persona 3 portable is a celebration of persona 4, and i mean that in a highly negative way that would likely surprise you. this game does not play like persona 3. it plays like a persona 4 fanmod. persona 3 portable is a version of persona 3 that sheds all identity in favor of appealing to the (at the time) newfound popularity of persona 4. even if i liked persona 4, there would be no getting around the fact that this is the least essential way to play persona 3. i could not recommend against playing this game harder, especially if you have not played persona 3 to begin with.

as is tradition with my persona reviews, i do need to throw up a disclaimer and state the following: i love persona 3 FES, it is one of my favorite games of all time. i am reviewing this game purely as "what does it add to the base persona 3 experience and how does it modify that, for better or worse". in essence, i am not reviewing P3, i am specifically reviewing the new content in portable because it is easier to delineate the two in my brain.

so, with that said, i also have to state upfront that i came into this game wildly biased against it. for that, i blame years of hearing how portable was the "best" way to play persona 3 due to having "more content" (as we all know, more is always better) and direct control as an option. i think we can all be adults here and now admit to ourselves that maybe the playstation portable was not the most graphically advanced system nor would it ever be preferable to playing on a PS2. but how does the PSN version hold up? well, having actually physically played the PSP version, it's a marked improvement in two areas. one, there's no UMD to screech like nails on a chalkboard if you're playing on PSN. second, the load times are quite literally 3-4x quicker. outside of that? they're the same game. glad we cleared this up.

it's hard not to have an axe to grind with this game because it just butchers so much of persona 3's presentation, aesthetic, style, and feel. it may sound like i just described some relatively intangible feelings-based terms, but work with me. so much of the UI is changed to match 4's, fast travel is now given a dedicated button like in 4, you can now directly equip party members whenever instead of having to speak with them, etc. these sound like nitpicks, and it's because they are. these aren't things that inherently destroy the spirit of persona 3 to me. what does is the sad fact that portable can't host any of the FMVs (besides openings) that the game desperately needs. we're robbed of FMVs of critical moments, like shinjiro's death FMV that swirls in on a ken who becomes overwhelmed with the reality of losing all meaning in his life. i think maybe the most egregious of all of these is the moonlight bridge showdown between aigis and ryoji, which near-perfectly juggled exposition explaining the events of aigis sealing death inside the protagonist, but also showing aigis' full-fledged attempt and subsequent failure to kill ryoji. sure, you could have a text log saying this, but ryoji effortlessly halts aigis after stern warnings not to test his power in a way that doesn't translate nearly as effectively or persuasively as actually seeing it does.

it's the basic "show, don't tell" rule. you rob that moment of all its power when you have to have a text box explain what happens instead of elegantly demonstrating it. so many of these moments' subtleties are lost. even without the FMVs, the lack of cutscenes with player models hurts so hard. remember when chidori dies and the last thing she does is stroke junpei's face, then her hand slowly falls down to indicate her passing? not in portable! hell, even the part where akihiko is mourning shinjiro and starts slamming his fist on the memorial to show his frustration? it's so much more effective to see it than to read "akihiko slams his fist out of frustration." it's insulting and i hate knowing that a non-insignificant portion of players will be exposed to this version as their primary exposure to persona 3. you lose the nuance when you water down the presentation this bad, and it's truly horrid to turn P3 into nothing more than a visual novel with occasional combat.

speaking of combat, the badness doesn't stop there! is it still a hot take, nearly a decade and change later, to tell you all that the lack of controlling your party members in P3 was the point? yes, i'll be the first to admit that sometimes it could be frustrating to have yukari set to heal/support and see her never use charmdi or use diarama on someone instead of mediarama on everyone. the lack of specificity with buffing/debuffing for aigis and akihiko respectively could also be frustrating. sure, i acknowledge and agree with this. but, by and large, this system created an identity for persona 3 that was wholly unique to it and elevated the gameplay to integrate with the story. these characters are real people who have their own ideas and you can only loosely guide them rather than control them like chess pieces. yes, i am really going to rail this hard against direct control. sure, its inclusion is optional, but when the game all but begs you to use it, you essentially invalidate the original design ethos of persona 3.

"just don't use it then" okay, but the game has been persona 4-ified such that using AI suggestion is now extremely risky. remember how persona 3 showed you the turn order and then persona 4 reduced it to "you only can see who's next"? guess what portable does! i can't adequately do any planning on my turn if i don't know when mitsuru is getting her turn and thus if i need to be the one doing x y or z. more importantly, this game very sloppily copy/pastes persona 4 mechanics into persona 3 that just do not work. this is very obviously a game that was not designed with dizzy as a mechanic, so it often breaks the game wide open to be able to hit an enemy for downed damage more than once per downing. also, being able to use any item with your party members (sans fusion spells) utterly assfucks so many of the boss fights. i literally cannot recall how many fights i invalidated by just spamming something like mazio gems on bosses weak to zio. square peg, square hole, sure, but persona 3 originally had failsafes around this by making it harder to use these dominant strategies and balancing the game around the player's limitations.

the persona 4 emulation doesn't stop there though. we now also have SP management being added in probably the most lazy way possible. now SP doesn't recover automatically on the first floor of tartarus but instead you have to recover it. . . by paying a meager amount of money, just like in persona 4. and while SP management was still easily broken in half in many ways, at least you could say that 4 had the advantage of the fox's SP recovery having somewhat steep pricing in early game. here, i never once had to sweat paying for SP recovery, and the removal of becoming tired the night of exploration means you are essentially given the greenlight to ignore that gameplay mechanic entirely and just run through entire blocks in one night. by trying to make persona 3 more like persona 4, you not only lose the very specific niche persona 3 had that captivated its audience, but you also just get a very braindead JRPG that's extremely easy to bruteforce. it's just so disappointing that on every level, portable seems embarrassed of the game it's supposed to be a remake of.

i think the last of the big points worth touching on in portable is the addition of playing as a girl. i don't know a gentle way to ease into this idea so i'm just going to come out and say it: this mode feels like it's not designed for girls, but instead for boys who want to play as a girl. please forgive the clumsy wording, but work with me. when you play as the female protagonist, it feels as though the game reminds you every 3-5 minutes that, hey, you're a girl! every social link rank up unique to the female playthrough feels explicitly gendered in a way that comes off more as condescending than real to life. were there social links as a boy that came off as "just me and my guy friend"? of course. but they felt organic and true-to-life. i just really can't escape that it feels like atlus knew the majority of its audience would be men and wanted to design the female protagonist around that rather than trying to appeal to another demographic.

i don't necessarily hate the female-specific social links, but even if you get out of the voyeuristic nature of them, some of them are just. . . really shittily written. i was actually kind of on-board with rio as a character in her "i'm pushing people away by doggedly pursuing my goals and need to learn how to socialize better" problem, but then that gets sidetracked to introduce kenji, who is now a "speak when spoken to" misogynist that rio inexplicably is enamored with, which just fucked me off so hard. and saori is. . . just a weird social link on several levels. her whole arc is learning not to be a doormat, but the resolution is her doing one assertive thing and then disappearing forever. also, the stuff about her uncle potentially sexually assaulting her and then killing himself quite honestly comes out of left field entirely and is frankly fucking bizarre to drop at the end of the link.

my most contentious take about the persona series is that party member social links are the worst thing to happen to the narratives of these games. persona 3 mostly skirts around this by making the only 3 party member social links be girls your character ends up dating instead of hiding plot-critical character development behind them. hell, that's one of the best parts of persona 3; the character arcs are slow-burned and baked into the plot of persona 3 and not just hidden behind rank 8 of their social link to be addressed maybe twice then never again. portable adds a bunch of party member social links that try to do this, but they largely fail because they either never organically fit into the story (why can junpei learn that women are people too in fucking january after his arc's been completed?) or are relatively unnecessary (if you don't date akihiko, his social link is such a nothingburger).

and i don't want to be entirely negative, because i think the social links with shinjiro and ken do give a lot more insight into these characters in a meaningful way (ignore the fact that atlus was like "what if we let you romance an 11 year old ken amada", which is maybe the most nauseating thing in the series). hell, even koromaru's social link managed to surprise me in a positive way. i don't hate what's on paper here, i just think the answer wasn't "give these characters social links", but instead to do something like FES did with the bonus recording footage events (some of which was terrible, dgmw) and find a way to let the player see these moments in a truncated fashion.

more is not more. less is more. i don't need to see ken defend me from bullies who call me a hag (as 🤪 as that moment was). to beat a dead horse, it's taking the persona 4 method on a problem with a persona 3 answer. i'm trying to be my most fair and even-handed here, but i don't like that the female protagonist route is a loose attempt to add minor character details to existing characters instead of creating new compelling ones to be interested in. rio and saori fall completely flat compared to literally any of the male protagonist's social link options because they're dull, lifeless, and have poorly told stories. ken and shinjiro benefit from being characters i already liked and wanted to know more about. in many ways, i feel myself being way too demanding with portable, and, in large part, maybe this is too grand an expectation. but why even bother with making a female protagonist then? why even bother making portable if you're going to half-ass it so fucking hard?

portable is the least essential way to experience persona 3. i opened with this statement, and, hopefully, you can see why it's something i will assert to my dying breath. the visual novel presentation is subpar for a story that can and has been told in a grander scale. the gameplay is a downgrade that apes persona 4 without having the design intricacies to accommodate its already loosey-goosey mechanics. and the writing of the portable specific stuff is just lackluster. i don't think it's that unreasonable to say that persona 3 deserved a better port/remake than this. it's a special game to not only myself but to thousands of other people. portable feels downright insulting by comparison. i get that this was made to make a quick buck and profit off of the popularity of persona 4, but jesus.

basically, the game embodies this to me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoO_q4uFH2o