I know it’s been a while since I last posted ANYTHING, but it’s been a while since I last put any substantial amount of time into gaming.
I had a really long Internet down time due to me sending my laptop away for repair. I’d bought Persona 3 Portable months ago but stopped halfway through. I’m pretty sure it’s because that was around the time I bought Final Fantasy Dissidia and switched my major. In any case, P3P is a worthy game to be sure. I’d played the original Persona 3 on the Playstation and the upgraded and expanded Persona 3 FES, both The Journey and The Answer. As a quick explain, The Journey is the original P3 game whereas The Answer is the direct sequel in which you control the android Aigis, one of your party members from the main game. The Answer is FUCKING HARD. I haven’t finished it myself because of its hardness but one day I will get back to it. In terms of the original P3 game itself, I’ve completed it once with a New Game+ cycle and a Persona Compendium at about 94% completion. However, I didn’t spend much time on side quests.
P3P, however, I have completed twice and am currently on my third playthrough, having steadily worked through most of the side quests both times.
First of all, P3P is different from the original in that you can choose the gender of your Main Character (MC). While this may not seem like a big deal, the Persona franchise is essentially a social simulation game with a dungeon and a compendium of summons known as Persona to use in a turn-based battle system. You can befriend many NPCs in order to establish Social Links (Slinks) all of which correspond to a particular tarot arcana, which is the species or order of the Personae and monsters as well as the franchise theme.
As your friendships level up, your ability to fuse new Personae according to the tarot of your Slink increases. This is extremely important. Normally, you cannot receive or fuse Personae whose level is higher than your own. However, you can fuse two or more of your Personae to create a completely new one - for as long as its base level is the same or lower than your level. Depending on how strong your Slinks are, you achieve bonus EXP points when you fuse Personae of a certain arcana, so your newly fused Personae can level up immediately and be of a much higher level than you yourself.
To sum up quickly, assume that the Star arcana Slink has been maxed out. If you at level 80 fuse your Personae to produce a Persona of the Star arcana, for example Helel or Setanta (both of whom have a base level that is lower than 80 thus enabling their fusion in the first place), your new Persona will receive bonus EXP, for example, 100,000. So immediately after it is fused, your Persona levels up and may possibly achieve level 90 or something. Not only does this make them (and you) stronger, they also learn new and powerful attacks. Therefore, Slinks is crucial to the game.
With all of this in mind, being able to choose the gender of your MC gives a huge diversity of Slinks available. The people you befriend are different depending on this choice. In my opinion, the female path gives you much greater variety and enables you to befriend everyone in your party whereas in the original, you are not able to do this. Furthermore, in the original, you could only forge romantic relationships with friends of the opposite gender. P3P with the female path allows you to be friends or lovers to your discretion. They’ve taken a lot of the improvements from the successor, Persona 4, and applied it to this game, among which - and this is a HUGE improvement - is the ability to directly command all your party members. In the original, you had to rely completely on AI. Thank god for this improvement.
A disappointment in P3P would be the lack of polygonal models you can control outside of the dungeon, but this is the effect of space shortage. In the original, you consistently control your MC and can make him walk and run around the world. Now, the MC is represented by a dot you move around the screen. However, using the SQUARE button, you can directly choose which destination you’d like for as long as it changes the map location. Also, since you aren’t controlling a physical character, shortcuts are possible since you only need to move your cursor across the screen instead of dodging corners and walls. This flaw is not so terrible if you think about the trade-off. In addition to a new game, you also get two bonus dungeons (as opposed to the original’s one).
Now that all the technical stuff is out of the way, what can I say about this game? How on earth have I been able to play through it twice and go on a third time?
The fact that it’s a portable game is a BIG winner. It doesn’t rely on high end graphics and the only time you really need to physically control your character is in the dungeons, where your reflexes actually determine whether you can ambush your enemies. It’s a social simulator at heart and so being able to play the game without plugging it into a TV is a plus. I have played the game non-stop through several days nearly everywhere I could.
I played on Normal mode each time, so there was a certain level of difficulty involved, but having done two playthroughs while retaining my New Game+ cycles, it made it a lot easier to enjoy other portions of the game that didn’t involve grinding (made easier since you can send your team out to level up on their own) or increasing your own personal stats. Even the farming side quests, which usually annoy the crap out of me, became a lot more pleasant because you weren’t doing it in between dying at the hands of enemies meant to level you up.
The first time I ended the game, I shorted out with the Bad Ending so I could quickly re-do some decisions. The second time I ended, it was with the Good Ending, but I didn’t manage to max out all my social links. I actually only managed to finish the last one halfway. My side quests also were only nearly complete. So the third playthrough is a matter of trying for a perfect game. While I’m not usually the kind of gamer who does perfect games, somehow, P3P is a game that is not particularly difficult to enjoy this way. There’s something to be said about the way it handles its characters and the depth in the relationships.
