Persona 3 Portable

2026-01-19
The Persona fandom is one of those true collectives of paint-huffers: wild eyed, a bit disconnected from reality, fervent followers and defenders of their fix. And back in 2017 I became a newly branded junkie after a hit of P5, dual Jokers reflected in my feverish eyes. With intensity I purchased a PS Vita and a PS TV to play through P4G and then P4 Dancing and then after much hemming and hawing over what version of P3 to dip into I dove into P3P. And only through the sheer strength of my manic addiction could I complete it. Because in the cold light of day, the truth is the series has gotten better. So fucking much better. And that is no more apparent than in P3.

Fucking Tartarus. The prison of Kronos. And you’ll feel like an immortal doomed to a life in prison every time you're in this dungeon, the only one in the game. Endless repetitive, boring, corridors. Endless repetitive, boring fights. It feels like a punishment for immortals especially in how it seemingly never ends. It feels like its entire existence is to pad out the 10 hours of actual story with another 50 hours of garbage gameplay. Hell, even the final boss fight took a half hour. No challenge, just a big ass health bar. They couldn’t let us leave prison without one more time-wasting punishment. Nah, man. I’d rather have an unsedated root canal than play this game again.

And yet I did it because the heart that beats in the prison of P3’s awful gameplay is great for all the reasons everyone says. I mean sure, just like P4, the social sim stuff still feels like it’s in a nascent form compared to P5's apotheosized, immersive version of it all. But the music is incredible, the sheer focus on loss and death and suicide is a welcome break from P4/P5’s happy-go-lucky tone, the cast of characters is some of the best--Akihiro, Mitusuru, Koromaru, and the dying kid S-Link--oof. It has charm in spades and the twists and turns of the story hit. And they hurt.

If I was smart I would have waited the better part of a decade to just play Reload which I’m going to assume fixes everything by just using P5’s actually good gameplay. But then sometimes addiction gets the better of us. And in some ways it’s good to see just how far the series has come.