While an enjoyable experience overall, complete with the ridiculously stylish aesthetic bells and whistles you'd expect from a recent Persona game, I found myself comparing this entry unfavourably to Persona 5. In particular, the social links fell quite flat for me. I think there were two reasons for this: the first is that there was no connection between the social links and the Tartarus elements of the game. Persona 5 handled this a lot better by forcing you to deal with a problem in Mementos to progress the social link in the real world, which helped unite the life sim/combat game structures. Secondly, the social links had no plot relevance to your journey through Tartarus. P3R tries to rectify this by claiming it's to do with the power of friendship, but that just feels a bit lazy. In Persona 5, each social link could benefit your quest, no matter how tangential their circumstances were: yes, it's hard to believe that befriending a shogi champion would help you defeat shadows, but at least Persona 5 tried to bridge the gap, whereas Persona 3 Reload doesn't.
Additionally, it was really jarring that so many more social links were available in the afternoon/daytime compared to evenings. And also, why did none of my school friends want to hang out when school wasn't on? Very weird.
I totally get that these are all potentially teething issues, given that the original Persona 3 was the first game in the franchise to really develop the game's broader structure, but this revamped version presented a great opportunity to really refine these issues and make the gameplay feel more cohesive than it currently is. However, having said all this, the game is still very enjoyable and it was a treat to go through another Prrsona experience. Very much looking forward to what Atlus has in store for us next!