There are lots of great visual novels, this isn't one, Persona 3 suffers hard being transferred into this format with the cuteness and dialogue becoming so boring I ended up mass skipping months at a time in the game where the whole theme is about spending every second of your time wisely. The gameplay loop for me in persona3 portable was skipping the life simulation because it was so boring , only to arrive at the dungeon crawling, only to remember the dungeon crawling is insanely boring , so I end up skipping that and thus the cycle repeats. You dread going to Tartarus because of fear of death via boredom, so you end up under-levelled for bosses which make you have to repeat them again and again which is guess what... boring:).All in all just buy a PS2 or play reload if you are a person that wants to experience P3 without having your brain shut off.

WARNING MEGA RANT:

Booting up this game feels impactful, Even listening to the preview music while hovering over it on the PS5 feels Impactful, and when the curtains drew on this two hour video game it felt impactful. When you start off the dialogue from your protagonist girl makes you cough up a few hairballs. I Really remember one specific part where main girl tries to open a locked door and after failing says: "I've been trapped my whole life" or something equally stupid. But if you push through the first chapter's cheesy opening and make it through the game some real amazing colour starts to show. I remember being very excited throughout this segment of chapter two where start hallucinating an eyrie walk through your old high school with all of the pieces of this simple but effective story slowly mechanizing with it only being until chapter 3 where it gets really smart. As chapter three began I felt more inclined with the world that the game had built up with the characters and their personalities all varying and well done, albeit probably all a little underbanked. Then in chapter three the game threw a real unexpected run of high quality game design in here for a good ten minutes that I really enjoyed. The segment I'm talking about here is where main girl opens a door and impossibly walks into her empty childhood home. As soon as this segment starts the music shifts to this creepy melodic groaning and the voice acting, which was previously pretty stale, really kicks in with main girls voice being noticeably petrified to be in this place. You progress the rooms of the house and leave through the closet door ,each time you loop back to the beginning of the house but with changes to the environment which is probably showing time passing and the change from the main girls mother from a loving one to an psychotic abusive abusive one. Just as all these memories are flooding back with more and more of the story being drip fed through voices in the girls head and texts found in the apartment, We are hit with the honestly well executed reveal of the traumatic event in main girls past, being that their mother locked her and her younger brother in a closet to stop their crying only for her younger brother to suffocate inside. We learn that the mother desperately tries to hide the body in the fridge only to be arrested and for main girl to be put into care. We already knew that main girl was adopted at the start , we had already seen these horrifying baby dolls that move around as well as pulsating bin bags through the game, but this final story segment of the game ties everything that the protagonist sees through the game together for a genuinely good and scary payoff as the horrible connecting of the dots kicks in.The icing on the cake for me was that the player models height got shorter the more you progress the childhood home which not only makes the environment more intimidating but ties straight into the story in a way that I appreciate alot.Just when you think the game has finally gotten into its stride with the storytelling however, the segment ends and you have to do a chase. Through the game the end of each chapter was only reachable by doing these awkward and cliché chases with the games only risk , the "red pyramid thing" (I looked up the name this is it I swear) these chases are so badly done that at one point I started laughing very hard at how lame it was. I mean surely Konami with a rich history of survival horror games in the silent hill series would understand that scary most of the time is not a maze chase with a slow and soundless chaser. But who knows what they think at all, at least the game doesn't have a VHS filter or any mascots. All in all the game has a solid story with a real gem of a final chapter, however the game is dragged down hard by the clusterfuck chases that are all copy paste and really flat.