I’ve finally completed my playthrough and shrine for Persona 3 Portable. Go check it out under “Uncategorized” if it strikes your fancy.
Throughout my playthrough, I couldn’t help but compare P3P to Persona 4 Golden, the first Persona game I’ve ever played. The games are really similar in structure, after all. So here, I’m going to pit the two against each other and see which one wins. I’m going to avoid comparisons regarding game mechanics, since it wouldn’t be fair to compare a game to its successor where the developers had time and experience to improve. I’m also going to try to avoid purely subjective categories, such as music. With that…here’s the spoiler warning and let’s begin with some meta stuff… Plot Persona 3’s plot is a mess. The writers wanted the game’s theme to be dealing with the concept of death – both living life to the fullest to leave a legacy when you inevitably die and coming to terms with the deaths of those close to you. Unfortunately, the only justified death in the game in Shinji’s – you can argue that he was guilt-ridden and taking Persona-suppressing drugs, which weakened him to the point Takaya was able to kill him with a gun. But the others? Mitsuru’s father and Chidori only died with cutscene power plot holes. Minato’s death, the most important death in the game, hinges on Nyx having invincibility that the game never adequately justifies. The entire theme of the game is thus little more than shoehorned edginess via artificial plot armor. There are some issues with Persona 4’s plot – I pointed out that I don’t quite understand what Izanami’s whole deal was, for instance, but at least I could tell you the plot without constantly complaining that crucial events make no sense. Persona 4 wins this category hands down. NPC protagonists Initially I didn’t think this was a fair category, since Persona 4 specifically delves deep into each character – it’s how they each gain their Personas. But there’s more to it. Part of the problem with Persona 3 is that while the characters are probably interesting, the game doesn’t show that to you. Minato cannot form Social Links with any of his teammates in SEES except for the female ones, and if you’re trying not to be a cheating man-whore, this means you get to know exactly one person on the team. On the other hand, Yu can form Social Links with everyone on the Investigation Team. Persona 4 also shows several slice-of-life scenes, such as the school camping trip, where we see the team just…hang out. I thus felt the Investigation Team was a group of tight-knit best friends, whereas I saw SEES as a group of co-workers. This category goes once again to Persona 4. Villains Since we’ve already touched on Nyx and Izanami, I’ll instead focus here on more minor villains. Namely, for Persona 3 we have Chair Man and Strega whereas for Persona 4 we have Mitsuo and Adachi. Chair Man spends most of the game doing nothing, then has a big dramatic reveal that sabotages his own goal, which is itself nonsensical. Strega was irritating as fuck each time they appeared on screen and has little to no relevance to the plot. Mitsuo is kind of random, but he illustrates a theme of Persona 4 (avoiding baseless assumptions in search of truth). Adachi is pretty stupid, but he’s leagues smarter compared to Chair Man. Despite being more minor villains in scope – Mitsuo and Adachi are murderers, whereas Chair Man and Strega want to end the world – the former comes across as more competent, relevant, and threatening. I’m going to have to hand this category to Persona 4 as well. Social Links I think both games have well-written Social Links. These are people Minato and Yu meet in everyday life and form friendships with. They have a wide gamut of issues, which mirrors real life and reinforces the idea that there are everyday people dealing with regular life beyond the supernatural fighting that SEES and the Investigation Team deal with. Here I’m declaring a tie. I think I was more invested in some of the Persona 4 Social Links, but Persona 4 has the goddamned fox Social Link in which you have to catch that fucking fish from hell and I have to give props for Persona 3 since it’s the first time Social Links were a thing in the series, so it balances out. Next, let’s look at in-universe things. School We have Gekkoukan High School versus Yasogami High School. The former has better funding, since it’s built and backed by the Kirijo Group, but that money clearly didn’t go into hiring competent faculty. The principal of Gekkoukan High gets envious of Mitsuru’s Student Council President speech and calls an impromptu school rally so he could give his own competing speech, which turns out to be heavily plagiarized from Mitsuru’s. The math teacher doesn’t seem to know math and spends time commenting on how cute the numbers look. The history teacher is obsessed with samurai and will ignore the entire rest of Japanese history. And worst of all, the school nurse teaches magic. Long, long lectures on magic (though, to be fair, his lectures have some interesting history behind the development of magic). The Yasogami faculty are kind of weird and, in the case of the homeroom teacher, don’t have a grasp on ethics, but they’re at least competent teachers. If I went to school at Gekkoukan High, I’m pretty sure I’d fail every college entrance exam ever. I’m awarding this category to Yasogami High School. Setting Here we have Tatsumi Port Island versus Inaba. Honestly, a lot of this depends on what you want in where you live – I like small towns, but plenty of people find those boring and want a bigger city with things to do and places to go. Since this part comes down to personal preference, I’m going to look at a different consideration – safety. Inaba has biker gangs and at least one roving group of juvenile delinquents (we see these in both Chie’s and Kanji’s Social Links). The Inaba police force is, as I’ve detailed at length, incompetent to an obscene degree. I’d actually feel somewhat unsafe in Inaba, especially at night, which means the fact that some of the Social Links wander the town at night is a bit worrying. Tatsumi Port Island has one specific location the teen gangs gather, behind Port Island Station. We only see one particular policeman in Tatsumi Port Island, Officer Kurosawa, and this guy knows what he’s doing. Mitsuru at one point believes Junpei’s room was ransacked and she calls him to investigate. He takes one look at the room and immediately deduces that, no, it wasn’t vandalized – this is just what a teenage guy’s messy room looks like. I’d feel safer in Tatsumi Port Island, provided I just avoid the gangs’ known meeting area. This category thus goes in Persona 3’s favor. Power We’re asking the question of who would win in a fight between SEES and the Investigation Team. We’ll establish four rules: we’re excluding the main characters (more precisely, we’re excluding Wild Card holders), banning consumable items, not using any RNG instant-kill attacks, and taking the teams as they are at the Nyx/Izanami boss fights. This last one means (1) everyone’s at maximum possible power; (2) we can field Aigis, since she doesn’t get the Wild Card until after Nyx’s defeat; (3) we can’t field Shinji, as he’s dead by then. We’re also going to assume everyone can take part in the battle rather than just four characters from either team. SEES has higher HP and SP since Persona 3 automatically gives a character 999 HP and SP upon hitting max level. SEES also has fusion weapons and heart items, which means SEES’s equipment is more powerful compared to the Investigation Team’s. In particular, the Armors of Light mean no human character in SEES has any elemental weakness. Finally, SEES outnumbers the Investigation Team 8-to-7: SEES: Mitsuru, Akihiko, Yukari, Junpei, Fuuka, Ken, Koromaru, Aigis Investigation Team: Yosuke, Chie, Yukiko, Kanji, Teddie, Rise, Naoto I think SEES would win. This isn’t to say the victory would be easy. The Investigation Team has better special skills, such as Naoto’s Shield of Justice or Chie’s Dragon Hustle, but since we’re disallowing consumable items, they can only use them once or twice before running out of SP. We can also consider duo skills, such as Twin Dragons, which will do a chunk of damage, and all three duo skills are fair game since all six characters are in play. The Investigation Team’s best weapon is Rise, who can pop into battle to impart permanent buffs, heal, and block all damage the first time it would kill someone. Another possible strategy is to knock someone down and pave the way for Galactic Punt. A lot of these activate by random chance, so I think SEES would still win, but they’d struggle and probably lose a few people before they did. This category goes to Persona 3. Final score: Persona 4 wins 5-to-3! And with that, I hope I’m done with this series for awhile. These games are fun, but super long and draining. Yeesh. Comments are closed.
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