Definitely the worst way to play Persona 3. The only reason I can ever recommend playing this over FES or Reload is to play the FemC route which isn't in the other versions. The story and characters are still very good because for the most part it's just a downgraded version of Persona 3, but a lot of emotional moments lose their impact due to the presentation of the game being more limited. All of the animated cutscenes from the original that were used to properly convey dramatic moments are gone and replaced with screenshots of the cutscenes with dialogue over them, or just replaced with the same visual novel style events that happen throughout the whole game. All 3D overworld movement is gone and you now just move a cursor around the screen and click on characters and locations you want. This removes a lot of the immersion from the game and feels very boring. The combat on the other hand is an improvement from FES in my opinion. One of the reasons I didn't enjoy FES from what I played was the combat where you couldn't control your party members, and the entire tired system. In Portable you now have full control of your party and the tired system is much less annoying which makes Tartarus a lot less tedious to go through. Just like the original Persona 3 and FES however, a lot of the time in the game feels very empty. You'll end up going weeks in the game with nothing really interesting happening which got me very burnt out on the game for a while. Overall P3P is still a good game because it has Persona 3 as a base, but its presentation and downgrades make it the worst way to experience Persona 3 in my opinion.