After rereading my original review, I realized that it was more of a rant than a proper one. It was written in an hour after some Persona 3 retard tried to start a fight on an imageboard that I frequent about it after I mentioned something about modern fatlus and persona sucking major dick. So here’s my non anger driven review of persona 3.

I hate this game, I wouldn’t say I’m a completely positive person when it comes to writing reviews but I do tend to talk about things I actually like. The only time I’m negative is when something is closely related to my interest. That interest being Megaten. I like classic Persona, I like pretty much every SMT before SMT 4, which I like as well. Saying that I do like these things I have to interact with either games within the same series that I dislike heavily or straight up hate. Persona 3 is one of these games. I can usually ignore things I dislike but it gets to a point where I can’t because of how much it’s in my face. At that point I have to say something, this review is that something.

To run down my issues one by one I’m going to start with the gameplay. Most people criticized the AI team control, so much so that in both remakes they changed it. I personally think it works fine. Your teammates do exactly what you tell them to do, if they can’t complete the action they don’t do anything at all. It’s your fault if they don’t do what you want them to. The commands are very specific and concise, the only way I think you can come to the conclusion that it doesn’t work is if you only played the beginning of the game where you are limited in commands or you’re bad at rpgs. With how most Persona fans act, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the case.

My problem with the combat is how boring and samey it gets really early in the game. The battle system is called the ‘Once More’. You gain an extra turn when you knock down the enemy. It’s pretty much a simplified version of the ‘Press turn’ system that Shin Megami Tensei games mostly use. The reason why it gets really boring unlike press turn is that you’re limited in how you exploit the enemies. You either hit their weakness or get a crit. One of those is completely rng based, the other is lowkey rng too because you have to guess what the weakness is. But once you do that there’s no strategy left other than hitting the enemy with it. You don’t even have to memorize it because the game does that for you.

It doesn’t help that the dungeon you’ll be engaging in combat in is equally as boring. The dungeon is named Tartarus. Tartarus is an AI generated mess with no structure nor any aesthetic appeal. For the entire game outside of major bosses you are stuck inside this ugly lame excuse of a dungeon, which is about 50 hours of the game.

Speaking of bosses, they are also bad. Most of them are complete damage sponges with no strategy other than praying to god that they don’t one shot you. Actually most of the enemies are like this. Normal encounters have chances to one shot you because a coin flip didn’t land in your favor. I’m not talking about Hama or Mundo skills, they’re bullshit in their own right but I’m talking about normal moves one shotting you. This difficulty isn’t fun, this isn’t the hard to overcome but fair combat you get in other games within the series. It’s absolute bullshit.

The sound design and music choices don’t alleviate the frustration caused in the combat. Because they’re annoying too. The sound effects when you hit an enemy or scrolling through menus have this sharp sound to it that isn’t that easy on the ears. This spills into outside of combat into the social sim aspect. The sounds are really repetitive and get annoying really quickly, not dissimilar to the music.

This has the worst soundtrack in the entirety of Megaten, maybe just maybe except Ronde. I will mostly contribute the soundtrack being bad to Lotus Juice and Meguro trying to do this weird fusion between Rap, Jazz, and Rock. Which does not blend well nor is pleasant on the ears. The rap from Lotus Juice makes no sense lyrics wise. Which if you have ok flow you can probably get away with it, keyword if because he doesn’t.

The instrumental side of things are mostly Meguro’s fault. Around this time and after he does these weird experimental stuff with his music. They mostly sound bad. He starts messing with the same keyboard and guitar in his music supposedly making the ‘acid jazz’ sound that you’ll find in later works. I put it in quotations because it isn’t really acid jazz but I can’t expect people who only listen to Vgm to know that.

The music is really repetitive due to the game using the same 5 tracks the entire time. I got very tired of it very quickly. The only tracks I do like are Memories of the City, Shadow, and Blind Alley.

The voice acting is objectively bad but I have a history of liking shitty dubs, and this isn’t an exception. The Va’s have talent, outside of this game they have really good work that they’ve done but this isn’t a game where you can see that. It’s very stiff and flat sounding, no emotion behind it. I’ll talk about this more later but it makes scenes that are supposed to be heavy, unserious and comedic.

I think the art direction is fine. It matches the tone that the game attempts to go for. Out of all of the modern Persona it's not my favorite . Sometimes the character's faces look wonky and ugly. I also think that demon designs that are original to this game aren’t very good and get reused a lot. The graphics are meh. I do prefer Nocturnes look more and feel like they could've gone with full models in this game like it. I think some of the scenes like the crucifixion scene with Ikutsuki look a bit goofy with the smaller proportioned models.

WARNING FROM HERE ON OUT IT WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS. I DON'T RECOMMEND IT BUT IF YOU WANT TO PLAY THE GAME PLEASE LEAVE NOW

If you're still reading now I guess you've already played or don't care for spoilers. Either way here's an extremely basic run down of the plot. You play as a High Schooler named Makoto Yuki that moves back to his hometown of Tatsumi Port Island. You suddenly get roped into a group called S.E.E.S, (what a dumb fucking name) after finding out you have the potentional. This group pretty much exists to fight shadows and find out they're origin during the dark hour, an extra 25th hour of the day. Most people aren't conscious during this time, turning into coffins. The people who are though are ones with the potential, which is pretty much just the ability to awaken to your persona . It turns out you're special and can summon more than one persona. With your powers you go through this mysterious Tower called 'Tartarus' in which you and other members of S.E.E.S explore to hopefully find out the truth about the Dark Hour

At first glance this seems like a pretty ok set up, not anything crazy but good enough. All this information is given to the player within the first hour of the game. Actually it’s given multiple times within that first hour, and then a couple more times in case you missed it, then one more time for good measure.

This game loves repeating itself 500x over to make sure you got it. It feels like it’s constantly insulting the player’s intelligence when they do it. This also lends to the problem of the dialogue feeling stiff and awkward. The game relaying most of its information through blatant expositions dumps doesn’t help either.

Exposition dumps on their own aren’t a crime, they can be done well and I have seen it done well. The way Persona 3 does it is usually with characters giving others information that those people should and do already know. Why is Ikutsuki explaining the dark hour to characters that already know the information? It serves nobody but the player, even then not really because back to my point where they repeat everything multiple times over.

The dialogue outside of the exposition dumps is still stiff and awkward there too. Maybe it’s a weird translation but as I’m not a JOP I’m not sure. A lot of stuff that’s supposed to be emotional comes off as comedic because of how the dialogue just sounds weird. It’s bad in this game because it tries to go for a darker and more emotional tone that is directly hindered by the dialogue.

The story is also badly paced. The game functions on a calendar system because of the forced social sim mechanic that I also have a problem with. You barely get any plot until the end of the month where one of the moon bosses shows up. Maybe you’ll get a mid month cutscene that doesn’t give you much information.

The things the devs intended you to do during the large amount of downtime is either grind out Tarturus or participate in the poorly disguised dating sim, Social Links. I have no problem with dating sims at all, the little ones we do have translated over here I fully enjoy. The difference between those and this is that they’re good.

In Social Links they’re supposed to give backstory to characters and become an accent to their development in the main story or introduce you to side characters. The side characters for the most part are fine, there’s some weird ass dialogue with the elementary schooler and oh right THE PEDO TEACHER SAYING SHE WANTS TO GROOM YOU. But other than that I’d argue they fit the themes of the game better than anyone in the main cast.

The Social Links with the main girls are bad. I specifically say girls because some wise guy at Atlus thought “hmmmmmm our main male characters are flat as rocks, lets just do the female characters. No ones here for the dudes anyway”. The Social links don’t add much to these already poorly written female characters other than wish fulfillment for the player.

It’s even worse because they incorporate the ability to break the bonds. Which on paper is pretty standard dating sim stuff, but then you realize you can’t reject any of the girls in the game unlike most dating sims. So if you want the buff or see all those 10 ranked social links on your screen you have to cheat. Which wouldn’t be a big deal if they didn’t make you sit through every single cringe cheating dialogue for each character when you do.

If you took out the Social Links you wouldn’t miss anything to the characters that couldn’t be added into the main plot. I mean look at the main characters that don’t have Social Links, they’re still shit characters!! Except maybe Junpei, they did alright with his story. The exposition dump rears its ugly head once again with the character's development.

They completely spell out their entire motivations, goals, everything for you the player. I don’t end up feeling any type of emotion towards the characters because why should I? The characters are flat and unrealistic, with basic character motivations.

Akihiko is a perfect example, his character has him dealing with him wanting to get stronger and stronger to make sure he can protect the people he loves. He gets like this because he couldn't save his sister when he was younger and "weak". So he constantly trains to make sure he’s strong enough. How do they show us his backstory you may ask, mostly through really awkward exposition dumping with Shinji. He tries to come to peace with it but his boyfri- I meant bestie, Shinji ends up dying and Akihiko ends up beating himself up again for not being stronger.

His story didn't elicit anything from me but laughter because of how I didn't really care and how dumb they were. Supposably Akihiko moves on from this but I don't see it happen. The game has never heard of show don't tell. I'm told that the characters have changed and are at peace. But barely anything in the game actually shows me any proof that that's the case other than the characters saying that they did. That's why the character arcs mostly all end in an extremely unsatisfactory and underdeveloped way for me.

They don’t know how to write character relationships either. Maybe they got used to writing for main character-kun, but wow the interactions are as stiff as the rest of the game. They have no chemistry with each other, even the characters that are supposed to be best friends feel awkward around each other.

Maybe Evangelion popped on the TV when the writers realized they didn’t have a proper ending to the story. I say this because the ending is just an evangelion bootleg. In the last month of the game a dude named Ryuji pops up out of nowhere. He reveals the truth about the dark hour and Nyx to the group then disappears… kinda like some white haired dude that had weird tension with the mc….

After this is revealed the game seems like it’s gonna finally get good, with the best song in the game kicking in and the tone of the game actually fitting what they’re going for. Too bad the devs couldn’t live up to the hype they set and absolutely fumbled the final boss with the lead up to it, oops. Nyx is the same as every other boss in the game with the bullshit turned up to 500%, damage sponge waste of time and all. You’d think that after everything that happens they’d at least try and make you feel something about THE MAIN CHARACTER DYING. Couldn’t even do that.

This game sucks and I hate it. I am a proud (pre-persona 5)Megaten Elitist and will continue to be for the rest of my life.