Playing the first 3/4s of Ico: "This game fucking sucks. Oh my god. How much do I have to do for Yorda to stop spinning and climb this ladder holy shit. How did anyone do this shit without a walkthrough at the ready to be able to use once every 30 minutes"

Playing the last hour of Ico: "Okay, I APPRECIATE Ico because you can see its influence everywhere and there is no doubt in my mind that I was being fucked with the entire time. HOWEVER it still is extremely clunky and annoying (although the greater offense is that most of it is boring and repetitive, and that the AI being janky undermines any sort of attempts at establishing an emotional connection to your companion), and for that reason, within the microgenre of 'games which intentionally suck ass to play', I will always love Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days more."

Solid Pikmin game, nothing to write home about, and definitely weaker than Pikmin 1 or 2, but it's still alright. Much easier than 1 and 2 (understandably due to the big time gap between their releases), and the structure of the story causes it to end weirdly abruptly (compared to a goal you're incrementally working towards like in 1&2) which prompted me to play some of the challenge stages until I got bored. Once they kept throwing defeat enemy ones at me I tapped out, but it's still fine.

Kinda makes me wish that there was a single other RTS series that had a single linear singleplayer campaign that wasnt hard as shit to get into lol

played to try and shoehorn in a tetris game into that best of 2014 event. it's okay but i don't really like puyo (too slow and more on the puzzle side of "action puzzle" than i tend to like in these sorta flow state games) and tetris is just a little more clunky than i'd like with eveeeer so slightly too slow autodelays and a very small pause whenever you clear a line. a good puyo player seems to be able to completely blow a good tetris player out of the water as well, so the whole concept of combining the two doesn't really line up. but that could just be from me being a bad puyo player and a good tetris player. it's still fine though, this is a game with mostly normal guideline tetris in it

A pretty great last third preceded by 40 hours of decent but largely unremarkable social links and mind-numbingly boring dungeon crawling and combat. A very solid story kneecapped by an incredibly poor structure.

[~15 minute read]

---------------- Pacing ----------------
JRPGs have a pacing problem. Video games in general have a pacing problem—they’re a relatively new artform and have a much wider breadth to cover than most other mediums. It’s much harder to thread that needle when some people want to play a 2 minute long arcade game, and some people want to play a 200+ hour long monstrosity. Obviously, you can tell my preferences from my word choice, but JRPGs tend to lean on the longer side of things, which can cause those lulls and valleys to sometimes stretch many hours wide.

I have always been ultra-conscious of how my time is being used, so this irks me much more than it seems like it does for most. What tends to be the roughest for me is when I have to play tens of hours of a game until it “gets good”. I’m usually willing to give a boring section the benefit of the doubt if I’ve already been sold on a game, but lacking a good hook early on is tougher than anything else, no doubt in my mind.

As someone who has already played Persona 4 and 5 (a perspective I imagine many other P3R players share), the opening 2/3s of P3R feels drab and dry, nearly every day feeling obligatory and rote, with Tartarus especially feeling like a sharp downgrade of the already pretty bad dungeon crawling in Persona 4. Obviously, Persona 3 came out before either P4 or P5, so it’s a format that got iterated on, but P3R came out many years after both, and includes many of the iterations from later persona games, so I feel like I’m able to judge it in this manner.

Persona 3 Reload’s “part before it gets good” is nearly 40 hours long. Those 40 hours, for the most part, simply establish a “vibe”, cast of characters, and list of related proper nouns. This is not a build-up. There is basically no escalation of tension, until one event, delivered moments after a plot twist, finally kicks the story into action. It often doesn’t even do a good job at establishing, with some aspects like the S.E.E.S. team only feeling like a loose group of acquaintances, for reasons I’ll talk about later.

I am unable to play through 40 opening hours of a game without thinking that a game as sprawling and huge as Final Fantasy 7 is only about 36 hours long. I think about how EarthBound and Mother 3 both don’t clock 30. Persona 3 only really starts telling its story in its final 20 hours (10 of which are spent trudging through even more Tartarus) so it’s very easy to find games a fraction of the length with more stuff going on. Yakuza 0. Phoenix Wright 3. Every Danganronpa game has just as many characters and plot twists as any modern Persona game, and yet not a single one is longer than even 35 hours long. Having put 6 years of video games experience between my last Persona game and this one, it is ridiculous the degree to which these purportedly “story dense” games meander through their narratives. The vast majority of the time is spent in daily life or Tartarus sections, with a very small real estate being given to the overarching narrative. This would be fine, but both other parts have significant problems of their own that make them a lot less than they could be.

---------------- School Life ----------------
School life is the thing that makes Persona stand out from other JRPGs. Here, it’s okay, but you very quickly pick up on how limited your options are. You can work somewhere and get money (pointless late game), you can level up your social skills (usually uninteresting and also pointless once they’re maxed out), or you can do a social event, either via a social link or a special event tied to a party member. These social events are the clear highlight of this part of the game, and the thing people talk about the second most in these games, behind the main story. It’s a shame that the social links are kind of a mixed bag in the end, though.

This isn’t as much of a problem as the dungeon gameplay, given you can completely ignore many of the social links if you don’t want to do them. You’re given an incredibly limited selection at first, but your options expand after not too long, and you can pick and choose the people with the most interesting stories. Between everything, it’s mostly average as far as Persona games go. I can’t remember almost any non-party social links from P4, and this game is definitely better in that aspect—the Sun arcana in particular gives the whole series a good run for its money as it’s probably the best social link in any of these games. But there’s a lull period for several hours after you’ve maxed everyone you want to and before you unlock the ability to do the social links with the female party members, which makes the already rough middle section of this game even rougher. Regardless, most of them are fine, nothing to write home about, but interesting enough to want to pursue.

My biggest concern with the social links here is in how many of them rhyme with one another. My Persona fan friends tell me that the social links in 3/4/5 are all supposed to have a unifying theme, and Persona 3 is where it’s strongest. One thing you’ll notice about nearly every single P3 social link is just how many are about someone overcoming the death of someone close to them. I swear, almost every person in this game has a recently deceased parent or aunt or brother or cousin or son or something. If this were tackled in a few social links it would be very compelling, but as of now it’s a bit ridiculous just how many repeat the same ideas here. Every time I gained access to a new social link later on and found out they had a dead relative I thought less and less of it every time. These stories tend to be good anyways, but the best ones often have their impacts lessened by just how mundane these ideas become after being presented so many times. Again, the Sun arcana is the obvious clear highlight, with a lot of other social links in feel like lesser or redundant versions of one another.

I’ve also since realized that these kinds of social links are more akin to a visual novel than a true social sim. I have never played Tokimeki Memorial, but I have watched the Tim Rogers video on Tokimeki Memorial (also the best video on YouTube) so I know about its impact on series like Persona and Danganronpa. The big thing is that and it’s got so many more moving parts than anything I’ve ever seen with “dating sim elements”. Once you max out a social link in Persona, you have absolutely no reason to ever talk to them again and waste a time slot. In Tokimeki Memorial, your public opinion is constantly draining and you have to work and very strategically manage your time to keep it up. This makes the act of deciding who to hang out with into a stock market’s worth of game depth and which requires a lot of juggling and paying attention. In Persona, you really just decide which ones you want to see and be a yes man for any questions they ask you and it’s trivial to max.

I’m not saying Tokimeki’s structure would work in a Persona game with no modifications, but certainly a heavily toned down version of it that still retains a lot of the mechanical strategy could. Instead we have no mechanical strategy past deciding when you want to level up each bar you have available to you, and you can easily get so many done by the end anyways that it feels like a missed opportunity. Not something that makes the game bad, but an absence of something that could make it better. If you’re going to make a game this long, why not make the gameplay dense?

---------------- The Dark Hour ----------------
Tartarus is bad. Even my friends who love Persona 3 agree that Tartarus is bad. I haven’t played many dungeon crawlers, but from the ones I’ve played (full PMD series + a few rougelikes like Shiren 2, HyperRogue, and Crypt of the NecroDancer), Persona 3 and 4 are exceptionally bad dungeon crawlers. Combat taking place in a different plane than exploration with long transitions between the two absolutely kills any sense of flow, and fills the game with hundreds of minutes of nothing but dead time. This would be mildly irritating if the two halves were good on their own, but both the combat and exploration are bad, both in unique ways.

The combat is bad for the same reasons the combat of Persona 4 is bad—it’s just a worse, oversimplified SMT. Full disclosure, I have only played SMT4, but that game has some sauce. I have overall mixed opinions, but the combat is not a weak point—you’ve got a litany of options and are constantly being given new environments and enemies to see. The same goes with Persona 5, which changes very little in terms of progression or mechanics from the SMT games. One of the most bizarre choices P3 and P4 make is in making their enemies a new kind of thing separate from Personas/Demons that you can’t capture and use. This is already bad enough, but you see the same palette swaps of the same handful of enemies over and over for the entire game. There is literally nothing exciting about seeing a new type of hand enemy that has different colors. And you can’t even capture them! Seeing a new enemy does not invoke a “wow, this is cool, I would like to use this”, but rather a dry “ok I guess I kill this thing now.” The lack of a demon negotiation system also removes any alternative ends to battles, so you know going in that all of them are going to play out in exactly the same way every time.

Do you know what you do in every single battle in P3R? Fish for weaknesses, and then spam them. If an enemy has no weaknesses, it requires even less strategy and just involves hitting it until it dies. That’s the whole thing. Early on, you can often guess an enemy’s weakness based on how they attack, but it gets a lot more random later on. But at that point, you probably already have access to a mechanic which will just tell you an enemy’s weakness after 4 turns for an SP cost. Fishing for a weakness requires nothing besides setting up a party with a bunch of different magic attacks, so you can start the battle by hitting the same series of them every single time until one of them hits a weakness. There is no strategy, only rote repetition. And once you do snag a weakness, downing an enemy is so much more powerful than anything else with the all-out-attack mechanic, that there is no reason to do anything other than spam it and heal when you need to. There is simply nothing to be found in the combat that requires any more adaptability than an incredibly simple algorithm.

The exploration, separate from the combat, is bad because there’s nothing interesting to see. Every floor is made of a random combination of a very small handful of prefabricated elements. There’s a theme change, like, once every 50 floors. Once you’re 3 floors past a theme change you’ve already seen everything you’re going to be seeing for the next 50 floors. Find a theme too annoying to look at or navigate? Too bad, you’re stuck with it. There’s a stretch in the middle of this game where you go from 50 floors of this very annoying-to-navigate industrial setting, right into 50 floors of piss-colored hallways. I shouldn’t need to say it, but this is absolutely grueling, and it’s something that feels stapled on for no reason. Tartarus does not need to be this long and this repetitive. They could have made Tartarus half as tall and had everything give you double EXP and literally nothing would have changed except it wasted less of your time. The way EXP is distributed as of now actually shoves you into even more dungeon crawling, since engaging in non-boss combats borderline pointless due to their pitiful experience payouts. I ended up just running past everything for the last 100 hours of Tartarus with basically no trouble, and I was playing on Normal! Still, getting from border floor to border floor still typically took upwards of two hours of grinding, every single time. Tartarus feels like clocking in to work at a shitty job.

The craziest part is that both the combat and exploration used to be worse! Like, a lot worse! In the original game, Tartarus exploration had a single theme for the entire game. In combat, you couldn’t control your party members, which I can only imagine turned weakness fishing and hitting into even more of a slog than it already is. I never got more than 4 hours into the original Persona 3 before tapping out, but it’s ridiculous that they updated it, it’s obviously better, and it’s still not even remotely approaching adequate.

---------------- Pacing – Part 1.5 ----------------
As an overall experience, Persona 3 Reload is filled to the brim with wasted time, both on the large and small scale. I’ve talked about the overall structure of the entire game, but it’s a persistent problem moment to moment as well. Entering the Velvet Room, even on fast forward, takes somewhere around 5-10 seconds every time. Animations for the Theurgies in battles can take what feels like dozens of unskippable seconds to play out every time, animations you are going to see over, and over, and over again. Ending a day constitutes a 10-second-long animation of a calendar appearing on screen, moving forward a day, and then transitioning into one of a couple possible day starts, and you have to watch this animation play out hundreds of times.

These may all seem like nitpicks, but you are near-constantly forced to watch animations that waste a few or more seconds than they need to. All this contributes to the feeling that P3R does not value your time in the slightest. I grew desensitized to it, I acclimated, but the feeling lingers, and it never really goes away. This is a huge problem in all 3 Persona games I’ve played, but having played P4 and P5 before really developing a critical voice meant that I wasn’t able to put my finger on what exactly irked me about the pacing in these games outside of “it’s too slow” until now.

---------------- The Actual Story ----------------
When people talk about Persona 3, they’re talking about this the vast majority of the time, and for good reason. It’s very very solid! Nothing that hasn’t been done by other JRPGs before (save for the setting which was pretty innovative on release), but when it finally gets going, it executes its ideas very well. It’s got a very strong focus on its themes surrounding death and it does get a bit preachy and repetitive at points, but compared to everything else it’s a very minor problem that’s easy to shrug off.

Obviously, this is something that I don’t want to get too much into for spoiler reasons, but, in a hypothetical world where this game was paced better, I think this would be a really great execution. It isn’t paced well, though. The story would be tremendously improved with the first 40 hours being compressed down to 20, maybe even 15 or 10, and there simply isn’t enough going on in that timespan to make that unachievable. Its impact is very much dampened by its own structure, and with the ample Tartarus time given to reflect on what has happened so far, it’s very disappointing how little of the early game gets reincorporated in any meaningful way. I mean, almost no events happen that aren’t just Tartarus, a Full Moon, or normal school life, but that’s the problem. I won’t harp on this point any more than I already have, but P3R’s lack of anything to string you along in its opening two thirds is its biggest flaw.

---------------- Design Clashes ----------------
One final problem with most of these Katsura Hashino persona games (as well as the other Hashino game I’ve played, Catherine) is that all of these parts just don’t come together in any sort of satisfying manner. They all operate apart from one another, and only interact in very minor ways. In fact, the mechanics from one part often act in a way that feels designed against another part.

Take, for example, Tartarus and the calendar system. In the story, you are expected to dip in and out of Tartarus at many nights over the month, making small incremental progress. This would also greatly improve the pacing of the game, as you wouldn’t be stuck with multiple hours of slogging through terrible dungeons in a row and could space it out with the much better social link half of the game. But almost no one does this, since the actual mechanics discourage you from doing so. The problem is twofold: you are given enough SP with recovery items to make it from border floor to border floor in one night, and you have limited night slots to spend. If you run through it in a day (which is easily possible), you have that many more time slots to spend leveling up your social stats, which all need to be maxed by the end of the game to see 3 of the most important social links. This exact thing is a problem in every Hashino Persona game! It’s a problem in 3, 4, and 5, and forces you into long, unbroken periods of dungeon crawling if you want to play optimally.

The social links excluding your party members this time (until very late into the game) also make it so that you probably won’t bother to learn about and hang out with them until much later on. This contributes to how weakly established this team is in the first half of the game. Once they start getting events, it gets better, but many players will opt to level up a social link (obvious clear progress) vs. doing an event with a party member. Even then, opportunities to hang out with party members are very barren at first and it just doesn’t feel like anyone really knows one another, or that they hang out at all. It’s just further contribution to how redundant and pointless the first 2/3s of this game feels. It’s poor buildup for when things start happening, and it’s poor at establishing that the members of S.E.E.S. are even actually friends with one another.

And for the social links you do have, there’s frequently a heavy dissonance between the social links and the calendar-based story. Something sad and tragic happens in the story, and then the next day you’re just at school going about your business, hanging out in social links over happy upbeat music like it never happened. This feels weird! It contributes to the feeling that these parts are all modular and have no effect on one another, making getting through the module that you dislike all that much harder, as it’s so easy to imagine a version of the game without it. The fact that it is so easy to imagine “Persona but the dungeon parts are just replaced with something else” makes the fact that we’re stuck with what we have even harder to get through.

Earlier I mentioned Danganronpa, which also is very clearly divided into a social/romance sim half and a second half of a different gameplay genre, but the difference is that there’s a stronger link between the two and both halves are good on their own. Trials are the main appeal, so much care is put into making them tense and energetic. However, if a character dies in the Trial half of the game, you can’t do their social events anymore, so it adds a tension to trying to win over a character on the already very visibly limited slots you have in the social half of the game. The designers also understand that most players are going to be coming for the mystery, so in all 3 games you’re allowed to skip the social events entirely if you’re feeling like it. You’ll be weaker in trials, but it’s nothing that isn’t fairly easy to get over. There’s a mild understanding in the Persona games for this as well—the combat is heavily simplified (to its detriment) from the SMT games to be approachable to newer players who may have played something like a Tokimeki Memorial, but have never played an SMT. But you are not allowed to outright skip it, let alone speed it up by any meaningful metric, outside of just lowering the difficulty and running past everything.

It’s one thing to combine a few disparate genres to make something new, but the key is combining them in a way where their best qualities complement one another. Something like Undertale works because the appeal of the bullet hell games that inspired it is in dodging attacks, not in spamming or holding down the fire button. And the appeal of the SMT games that inspired its structure is in being able to talk your way out of fights, not actually carrying out those fights.

From my point of view, the Persona games take a lot of the least interesting aspects of the genres they’re pulling from, rather than the best parts. It’s an SMT game without the ability to negotiate out of battles, and it’s a Tokimeki Memorial game where you don’t have to worry about any social links turning on you. The core loop and gameplay appeal of both of these things is absent from Persona, so they have to lean back on their barest forms—the dungeon crawling on oversimplistic type-weakness turn-based combat, and the social sim on the J-adventure games that they grew out of. The social sim half walks out of this doing fine but still compromised, whereas the dungeon crawling is completely decimated into nothing but sludge.

---------------- So, Persona, huh? ----------------
All this has led me to some very interesting conclusions about these games, perspectives that I don’t think many people share. Few people like me would play more than 1 Persona game, let alone 3, but I just had to keep mining for those diamonds.

Despite having by far the weakest story, and going on and on the longest by far, I think my favorite Persona game is actually Persona 5. I haven’t played Royal and I’m not going to. Fans tend to overemphasize the stories in these games and talk about them like the story is the entire game. Fans could not be more wrong—the story is only a small fraction of an entire Persona game. If you want an experience like that, VNs are much better suited than any JRPG could ever hope to be. Tn the moments you’re spending 90+% of the game in, P5 was more enjoyable than P4 and P3 without a doubt.

P5 has a wider diversity of social links, with many more ways to spend your time. Even simple mechanics like being able to read a book on the train sometimes to buff a stat means you can often be pleasantly surprised with how time ends up, and you can’t plan literally everything weeks and weeks in advance. 5 social stats means you’re spread thinner and have to juggle and keep track of more, making that aspect of the gameplay much more engaging.

As far as the combat goes, it’s almost entirely lifted directly from an SMT game. You have demon negotiation, you have demon capturing, you even have the hand-designed environments as seen in later SMT titles. In addition, the social links also provide many incremental and concrete buffs and benefits instead of just abstractly making fusion more powerful. You’ve got much more incentive to interact with both of these parts of the game, and they work together much better than they do in 3 or 4.

The story opens great and hooks you early. It spends the rest of the game faltering around constantly, never really hitting you with stakes that compare to the first palace at all. It’s all very lukewarm and middling in retrospect, with a couple very bad sections and a weak conclusion, but the gameplay is fun enough to outlast it on its own merits for a long while, with me only getting bored and needing to force myself through at the 80 hour mark.

Comparatively, in the end, Persona 3’s story has much more going for it, but it only starts playing its cards 40 hours in. Those last 20 hours are very good, but there’s very little before then worth seeing, and only a handful of events from the build-up get any sort of meaningful reincorporation anyways. The social sections are good, but somewhat lacking in terms of options of things to do, especially at night. And the dungeon gameplay is grindy and terrible, and a hollow shell of what makes SMT and dungeon crawling gameplay compelling.

------------------------------
Also, the music isn’t that good. There’s like 8 tracks you hear the first 30 seconds of for 95% of the game. Even if those 30 seconds are good, there is no universe where I would not slowly begin to sour towards them after 60 hours.

I never want to hear a song ever again that contains the lyrics “chill vibes”, “we gon’ chill today” and “I'm chilling on my bed” all in the first minute and a half.

A pretty great last third preceded by 40 hours of decent but largely unremarkable social links and mind-numbingly boring dungeon crawling and combat. A very solid story kneecapped by an incredibly poor structure.

[~15 minute read]

---------------- Pacing ----------------
JRPGs have a pacing problem. Video games in general have a pacing problem—they’re a relatively new artform and have a much wider breadth to cover than most other mediums. It’s much harder to thread that needle when some people want to play a 2 minute long arcade game, and some people want to play a 200+ hour long monstrosity. Obviously, you can tell my preferences from my word choice, but JRPGs tend to lean on the longer side of things, which can cause those lulls and valleys to sometimes stretch many hours wide.

I have always been ultra-conscious of how my time is being used, so this irks me much more than it seems like it does for most. What tends to be the roughest for me is when I have to play tens of hours of a game until it “gets good”. I’m usually willing to give a boring section the benefit of the doubt if I’ve already been sold on a game, but lacking a good hook early on is tougher than anything else, no doubt in my mind.

As someone who has already played Persona 4 and 5 (a perspective I imagine many other P3R players share), the opening 2/3s of P3R feels drab and dry, nearly every day feeling obligatory and rote, with Tartarus especially feeling like a sharp downgrade of the already pretty bad dungeon crawling in Persona 4. Obviously, Persona 3 came out before either P4 or P5, so it’s a format that got iterated on, but P3R came out many years after both, and includes many of the iterations from later persona games, so I feel like I’m able to judge it in this manner.

Persona 3 Reload’s “part before it gets good” is nearly 40 hours long. Those 40 hours, for the most part, simply establish a “vibe”, cast of characters, and list of related proper nouns. This is not a build-up. There is basically no escalation of tension, until one event, delivered moments after a plot twist, finally kicks the story into action. It often doesn’t even do a good job at establishing, with some aspects like the S.E.E.S. team only feeling like a loose group of acquaintances, for reasons I’ll talk about later.

I am unable to play through 40 opening hours of a game without thinking that a game as sprawling and huge as Final Fantasy 7 is only about 36 hours long. I think about how EarthBound and Mother 3 both don’t clock 30. Persona 3 only really starts telling its story in its final 20 hours (10 of which are spent trudging through even more Tartarus) so it’s very easy to find games a fraction of the length with more stuff going on. Yakuza 0. Phoenix Wright 3. Every Danganronpa game has just as many characters and plot twists as any modern Persona game, and yet not a single one is longer than even 35 hours long. Having put 6 years of video games experience between my last Persona game and this one, it is ridiculous the degree to which these purportedly “story dense” games meander through their narratives. The vast majority of the time is spent in daily life or Tartarus sections, with a very small real estate being given to the overarching narrative. This would be fine, but both other parts have significant problems of their own that make them a lot less than they could be.

---------------- School Life ----------------
School life is the thing that makes Persona stand out from other JRPGs. Here, it’s okay, but you very quickly pick up on how limited your options are. You can work somewhere and get money (pointless late game), you can level up your social skills (usually uninteresting and also pointless once they’re maxed out), or you can do a social event, either via a social link or a special event tied to a party member. These social events are the clear highlight of this part of the game, and the thing people talk about the second most in these games, behind the main story. It’s a shame that the social links are kind of a mixed bag in the end, though.

This isn’t as much of a problem as the dungeon gameplay, given you can completely ignore many of the social links if you don’t want to do them. You’re given an incredibly limited selection at first, but your options expand after not too long, and you can pick and choose the people with the most interesting stories. Between everything, it’s mostly average as far as Persona games go. I can’t remember almost any non-party social links from P4, and this game is definitely better in that aspect—the Sun arcana in particular gives the whole series a good run for its money as it’s probably the best social link in any of these games. But there’s a lull period for several hours after you’ve maxed everyone you want to and before you unlock the ability to do the social links with the female party members, which makes the already rough middle section of this game even rougher. Regardless, most of them are fine, nothing to write home about, but interesting enough to want to pursue.

My biggest concern with the social links here is in how many of them rhyme with one another. My Persona fan friends tell me that the social links in 3/4/5 are all supposed to have a unifying theme, and Persona 3 is where it’s strongest. One thing you’ll notice about nearly every single P3 social link is just how many are about someone overcoming the death of someone close to them. I swear, almost every person in this game has a recently deceased parent or aunt or brother or cousin or son or something. If this were tackled in a few social links it would be very compelling, but as of now it’s a bit ridiculous just how many repeat the same ideas here. Every time I gained access to a new social link later on and found out they had a dead relative I thought less and less of it every time. These stories tend to be good anyways, but the best ones often have their impacts lessened by just how mundane these ideas become after being presented so many times. Again, the Sun arcana is the obvious clear highlight, with a lot of other social links in feel like lesser or redundant versions of one another.

I’ve also since realized that these kinds of social links are more akin to a visual novel than a true social sim. I have never played Tokimeki Memorial, but I have watched the Tim Rogers video on Tokimeki Memorial (also the best video on YouTube) so I know about its impact on series like Persona and Danganronpa. The big thing is that and it’s got so many more moving parts than anything I’ve ever seen with “dating sim elements”. Once you max out a social link in Persona, you have absolutely no reason to ever talk to them again and waste a time slot. In Tokimeki Memorial, your public opinion is constantly draining and you have to work and very strategically manage your time to keep it up. This makes the act of deciding who to hang out with into a stock market’s worth of game depth and which requires a lot of juggling and paying attention. In Persona, you really just decide which ones you want to see and be a yes man for any questions they ask you and it’s trivial to max.

I’m not saying Tokimeki’s structure would work in a Persona game with no modifications, but certainly a heavily toned down version of it that still retains a lot of the mechanical strategy could. Instead we have no mechanical strategy past deciding when you want to level up each bar you have available to you, and you can easily get so many done by the end anyways that it feels like a missed opportunity. Not something that makes the game bad, but an absence of something that could make it better. If you’re going to make a game this long, why not make the gameplay dense?

---------------- The Dark Hour ----------------
Tartarus is bad. Even my friends who love Persona 3 agree that Tartarus is bad. I haven’t played many dungeon crawlers, but from the ones I’ve played (full PMD series + a few rougelikes like Shiren 2, HyperRogue, and Crypt of the NecroDancer), Persona 3 and 4 are exceptionally bad dungeon crawlers. Combat taking place in a different plane than exploration with long transitions between the two absolutely kills any sense of flow, and fills the game with hundreds of minutes of nothing but dead time. This would be mildly irritating if the two halves were good on their own, but both the combat and exploration are bad, both in unique ways.

The combat is bad for the same reasons the combat of Persona 4 is bad—it’s just a worse, oversimplified SMT. Full disclosure, I have only played SMT4, but that game has some sauce. I have overall mixed opinions, but the combat is not a weak point—you’ve got a litany of options and are constantly being given new environments and enemies to see. The same goes with Persona 5, which changes very little in terms of progression or mechanics from the SMT games. One of the most bizarre choices P3 and P4 make is in making their enemies a new kind of thing separate from Personas/Demons that you can’t capture and use. This is already bad enough, but you see the same palette swaps of the same handful of enemies over and over for the entire game. There is literally nothing exciting about seeing a new type of hand enemy that has different colors. And you can’t even capture them! Seeing a new enemy does not invoke a “wow, this is cool, I would like to use this”, but rather a dry “ok I guess I kill this thing now.” The lack of a demon negotiation system also removes any alternative ends to battles, so you know going in that all of them are going to play out in exactly the same way every time.

Do you know what you do in every single battle in P3R? Fish for weaknesses, and then spam them. If an enemy has no weaknesses, it requires even less strategy and just involves hitting it until it dies. That’s the whole thing. Early on, you can often guess an enemy’s weakness based on how they attack, but it gets a lot more random later on. But at that point, you probably already have access to a mechanic which will just tell you an enemy’s weakness after 4 turns for an SP cost. Fishing for a weakness requires nothing besides setting up a party with a bunch of different magic attacks, so you can start the battle by hitting the same series of them every single time until one of them hits a weakness. There is no strategy, only rote repetition. And once you do snag a weakness, downing an enemy is so much more powerful than anything else with the all-out-attack mechanic, that there is no reason to do anything other than spam it and heal when you need to. There is simply nothing to be found in the combat that requires any more adaptability than an incredibly simple algorithm.

The exploration, separate from the combat, is bad because there’s nothing interesting to see. Every floor is made of a random combination of a very small handful of prefabricated elements. There’s a theme change, like, once every 50 floors. Once you’re 3 floors past a theme change you’ve already seen everything you’re going to be seeing for the next 50 floors. Find a theme too annoying to look at or navigate? Too bad, you’re stuck with it. There’s a stretch in the middle of this game where you go from 50 floors of this very annoying-to-navigate industrial setting, right into 50 floors of piss-colored hallways. I shouldn’t need to say it, but this is absolutely grueling, and it’s something that feels stapled on for no reason. Tartarus does not need to be this long and this repetitive. They could have made Tartarus half as tall and had everything give you double EXP and literally nothing would have changed except it wasted less of your time. The way EXP is distributed as of now actually shoves you into even more dungeon crawling, since engaging in non-boss combats borderline pointless due to their pitiful experience payouts. I ended up just running past everything for the last 100 hours of Tartarus with basically no trouble, and I was playing on Normal! Still, getting from border floor to border floor still typically took upwards of two hours of grinding, every single time. Tartarus feels like clocking in to work at a shitty job.

The craziest part is that both the combat and exploration used to be worse! Like, a lot worse! In the original game, Tartarus exploration had a single theme for the entire game. In combat, you couldn’t control your party members, which I can only imagine turned weakness fishing and hitting into even more of a slog than it already is. I never got more than 4 hours into the original Persona 3 before tapping out, but it’s ridiculous that they updated it, it’s obviously better, and it’s still not even remotely approaching adequate.

---------------- Pacing – Part 1.5 ----------------
As an overall experience, Persona 3 Reload is filled to the brim with wasted time, both on the large and small scale. I’ve talked about the overall structure of the entire game, but it’s a persistent problem moment to moment as well. Entering the Velvet Room, even on fast forward, takes somewhere around 5-10 seconds every time. Animations for the Theurgies in battles can take what feels like dozens of unskippable seconds to play out every time, animations you are going to see over, and over, and over again. Ending a day constitutes a 10-second-long animation of a calendar appearing on screen, moving forward a day, and then transitioning into one of a couple possible day starts, and you have to watch this animation play out hundreds of times.

These may all seem like nitpicks, but you are near-constantly forced to watch animations that waste a few or more seconds than they need to. All this contributes to the feeling that P3R does not value your time in the slightest. I grew desensitized to it, I acclimated, but the feeling lingers, and it never really goes away. This is a huge problem in all 3 Persona games I’ve played, but having played P4 and P5 before really developing a critical voice meant that I wasn’t able to put my finger on what exactly irked me about the pacing in these games outside of “it’s too slow” until now.

---------------- The Actual Story ----------------
When people talk about Persona 3, they’re talking about this the vast majority of the time, and for good reason. It’s very very solid! Nothing that hasn’t been done by other JRPGs before (save for the setting which was pretty innovative on release), but when it finally gets going, it executes its ideas very well. It’s got a very strong focus on its themes surrounding death and it does get a bit preachy and repetitive at points, but compared to everything else it’s a very minor problem that’s easy to shrug off.

Obviously, this is something that I don’t want to get too much into for spoiler reasons, but, in a hypothetical world where this game was paced better, I think this would be a really great execution. It isn’t paced well, though. The story would be tremendously improved with the first 40 hours being compressed down to 20, maybe even 15 or 10, and there simply isn’t enough going on in that timespan to make that unachievable. Its impact is very much dampened by its own structure, and with the ample Tartarus time given to reflect on what has happened so far, it’s very disappointing how little of the early game gets reincorporated in any meaningful way. I mean, almost no events happen that aren’t just Tartarus, a Full Moon, or normal school life, but that’s the problem. I won’t harp on this point any more than I already have, but P3R’s lack of anything to string you along in its opening two thirds is its biggest flaw.

---------------- Design Clashes ----------------
One final problem with most of these Katsura Hashino persona games (as well as the other Hashino game I’ve played, Catherine) is that all of these parts just don’t come together in any sort of satisfying manner. They all operate apart from one another, and only interact in very minor ways. In fact, the mechanics from one part often act in a way that feels designed against another part.

Take, for example, Tartarus and the calendar system. In the story, you are expected to dip in and out of Tartarus at many nights over the month, making small incremental progress. This would also greatly improve the pacing of the game, as you wouldn’t be stuck with multiple hours of slogging through terrible dungeons in a row and could space it out with the much better social link half of the game. But almost no one does this, since the actual mechanics discourage you from doing so. The problem is twofold: you are given enough SP with recovery items to make it from border floor to border floor in one night, and you have limited night slots to spend. If you run through it in a day (which is easily possible), you have that many more time slots to spend leveling up your social stats, which all need to be maxed by the end of the game to see 3 of the most important social links. This exact thing is a problem in every Hashino Persona game! It’s a problem in 3, 4, and 5, and forces you into long, unbroken periods of dungeon crawling if you want to play optimally.

The social links excluding your party members this time (until very late into the game) also make it so that you probably won’t bother to learn about and hang out with them until much later on. This contributes to how weakly established this team is in the first half of the game. Once they start getting events, it gets better, but many players will opt to level up a social link (obvious clear progress) vs. doing an event with a party member. Even then, opportunities to hang out with party members are very barren at first and it just doesn’t feel like anyone really knows one another, or that they hang out at all. It’s just further contribution to how redundant and pointless the first 2/3s of this game feels. It’s poor buildup for when things start happening, and it’s poor at establishing that the members of S.E.E.S. are even actually friends with one another.

And for the social links you do have, there’s frequently a heavy dissonance between the social links and the calendar-based story. Something sad and tragic happens in the story, and then the next day you’re just at school going about your business, hanging out in social links over happy upbeat music like it never happened. This feels weird! It contributes to the feeling that these parts are all modular and have no effect on one another, making getting through the module that you dislike all that much harder, as it’s so easy to imagine a version of the game without it. The fact that it is so easy to imagine “Persona but the dungeon parts are just replaced with something else” makes the fact that we’re stuck with what we have even harder to get through.

Earlier I mentioned Danganronpa, which also is very clearly divided into a social/romance sim half and a second half of a different gameplay genre, but the difference is that there’s a stronger link between the two and both halves are good on their own. Trials are the main appeal, so much care is put into making them tense and energetic. However, if a character dies in the Trial half of the game, you can’t do their social events anymore, so it adds a tension to trying to win over a character on the already very visibly limited slots you have in the social half of the game. The designers also understand that most players are going to be coming for the mystery, so in all 3 games you’re allowed to skip the social events entirely if you’re feeling like it. You’ll be weaker in trials, but it’s nothing that isn’t fairly easy to get over. There’s a mild understanding in the Persona games for this as well—the combat is heavily simplified (to its detriment) from the SMT games to be approachable to newer players who may have played something like a Tokimeki Memorial, but have never played an SMT. But you are not allowed to outright skip it, let alone speed it up by any meaningful metric, outside of just lowering the difficulty and running past everything.

It’s one thing to combine a few disparate genres to make something new, but the key is combining them in a way where their best qualities complement one another. Something like Undertale works because the appeal of the bullet hell games that inspired it is in dodging attacks, not in spamming or holding down the fire button. And the appeal of the SMT games that inspired its structure is in being able to talk your way out of fights, not actually carrying out those fights.

From my point of view, the Persona games take a lot of the least interesting aspects of the genres they’re pulling from, rather than the best parts. It’s an SMT game without the ability to negotiate out of battles, and it’s a Tokimeki Memorial game where you don’t have to worry about any social links turning on you. The core loop and gameplay appeal of both of these things is absent from Persona, so they have to lean back on their barest forms—the dungeon crawling on oversimplistic type-weakness turn-based combat, and the social sim on the J-adventure games that they grew out of. The social sim half walks out of this doing fine but still compromised, whereas the dungeon crawling is completely decimated into nothing but sludge.

---------------- So, Persona, huh? ----------------
All this has led me to some very interesting conclusions about these games, perspectives that I don’t think many people share. Few people like me would play more than 1 Persona game, let alone 3, but I just had to keep mining for those diamonds.

Despite having by far the weakest story, and going on and on the longest by far, I think my favorite Persona game is actually Persona 5. I haven’t played Royal and I’m not going to. Fans tend to overemphasize the stories in these games and talk about them like the story is the entire game. Fans could not be more wrong—the story is only a small fraction of an entire Persona game. If you want an experience like that, VNs are much better suited than any JRPG could ever hope to be. Tn the moments you’re spending 90+% of the game in, P5 was more enjoyable than P4 and P3 without a doubt.

P5 has a wider diversity of social links, with many more ways to spend your time. Even simple mechanics like being able to read a book on the train sometimes to buff a stat means you can often be pleasantly surprised with how time ends up, and you can’t plan literally everything weeks and weeks in advance. 5 social stats means you’re spread thinner and have to juggle and keep track of more, making that aspect of the gameplay much more engaging.

As far as the combat goes, it’s almost entirely lifted directly from an SMT game. You have demon negotiation, you have demon capturing, you even have the hand-designed environments as seen in later SMT titles. In addition, the social links also provide many incremental and concrete buffs and benefits instead of just abstractly making fusion more powerful. You’ve got much more incentive to interact with both of these parts of the game, and they work together much better than they do in 3 or 4.

The story opens great and hooks you early. It spends the rest of the game faltering around constantly, never really hitting you with stakes that compare to the first palace at all. It’s all very lukewarm and middling in retrospect, with a couple very bad sections and a weak conclusion, but the gameplay is fun enough to outlast it on its own merits for a long while, with me only getting bored and needing to force myself through at the 80 hour mark.

Comparatively, in the end, Persona 3’s story has much more going for it, but it only starts playing its cards 40 hours in. Those last 20 hours are very good, but there’s very little before then worth seeing, and only a handful of events from the build-up get any sort of meaningful reincorporation anyways. The social sections are good, but somewhat lacking in terms of options of things to do, especially at night. And the dungeon gameplay is grindy and terrible, and a hollow shell of what makes SMT and dungeon crawling gameplay compelling.

------------------------------
Also, the music isn’t that good. There’s like 8 tracks you hear the first 30 seconds of for 95% of the game. Even if those 30 seconds are good, there is no universe where I would not slowly begin to sour towards them after 60 hours.

I never want to hear a song ever again that contains the lyrics “chill vibes”, “we gon’ chill today” and “I'm chilling on my bed” all in the first minute and a half.