My love affair with the Persona series began 10 years ago when I randomly picked up Persona 4 Golden for the PS Vita. I fell in love with the story, music, art and Teddie – the game is a masterpiece.
I’ve just finished playing through Persona 5 Royal, and while I love the game, it didn’t quite hit the same as P4G. It was a grand and colourful adventure, but it was missing the darker visuals I loved from 4. When I heard P3P was coming to modern consoles, I knew I had to see where all the hype came from.
While it’s strange to me that they elected to port Persona 3 Portable instead of Persona 3 FES – the enhanced version of the game, it’s still great to be able to finally play a game that helped to solidify the JRPG genre outside of Japan.
Persona 3 Portable
P3P’s story is deep and compelling, guiding the player through a tale of friendship and betrayal. You start by picking your player character, male or female. Depending on whichever you pick, you’ll get different dialogue and romance options, as well as different social links. This is the only game in the Persona franchise that gives you the option to choose your player character. I wanted to experience the game as close to the original as possible (at least on my first playthrough) so I went with the male character option.
After choosing your character, you begin your life as a Japanese high school student. Your school is a huge building on a man-made island, and while everyone seems friendly enough, something is a little bit off. Students around the school have been getting something called ‘Apathy Syndrome’, causing them to become apathetic to the point of collapse and being unable to care for themselves. In addition, you find out that every night at midnight, the citizens turn into coffins and a giant tower called Tartarus appears.
This is known as the Dark Hour. Because you’re awake during the dark hour, it’s determined that you have ‘the potential’ and you’re recruited by the Specialised Extracurricular Execution Squad (SEES) to go to Tartarus each night and fight the Shadows.
Tartarus is broken up into a series of ‘blocks’, each consisting of several random, maze-like floors, full of Shadows and loot, culminating in an area boss. The primary objective of the SEES is to climb to the top of Tartarus, making your way through the floors and bosses, with a metaphorical break after each boss where you return to the visual novel style of gameplay during the day.
Tartarus is the only portion of the game where you control your character to run around and encounter foes as P3P uses the battle advantage system. If you attack a Shadow that hasn’t yet seen you, you’ll gain the advantage. It works the other way too, Shadows that attack you before you try to hit them give you a disadvantage. If you attack the Shadow when they’ve seen you, it’s neutral.
In battle, you’re able to control your allies’ actions as well as your own (though this isn’t the default option and you’ll need to turn it on), which makes battles both easier and faster. The options for battle are: attack, defend, run away and use your Persona. Your team members only have one Persona, but the player character can have up to 12 at any time. Now the interesting thing about using Persona abilities in P3P is that each time you use them, you see a cutscene where the selected character shoots themselves… in the head.
At first, it’s a little confronting, but you become accustomed to it because it happens every time you use your Persona. The lore behind this is that to be able to evoke a Persona, the user needs to feel like they’re in danger, so they have fake guns to recreate the fight or flight response.
The battles are turn-based and there’s an option to speed them up, but this involves having characters just ‘attack’ the enemy until they’re defeated. It is useful when traipsing through floors that you’ve either explored previously or don’t have any bosses in them. As with many JRPGs, the battles do become repetitive, and it does become tedious navigating through the shabby and dilapidated floors of Tartarus after a while. This is where daytime comes in to break up the monotony of the Dark Hour.
During the day, P3P plays like a visual novel. You don’t get to control your character directly but are instead presented with a moveable circle that you can use to interact with doors and other static characters on the screen. While this isn’t ideal, it does make for a more direct playthrough without having to backtrack through the school halls constantly.
You spend your days going to classes, participating in after-school clubs, going to your part-time job and hanging out with your friends among other things. These activities are needed to increase your character stats – Charm, Academics and Courage – which in turn provide access to more activities and social links.
Social links are the measure of your relationship with the characters you will encounter on Tatsumi Port Island. Spending time with them during the day will increase your social link level, which can lead to helpful bonuses like discounts at stores, or opportunistic attacks during combat. More importantly, each social link represents an engaging side story featuring some of the most memorable, often hilarious or heart-wrenching, moments of P3P.
As a fan of P4G and P5R, I was excited to dive into an instalment that I had previously overlooked. What I found was an absolute gem of the PS2 RPG era.
Ultimately, the story of P3P is where the game shines. Full of meaningful relationships and engaging twists and turns, the jump to a visual novel style has done nothing to water down this masterfully told tale. The combat has aged, especially compared to more fluid modern RPGs, but ultimately this is a port of a retro game from a portable console, so it feels unfair to judge it too harshly in that regard. If like me, you’re a fan of the Persona series but haven’t had the opportunity to play the third instalment before, I’d highly recommend P3P as a darker and grittier take on the franchise.
Persona 3 Portable was reviewed on Xbox Series X using a digital code provided by the publisher.
