*MEGA THREAD ON PERSONA 3*

I think I’m close to done with Persona 3 FES. The climax is on the horizon and the story should be super interesting from what I’ve heard. But I think even with that in mind, I doubt P3 is gonna surpass P5 for me.

Too many aspects of gameplay in P3 are legitimately unfun and if I’m being completely honest with myself, the story takes way too long to get going after getting introduced to the world and wasn’t all that engaging until like halfway through the game.

And even when cool plot stuff was happening around the middle, they kinda come and go at like a mile a minute. I’m not saying stuff happens out of nowhere and that there isn’t any build up. It just feels like things come to their climax as well as calm down from them pretty quick

I’ll fully admit that P5’s QOL improvements may have spoiled me going into P3, but I really feel that some of mechanics are legitimately bad regardless of how much older P3 is (Party members controlled by AI and AI only is TERRIBLE).

And the story, for me, on a purely subjective level, not saying this applies to anyone else specifically and this is just how I feel about it; just isn’t engaging enough throughout most of it for me to love this game, much less put it above P5 even if I were to ignore gameplay.

Basically for me, if I had to list the number of Palaces in P5 I didn’t find that interesting and equate that to the percentage of the game I didn’t find that interesting, I’d probably say Madarame’s palace...

...(and that’s only because the first palace was so good that the second one honestly didn’t stand a chance in being as interesting) and Okumura’s Palace were the points in the game where I might’ve had the least interest. Which would be roughly 25% of the game.

Yet if I were to estimate the percentage of P3 I don’t have much interest in, it’d probably be around 60% at least since there’s barely any story happening outside of beating bosses until way later.

And going back to P5, even if Okumura’s Palace has a lot of frustrating story elements going on, it ends with a majorly intriguing plot hook as the story progresses to possibly it’s coolest section.

And Madarame was less interesting compared to Kamoshida in terms of initial drive to want to take him down, but even then I still had enough interest to want to see how things would play out.

In the beginning stages of P3 I’m just clearing out bosses because they’re dangerous monsters. The sense of duty to defeat them is understandable, but there’s not much to the bosses or events surrounding them to interest me all that much.

In P5 I felt like time was of the essence at all times even when I beat a Palace as soon as possible and wanted to make the most of the day’s remaining before a deadline. In P3 I just wanted to get to the next event and hardly cared that much as the days ticked down.

In short, Persona 3 just hasn’t been able to keep me actively invested in playing it up until the 2/5 of the game that I’m closing in on.

This game means a lot to other people and it sounds like it had a great affect on them. So I just want to be clear that this thread wasn’t made to dunk on those people in any capacity and say that their enjoyment of this game makes no sense.

I just wanted to thoroughly explain why I just couldn’t get the same out of it as others have.