Review: Persona 3 Portable
Confession: I have a HUGE soft spot for the Persona series. Persona 5 Royal is the game that first got me into JRPGs several years ago, and after putting nearly 150 hours into my first playthrough, I’ve been eager to try games 1-4. Now that Persona 3 Portable and Persona 4 Golden are available on the Switch, I knew I had to get them both so that I can play them wherever I’m at.
Warning: These games are BEEFY. I clocked in at 73 hours on Persona 3 Portable (or P3P), which seems to be a pretty average play length according to HowLongToBeat.com. If you’re looking for a shorter story with just as much depth, check out my review for A Space for the Unbound and see if that suits your fancy! However, if you do have dozens of hours to spare and an appreciation for turn-based mechanics, light social sim elements, and fantastic game soundtracks, then keep reading.
Story: A
Without a doubt, the story was the highlight of this game. Persona 3 Portable follows our teenage protagonist as he enrolls at Gekkoukan High and encounters a phenomenon known as the Dark Hour - an hour after midnight where monsters thrive, and only he and a few others can see and stop them. He joins forces with several fellow students to tackle the shadows (as these monsters are known) that threaten to destroy humanity every full moon. As details emerge about just exactly how these shadows came to be, our protagonist is faced with difficult questions about what it means to be alive, and how best to protect the people in your life worth fighting for.
The cast of main characters, although not perfect, are varied and multi-faceted enough to draw my attention, and I found myself utilizing the social simulation system not out of a sense of obligation or necessity, but because I genuinely wanted to learn more about their background stories. Because this game uses a day-by-day progression model, you are limited on who you can hang out with at specific times. Every interaction is meant to support your character in some way, either by increasing your stats or deepening your emotional bonds (which in turn allows you to fuse more powerful Personas to aid you in combat). It’s up to you to determine the best way to spend your free time, but you always have an adequate number of options.
Even the background characters - those NPCs whose sole job is to stand there and provide some quippy comment - are intriguing in that their little side stories develop over time as well. I was especially fond of the teenage boy and girl classmates whose feelings for one another shift over time in a hilarious manner.
Also: You have a dog as a teammate. And he is absolutely the best boy.
I don’t want to spoil any important story elements about this game, so I’ll leave my thoughts at this: thanks to strong character development and a few heartbreaking - if not necessarily surprising - twists, it’s easy to laud P3P’s story as a well-deserving A.
Combat and Gameplay Mechanics: C
If you hate visual novel-type forms of media, then this game is probably not for you.
Your gameplay differs drastically between two general settings. When you are in the “real” world, the game is set up like a visual novel, meaning that instead of walking around you are subjected to moving a cursor around the screen and clicking on the people and places you wish to interact with. All conversations happen via text boxes appearing on the screen, and there are zero - repeat, ZERO - animated cutscenes throughout this game.
While the lack of player maneuverability in the real world can be frustrating, the one positive I was able to come up with was that this format probably shaved off some time of my overall gameplay, since I could just click on the activities I wanted to interact with rather than having to walk towards them. Still, this kept me from being able to fully immerse myself in the game’s world, and after a game like Persona 5 Royal, where the rich and detailed environments are one of the game’s strongest highlights, this gameplay choice left me wanting a lot more than what I was given.
The combat sequences were generally more enjoyable. If you have never played a Persona game before, combat consists of you and a set of companions - in this case, up to three - utilizing various Personas, or powerful spirits which you call forth through a special device known as an evoker. Each Persona has its own unique elemental traits - for example, some might be weak to Fire attacks, but wield strong Ice attacks. As time passes you are able to fuse more and more of these Personas together in new combinations, creating more powerful ones to further assist you as your enemies grow tougher. While you are able to carry a stock of multiple, ever-changing Personas, your companions each are limited to one throughout the entire game.
Every month you and your stock of Personas face off against a different, ultra-powerful Shadow - the mini-bosses, essentially - and a couple of these fights gave me real trouble and forced me to think critically about who I had in my fighting line-up. In the days between these story-driven showdowns, you often have the option to spend your evenings exploring Tartarus, a multi-leveled dungeon where you can level up yourself and your teammates by defeating shadows and collecting treasure. Since these are the only moments in the game where your character can move freely on screen, you would think these sessions would be more enjoyable. However, the lack of design variety in Tartarus and the repetitive nature of (spoiler) over 200 floors of shadows gets very old, very quickly.
Vibes: B
There’s a great amount of controversy online over which version of Persona 3 is better, Portable (the version I played) or FES (the version released over a decade ago on Playstation 2, featuring an additional epilogue). I would have loved to experience that epilogue chapter, but I don’t necessarily regret playing this version, as 1) it was the only version easily accessible, and 2) despite the gameplay mechanic drawbacks, the story is still phenomenal. In addition, you have the option of playing as a female protagonist in P3P as well, which offers different music soundtracks and story beats.
One con of the Switch version of this game is that the sound quality was severely weakened in handheld mode vs. docked mode. This hurts mainly due to the phenomenal music, from the brilliant opening number to the soft, nostalgic tunes that carry you through the last portion of the game. There’s a reason that Persona music is so widely praised - every single track in this game was a bop.
I also managed to finish this game on March 5th. If you’ve played Persona 3 before, you might understand that this feels like a sort of fate. Overall, this gameplay variety, combined with a top-tier soundtrack and an ending that brought me to tears, bring the general vibes up to a solid B.
Overall Rating: B
If you’ve never played a Persona game before, I would urge you to pick up Persona 4 Golden or Persona 5 Royal before you try this one, as they are widely lauded as the general fan favorites of the series. However, if you’re a fan of strategic turn-based battle systems, don’t mind visual novel games, and have 70-80 hours to kill, then there’s nothing holding you back from purchasing this game and attacking shadows to your heart’s content!
