow on a floor, or if it’s better to try and continue the climb so that you make it to the next checkpoint without having to redo a section of floors again. It can be fun and an interesting challenge, but by the time you reach the end of the game and you make it to the top, you’re likely sick to death of it.
After all of that has been said and done, at the end of the day, I still greatly admire and appreciate Persona 3 despite its flaws. It doesn’t excel in every single regard, but if you stick with it, I think that it’s a game that can ultimately feel very rewarding, with a story that remains deeply impactful to me. There’s a lot this game does right, and even a bit it does better than the games that come after it. I hope that Persona 3 Reload is able to patch up the areas where it’s lacking, because I think that with a modern touch, Persona 3 could end up being not just the best game in the series on a thematic and narrative level, but on a gameplay one as well.
Persona 3’s biggest draw to me has always been its story. The game has one of my favorite casts out of any JRPG I’ve ever played. I love how all of the characters grow and develop throughout the entire game. They all have emotional and generally very well-handled character arcs. Though some characters like Akihiko and Ken finish their character arcs a lot sooner and end up being flat for a good chunk of the story, I still think that the game overall does an excellent job with all of its characters, especially in comparison to the Persona games that come after it. One of my biggest problems with Persona 4 and 5 is their general story structure, and how each character goes through their arc before becoming flat for the rest of the game after completing their corresponding dungeon, only getting minor additional character development through their Social Links. Persona 3 isn’t like that at all. Up until the very end of the game, the cast is met with very personal challenges that they are able to overcome and learn from, which is what makes this cast and story resonate with me so much. Then there’s the game’s ending, which to date has made this one of the only games where I’ve actually cried while playing. It’s beautiful, tragic, and wraps up everything extremely neatly.
Aside from the story, another aspect about the game that I admire is how all of its unique systems are linked with one another. The combat system, Persona system, and Social Link system are all intertwined with one another in a way that’s extremely cohesive. Social Links affect the strength and progression speed of your Personas, which affects how efficiently you’re able to perform in combat. It’s very difficult to talk about one system without talking about another, and while that makes writing this review a bit more challenging, I think it makes for a very satisfying gameplay loop, as it constantly feels like you’re improving upon something in some fashion with every action you take on an in-game day to day basis.
The combat system is pretty standard for most JRPGs, though I really like Persona’s spin on it as it leads to more interesting decision-making. While you’re typically trying to find out the enemy’s weakness and exploit it, doing so allows you to knock your opponent down, causing them to lose their turn as well as take another turn for yourself. Knocking down all enemies on screen allows you to do an All-Out Attack with your party, which deals massive damage to every enemy on screen. However, this aspect of the combat also applies to yourself and your party members as well (though enemies can’t perform an All-Out Attack), which is why you need to make sure that you have the right Persona and party members when fighting enemies and especially bosses.
While aiming to get an All-Out Attack and wipe out the enemy as fast as possible is the general strategy, that strategy doesn’t always work nor is it always applicable at all times. There may be times where the spell you cast to knock the enemy down with misses, which gives the enemy a chance to retaliate. You might just not have a Persona or party member on hand who can exploit the enemy’s weakness, or the enemy might not have any weaknesses at all (which is the case for most bosses). Instead, you’ll have to form a strategy around what physical/elemental attacks your Personas and party members are strong and weak against and engage in more of a back and forth turn-based confrontation.
One of the most criticized aspects of the game is how it handles party members in combat. You don’t directly control what your party members do. Instead, your party members are controlled by AI. You are able to issue them general orders via the Tactics menu, however. You can assign party members specific enemies to target, tell them to focus on exploiting the enemy’s weakness and knocking them down, have them concentrate on healing/supporting the party with buffs or debuffs, etc, but you can’t select a specific ability of theirs during their turn. Personally speaking, this doesn’t bother me very much. For the vast majority of my play time, party members generally behaved as one would expect them to and did the most logical action during their turn. There were a few key instances where I found the AI consistently making decisions that aggravated me, though.
The first and more minor instance is that whenever you’re fighting a boss and you haven’t had the chance to analyze its weakness yet, Ken and Koromaru will almost always waste a turn trying to cast an instant-kill Hama or Mudo skill that will never ever work because bosses are always immune to them. There are also times where characters that don’t have a dedicated healing spell will give someone low on health a healing item. On paper, this isn’t a big deal, but in practice, wasting a turn to give someone an item that only heals a small amount of HP can be very frustrating, especially if they could’ve spent that turn knocking an enemy down, or you or someone else in the party is capable of healing people for more HP the very next turn. The biggest outlier however is one character in particular: Mitsuru. When Mitsuru is in your party, you need to be especially vigilant when it comes to assigning tactics to her, otherwise she will almost always waste a turn and magic casting either Marin Karin (a charm spell) that doesn’t work 90% of the time, or later in the game, she’ll cast Mind Charge instead, which can be more helpful since it boosts the damage of magic attacks, but isn’t really necessary since it’s generally more efficient to just knock the enemy down and do an All-Out Attack as fast as possible.
Still, despite the occasional frustration, I do think that a lot of people’s criticisms towards not being able to directly control your party members is fairly overblown. I actually like this system a lot, it makes the characters feel a bit more real. I understand that it’s not super popular, since the ability to directly control your party members was re-introduced in subsequent Persona games. Even though AI party members is still an option in those titles, the security of being able to directly pick which skill of my party members to use in any given situation is just too tempting to pass up on, and I fully admit that I likely wouldn’t ever use AI party members unless it was the only option I had.
The Persona system is both simultaneously easy to understand as well as very esoteric. If you’re just trying to play through the game normally, and you’re not trying to create a specific Persona, it’s fairly simple to just test and see what the results are of specific combinations of Personas. As long as it makes a Persona with a specific skill you’re looking for and is of an Arcana whose corresponding Social Link you’ve made a lot of progress in, then you’re generally good to go. However, if you’re trying to create a specific Persona for something like Elizabeth’s Requests or if you’re looking for one to help with a particularly difficult sub-boss in Tartarus, I do not see how you are supposed to reasonably be able to do so without some sort of guide. There are just far too many combinations and no real in-game way to tell what makes what. As long as you’re just sticking to the main game and not doing anything optional, you don’t really need a specific Persona for anything though. You’re generally able to make do with what you have as long as you’re consistently fusing Personas that are near your current in-game level.
The Social Link system is very conflicting, for a multitude of reasons. While the system itself I think is great and is an excellent way to tie-in gameplay elements with the thematic elements of the narrative, coming back to this game I initially thought that the narrative quality of the Social Links was generally very poor. In order to progress certain Social Links in the fastest and most efficient way possible, you’ll be required to constantly reinforce the beliefs and choices of the character whose Social Link you’re currently working on, even if they’re very poor, like Kenji or Hidetoshi. However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that was kind of the point. As opposed to my original playthrough I decided to use a guide to see how best to progress through the Social Links, and I found the dialogue choices that would progress them the fastest are the ones where you have to kiss up to them at all times. This resulted in some Social Links being incredibly boring, with little to no conflict to them. I think this is the game’s way of saying that no friendship or relationship is ever perfect, most relationships have conflicts to them, and what’s most important is being able to overcome those conflicts and emerge from them with a stronger bond. Now, that could just be me reading too deep into the Social Links on a thematic level, admittedly. However, the Social Links do still have serious problems, some of which have already been addressed in future Persona titles, and some that I hope the remake rectifies.
The most obvious problem with them is that you can’t fully complete a female character’s Social Link without dating them. You have no option to just be friends with them. Thankfully, this was something that has already been handled in future Persona games, and I have no doubt that will carry over to the remake as well, but this was a very baffling oversight that wasn’t even addressed here in FES, the second version of Persona 3. An even bigger issue is that there are various Social Links that either involve or allude to romances with extremely uncomfortable age gaps. Kenji is a sixteen-year-old high school student whose entire Social Link is about his oblivious pursuit of his completely one-sided romance with his teacher. Maiko is a nine-year-old girl dealing with parents who are going through a divorce, and at the end of her Social Link, she falls in love with the high school age Protagonist, and you don’t have the option to directly say “no” to the idea of the two of you becoming “a mom and dad together”. One of the most problematic ones is “Maya”, the MMO player who is revealed to be an adult in the Protagonist's life with a crush on him. I really do hope that the remake rewrites these, “Maya”’s especially, because these are just not acceptable, especially in this day and age.
Tartarus is where that previously mentioned intertwining of systems is on full display. It’s a single 264 floor dungeon that you spend the entire game climbing. It’s here where you build up you and your party’s levels so that you’re strong enough to face the boss that appears at the end of each in-game month. Tartarus has always had a very mixed reception, and my most recent playthrough really opened my eyes to its problems. I think it’s biggest issue is that it’s not clear how much time you should be spending in Tartarus before you face the boss at the end of the month. The game does suggest you try and make it to the top of a block of floors before each fight, specifically via Elizabeth’s Requests, but even if you do make it to the top of a block, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you fought enough enemies and that you’re strong enough to fight the end-of-the-month boss. Persona 4 and 5 solved this problem by letting you fight the monthly bosses at any point within a certain period of time, giving you a deadline to defeat the boss as opposed to only allowing you to challenge and defeat a boss on one specific day. Given the narrative concept of Persona 3, you can’t really do that here, but hopefully Reload will give you some idea of what level you should be at to face those end-of-the-month bosses.
In addition to that, the sheer length of Tartarus and the unchanging layouts of its floors can grow rather tiresome and repetitive over the course of the game. The longer you play, the more of a grind it is, as more party members get added, which means you need to level more party members up, which means you need to spend more and more time in Tartarus. I do like the decision making that Tartarus forces, as you have to consider whether or not it’s worth challenging every Shadow on a floor, or if it’s better to try and continue the climb so that you make it to the next checkpoint without having to redo a section of floors again. It can be fun and an interesting challenge, but by the time you reach the end of the game and you make it to the top, you’re likely sick to death of it.
After all of that has been said and done, at the end of the day, I still greatly admire and appreciate Persona 3 despite its flaws. It doesn’t excel in every single regard, but if you stick with it, I think that it’s a game that can ultimately feel very rewarding, with a story that remains deeply impactful to me. There’s a lot this game does right, and even a bit it does better than the games that come after it. I hope that Persona 3 Reload is able to patch up the areas where it’s lacking, because I think that with a modern touch, Persona 3 could end up being not just the best game in the series on a thematic and narrative level, but on a gameplay one as well.