Persona 3 Thoughts

Persona 3

Stuff I liked:

The game uses the first 13 major arcana of the tarot deck as sort of a “central pillar” for the game. Previously only used as a sort of class system for demons, in this game you fight a boss that represents one of these cards each month. They proceed in order until you reach the final boss, the “death” arcana. The same concept is used for the nyx phase, where each phase replicates that card’s fight. The Arcana is the memes by which all is revealed...

The Junpei and Chidori storyline. Junpei is this weird character that tries so hard to be unlikable, and they somehow found this crazy chick who is a perfect match for him. The more time Junpei spends with her brings out her confusion to follow takaya’s orders and her fear of attachment due to her imminent death. Chidori’s fight is sick and she has some cool animations, I wish it was balanced a bit better and lasted longer than 2 turns. This was probably my favorite part of the game.

The full moon operations and how the early ones worked as mini dungeons. Exploring these locations developed the world around you a ton, and they were the perfect thing to break up the monotony of the game.

I liked Tartarus as a concept. It’s a single tower that you devote your entire playthrough of the game to climb. There’s this sense of mystery, and it makes the player ask things like “What is this place?”, “What am I going to find at the top?”. When you finally climb all 264 floors it’s this immensely satisfying experience. I wish the game took a moment to focus on that accomplishment, but it was a little distracted by the Strega lore and then the Nyx fight. Maybe have a view of the entire city from the top of Tartarus and have the team discuss all the hardships they went through to get there.

The epilogue for all your finished social links. They were simple but they added enough to flesh out characters like Saori or Akinari with another perspective.

Teleporters own. I love the ability to jump in and out of Tartarus to save whenever I want. Persona 4 had a major issue with being able to save and what turned me off from finishing it was repeatedly losing progress to deaths. I was pleasantly surprised to find that this was never an issue in the predecessor.

The game’s theme about the acceptance of death, and how the characters develop that theme. This is a pretty difficult thing to talk about, and most games I’ve played have shied away from it, so props for the ambition Atlus.

The music is pretty cool. I’m a fan of the quirkiness of Japanese hip hop and they did a good job of blending it with the upbeat jpop that’s become signature for the series. Big fan of the girl route exclusive tracks “Time” and “A Way of Life”, also the somber music that plays during January like “Living with Determination -Iwatodai Dorm Arrange-” and “Memories of the City”.

All the stuff that happens on the final day (1/31). I liked the idea of being locked into Tartarus and forced to climb to the top even if you’re not ready. Also the fight with the Strega members to finish up their story, the top of the tower with the Nyx fight, the Majora’s Mask moon and the burn my bread fight. Everything makes you feel badass.

It’s pretty ballsy to give you Shinjiro as a party member when he dies a month later.

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Rather than list out complaints I had with the game, I decided I would make a list of things I would change if I was in charge of making a romhack or something. I’m going to try and focus on specific changes that are constructive because they’re more meaningful than saying “just make the game better lol”

Stuff I would have changed:

Add volume sliders in the options for voice/bgm/sfx

Why: The music and voice acting were too quiet, but battle sound effects like thunder reign and all out attacks were very loud. I could never find a balance and my ears just had to suffer.

On nights of the full moon, have the special boss fights and areas inside Tartarus. They would be located at the top of that month’s block, and the player wouldn’t be able to leave until they defeat the boss.

Why: The entire point of the game is to climb to the top of Tartarus, but every month you have to go fuck off somewhere else and fight the cool boss there, which feels dumb. Having the cool dungeon areas would make Tartarus more memorable and you could explore how this giant tower is a crazy supernatural structure thats miles above the ground, rather than a pile of hallways with stairs. Keeping the boss fight in Tartarus would also allow players to make more personas and try different things out if their current setup wasn’t a good match for the boss. Having it at the top of the block would prevent players from falling behind, and help pace the game better.

Buff the full moon bosses, nerf the tartarus minibosses

The barrier floors at the end of each month should have a large teleporter

Add the option to save at each teleporter

Why: This way you can save without having to reload the floor, it keeps you in the action and it just makes sense

Improve social link availability. A start would be to allow social links to progress on days off of school.

Why: There are very long stretches of the game (summer and winter break) where you have nothing to do because half of your social links are only available after school. The game throws you Mitsuru and Aigis at the same time, and then you can’t do them for more than a month because of finals week into winter break, so you’re left scrambling to finish both in the second half of january. This kind of scheduling left me feeling frustrated.

Kill the social links with your party members and incorporate their links into the main story

Why: The social links feel pretty low effort across the board but it’s jarring to see all these great character interactions happen with the main plot but only improve links with your teammates when they talk about how shitty their parents are to a person who has no parents.
It also gets rid of the problem where as a developer you can’t be sure if a player has completed a social link or not, so by making them automatic you can develop them consistently across every playthrough.

Less floors of tartarus

Why: It doesn’t matter how fun you make something, doing the same thing 255 times will make it not fun. I think that cutting down on the floors would decrease the repetition, and from there work could be done to make the 100 floors more memorable and engaging.

Search by result in the persona fusing menu

Integrate compendium into the fusing menu

Scrap weapon upgrades

Why: They just never felt right. I didn’t like having to spend a persona on them, and getting nihil weapons felt dumb. The game also never explained that you could recraft them multiple times so I didn’t use them past the first one.

Make the golden shadows give exp instead of nihil weapons, also prevent them from disappearing into a wall.

Why: They are incredibly challenging to kill unless you get lucky, and after a point all they do is give you money. Experience is really what the player wants.

Get rid of the magic teacher, maybe transfer some of the cool tarot lore into someone like Igor

Why: Everything he said was a chore to read. I ended up just skipping through his text by the end of the game.

Have the MC die when they use the great seal.

Why: Anime was a mistake.

Have experience distribute evenly between every party member

Why: The game’s mechanics encourage you to solo the entire game with MC because you get 4x the experience, and all your teammates skillsets are useless to the point where they become buff bots. There’s also NINE party members, leaving you to pick and choose your favorites because you don’t want to waste experience on someone like Ken.

Change Nyx’s appearance for each phase of his boss fight.

Why: It would reinforce the tarot concept and make his fight more meaningful.

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Random thoughts on playing the PSP version.

This version sucks don’t play it lmao.

I was excited to have different social links with girl route, but 90% of the game is exactly the same, with a few lines changed to make it not weird. The only new content is really the exclusive social links and a better player model. you could just look up the social links on youtube instead.

I’m still salty Maiko died why on earth is that a thing.

Direct control is in every way better but your party is useless in this game so don’t let that stop you from playing FES.

So many of the cutscenes are gutted into low effort vn textboxes. If they had the ability to add more cg cut ins or fmvs it could have been doable, but as it is now it just made most of the game feel lame.

The hybrid P3/P4 battle system is really jank. I like parts of it (all out from multi target spells) but stuff like healing at the clock, or knockdown meaning nothing is really weird.

Changes in particular I liked:

Not having to side with Junpei during his outbursts.

Beach scene is dead.

Some of the girl social links (saori, rio, dog, shinjiro) are cool. A lot of them are very rough on scheduling (shinjiro, ryoji in particular) and I wish I didn’t have to stress as much.

Pink hud is cute.

A lot of people will disagree but I really like the low resolution look. P3’s models were pretty simple in the first place so you don’t lose much detail. I just wish that they could have made more of the cutscenes in 3D.

The overworld works a lot better as 2D. Even just adding the quick travel menu to FES would be a godsend. It kinda reminds me of P1/P2 which is cool.

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Random final thoughts:

There are games that are fun to play, and I think I need to accept that P3 is not one of those games. Instead it’s a game that’s so awful it’s fun to exploit how awful it is.

The games take too long to set up its story and that hurts it in the long run. Think of it like an elevator pitch:

P5: “A bunch of highschoolers join the phantom thieves in order to steal the hearts of a number of corrupt adults in a society that has become complacent.”

P4: “A bunch of highschoolers try to uncover the truth surrounding a mysterious serial killer targeting people who show up on the news.”

P3: “Well there’s this 25th hour of the day that most people can’t see, But you and your friends are special so you can see it. Theres these evil things called shadows that make people depressed, and you fight them by shooting yourself with a fake gun. You fight 12 of these shadows because some guy told you it would stop making people depressed but it actually causes the end of the world instead.”

A lot of people are convinced that this game’s plot is better than P4’s but after playing this game I’m not convinced it even had a plot. Things just happen and they don’t mean anything and then you fight nyx and then anime.

The game falls off hard after the first 4 months. Full moons stop having dungeons, and all these cool boss fights just happen in lame places like in the street or in front of the door to tartarus. There’s a big drought of social links you can do, and Tartarus starts being a total grind. This is where I took a break in my playthrough and only started up again after watching jersey beat the game.

While I enjoyed the focus on the tarot cards, I was disappointed that it only amounted to surface interpretations. If you made a game based around that and actually tried it would be sick.

On the dual playthrough experience:

It was nice seeing all the actual cutscenes for stuff like the chidori sections or the ikutsuki reveal. What helped my finish this game was watching other people play it, and seeing how they were doing things and succeeding. Also watching Jersey and Darkeye play the final part of the game was incredibly motivating.