Gamespot score:8.5(Great)
my score:9.2
(+)Pros:-Same great persona 3 story,-female main character adds a new perspective to the story and provides something new for those who have played the game before,-new quick traveling system is easy to adapt to and doesnt take too much experience away from the game,-lots of new features including new demons and social links,-controlling of party members is definetely a plus,-new soundtrack is awesome for the female MC.
(-)Cons:-Dungeon crawling is a little repititive.
Gameplay time:50 hours+
If you are familiar with the original story of persona 3, then nothing will suprise you. Once again, you play as a regular high school student with deceased parents, and are transfered to the gekkoukan high school dorm to live. Along the way, you discover a hidden power within you and another world that exists. Enter the dark hour, an hour that occurs every night at 12am. During the dark hour, regular humans transmogrify into coffins, and those unlucky enough not to be are preyed upon by shadows, monsters that dwell within the dark hour. The dark hour isnt recorded in the clock, and regular people are unaware of it. Of course, your main character can actively move during the dark hour, and eventually you discover that you can combat the shadows. Not too long after, you also discover that you aren't alone, and that your dorm mates too, can fight shadows. Together, you and your shadow busting friends are known as SEES, and you all strife to purge shadows from existence and to erase the dark hour. Even as the female main character, the core story remains the same, but there will be changes, and it is slightly different from that of the male main character. Its a nice change, definetely.
 |
| Enter persona 3 portable as either the old school male character, or a brand new female character. |
Persona 3 portable comes as a brand new game to almost any player, wheter or not you played the previous literations. There are many new tweaks made to the game, making it and overall more enjoyable experience.Lets start with the biggest and most obvious new feature, playing as the female main character. I am going to talk about playing as the female character for most of this review, since thats the biggest change and is practically the main new change towards persona 3 portable. Of course, you can still choose to play as the male main character, but you will already have seen most of what he has to offer during persona 3: fes. But, if you haven't played any persona 3 game, by all means, go ahead and use him. Back on topic, the female main character, her story, conversations and social links are mostly different from the male main character.
While playing as the female MC, you are refered to differently, you get different treatment, you do different stuff from the male MC, hang out with different types of friends and even fight differently! Its like playing the game in a whole new perspective. Speaking of perspectives, you no longer walk from place to place, theres a new traveling system, where you control a cursor, move around a place and communicate with others. Its convinient, and in a way, it doesnt destroy much of the original persona 3 experinece. In other words, the female MC does everything the male MC does, but in different ways. Otherwise, everything else is almost the same. You spend time day after day, going to school in the morning, hanging out with friends after school in the afternoon and during the night, you either go fool off somewhere in the mall or go fighting in tartarus. Tartarus is where the shadows nest, and is the place you will be exploring through the entire game in old dungeon crawling aspects.
 |
| You kicked ass with minato before? Never fear, you can now kick ass with the female main character! |
The dungeon crawling and battle, needless to say, is the main focus in persona 3 portable. You build a party of 4 in the ground level and start climbing the steps of tartarus, kicking all sorts of shadow ass. The battle mechanics are same as before, so I won't be going into great detail. All in all, its just the basic old SMT battle system, where you hit weaknesses of enemies and go for all out attacks. Of course, enemies can do the same, they hit you with something you are weak to, you're gonna get hit big time. And like before, you are the only character in the game who can switch personas at will, while others can only have one. Different personas means different strenght and weaknesses, use them well.
You also get your standard SMT fusion system, in which you can fuse 2 personas together to make a brand new one, inheriting skills of the 2 you used to fuse it. This can get really addicting and is really useful. Creating new badass personas for more powerful abilities...now thats cool. Plus, with all the different types out there, the possibilities are huge. While battle remains the same, the female MC is a new addition. While she retains the same persona switching ability as the male MC, she fights with a pole arm, where as the male MC fights with a sword. Sweet. Also, in P3P, you can CONTROL YOUR OWN PARTY MEMBERS. YESSS!!! Definetely a plus, looks like they took a thing or two from persona 4, definetely a good choice.
 |
| The new traveling system is simple and convinient. |
Its hard to actually find a flaw in persona 3 portable...except for those carried over from the previous literations. After all, theres nothing much to fix in persona 3, and atlus cant really revamp the dungeon crawling system. So yeah, expect to be going in and out of tartarus alot. When I say alot I really do mean ALOT. Even though the floor layouts change from time to time, climbing these floors can be quite a pain, since its practically kind of the same thing over and over.
Do I have to conclude? If you have played ANY literation of persona 3 before, you would know that this game is BEYOND awesome. To me, persona 3 portable, is the best literation of persona 3 as of now. Everything has been made better, and with the addition of the female MC, it gives us veterans a reason to play the game again. What can I say? I recommend persona 3 portable to any sensible gamer out there. Wheter or not you like RPGs, this game is a total blast.
Happy gaming!
