I have such mixed emotions on this game. It's a huge undertaking, a long story with a lot of peaks and valleys. I think it both is as homophobic as people say and also not nearly as bad as its reputation claims.

The game frankly feels every episodic and some episodes are great and some are so bad you want to obliterate them from your memory.

I was very cold on the Actual Ending because I think the "mastermind" of the plot sucked compared to the actual killer (GOD WHAT A GREAT VILLAIN, LOVE THEM). This game could be 15 hours shorter honestly.

And the MC of this game fucking sucks, full stop. Going from P3P to P4G is a horrible whiplash, mostly around how bad the protagonist is. If you're going to have a boring-ass protagonist with no personality, why not at least lemme play a girl, I mean.

But at the end of the day, it has Kanji Tatsumi, the best character in any Persona game, so.

For the love of god please ignore all these people crying about lack of anime cutscenes. The presentation of P3P is stripped down, sure, but the actual writing is so much better.

I'm begging people: PLAY THE GIRL. PLAY THE GIRL. It is absolutely BATSHIT to me that if you play the boy in P3 you miss out on such a tremendous amount of content. The reason to play Persona over other JRPGs is the characters and writing, and Girl Route feels like the final draft to the Boy Route's rough draft. I cannot get over the fact that you miss out on every male party members' S-Link in boy route.

Also there's been multiple moments where this game has made me sit back and actually admire its writing. Junpei's S-Link eventually comes to (spoiler) him going "Hey, I jumped into this situation to take control because I want people to take me more seriously and not just think of me as a goofball, but in doing so I cut you out and that wasn't respectful to you, and I'm sorry." Which is a fairly complicated emotional moment you literally will not get if you don't PLAY THE GIRL.

I'd rather have better writing and characters than anime cutscenes, sorry.

This was TTG's best game by a fucking lot. I sometimes have this full sensory flashback to the Trust Jack ending of Episode 2, which is a stunning confluence of cinematography, music, and writing. It's maybe my favorite Single Moment in a video game. And the entire story is amazing! I honestly still cannot believe what TTG did with Rhys in this game. The build of his deal with the devil is amazing. I am begging everyone who plays this game to try the Trust Jack plotline, it goes some fucking INCREDIBLE places. Look. This game made me cry a few times.

I don't know how this got made to be honest. So when people talk about Kojima as a brand all his own, I think it's important to understand that somehow, this pop culture philosopher military nerd got a triple A budget and used it to make art games. If you strip out the precision and polish and hours upon hours of voice acting from these games, the Metal Gear franchise would be most at home on itch.io with the other Esoteric Weird Games.

MGS2 is the pinnacle of that. Konami said "hey Kojima, here's an enormous budget and huge team, make a sequel to that game everyone likes" and Kojima said, "Sure but its going to be a game about how none of them really want a sequel to MGS1 and how such a thing is intellectually impossible," and Konami went, "whatever dude so lone as it sells."

And boy howdy did it sell. And singlehandedly define the PS2 generation and its capabilities.

Anyway, four stars. Snake and Otacon's handshake is the konami code.