Persona 3 Portable, a little review

P3P has kind of been my obsession of late, it seems like the RPG spree is continuing on, and this time it’s another one that I started back in the day, but never finished. Now the first time I played this game was back in the 2010s on my old PSP, I don’t remember why I didn’t go on, but I did really enjoy the game, it’s with so many games in that part of my life, I just played them for a bit, and then went on to the next one.

This is the little brother to the Persona 3 game for the Playstation 2, which has some extra constraints to it, in addition to the ones ATLUS had from being on the verge of bankrupcy, so it’s a doubly constrained game, and constraints usually leads to very interesting games, and this certainly is one, to save on space most of the daily lifesim elements are now presented as a visual novel, and most of the interaction is rewritten to still make the story make sense, I like this, since it makes it quite a breeze to go from one interesting thing to another, and you don’t walk around endlessly trying to figure out what to do next.

I put the difficulty down to easy, I’m not really that good at games, and I do want to get through this thing, the interest I have for now is mostly on story, and the Tartarus is grindy enough as it is with its 264 floors, so for time and my own sanity, I kind of dislike being blocked from progressing just because I haven’t arbitrarily acheived some skill that somenone just though I should intuit, or just banged against it until I get through it. With that the battles weren’t that much of a challenge, but it was still interesting enough to be fun. And I enjoyed the dungeon crawling, even though it can be a bit monotoneous, with a podcast playing in the background I was going through it, and I really enjoyed fusing together demons to create new ones, see what came out of it, and which things it brought along from the ones going into producing it.

Now the main draw to this was the story and the characters. And I really enjoyed it, there is something special in this game that the characters are starting out being quite cold towards you, and only slowly opening up quite a bit into the game when you’ve been through hell and back together. It’s something that you don’t see too often in game, some real character arcs. I really grew to like these characters, probably because it took effort, and we weren’t all best friends from point 0, it felt more like we earned the trust of the team.

I also really enjoyed the different small stories that get told through the Social-Links, basically small side stories that does affect things a bit in that it makes your fused personas get some extra stats, or when they are finished let you create the strongest one bearing their arcana.

There is a ton of subtext in this game, the arcanas, the personas of each person, and the writing being influenced from greek tragedies. It really all hangs together great, and there are some gut-punches along the way. Because of the length and the good writing, the story twists and turns, and the different feelings that they want to get across does hit, and things feel earned when something happens.

This was a really fun dungeon crawler with interesting systems glued together with well written dialogue and fun side-stories filled with room for interpretation. While I’m not really fond of interpretation and “literary” stuff it’s fun to see that it’s there for the people that like that stuff. It was a fun ride, with fun set-pieces, and a story that made me laugh, and get on the verge of tears. It’s a game that I really enjoyed.