A Minor Variation

So, I recently finished Persona 3.

I'd actually picked up the game quite a while back and never quite got into it at the time... I got a little bit past the Yakushima summer trip and then just never picked it back up again. I found some things about the premise interesting, but the whole dating sim/dungeon crawl setup kind of dragged.

But I was looking forward to the PSP re-release, which adds the option of playing as a female main character - always a plus. And, indeed, it made a world of difference for my level of interest in the game's progress, not only because of playing as a female protagonist, but because unlike the male one she gets Social Links with all of her teammates, not just the girls.

For the record, the period from between October 4 through about December 20ish makes P3P the most depressing video game I have ever played.

The one thing about P3P that I don't like in comparison to the PS2 version is that all of the animated cutscenes are gone. The original version has cel-animated sequences for important cutscenes and animates the rest with the little 3D character sprites; the PSP version does everything except the dungeon crawl / combat part in full visual novel mode, with a couple of stills capped from the anime cutscenes mostly as backgrounds. Which is a bummer. No actual content seems to be lost that way - mostly - but after I finished the game I looked up the ending of the original to make sure I wasn't missing something, and having the actual visuals really gives it a bit more emotional impact. I can't tell if this was done because of the PSP's different capabilities, because they couldn't be bothered / didn't have time or budget to re-do the cutscenes for the girl protagonist, or both.

( Some other stuff, with various spoilers. )

Overall, I ended up enjoying the game pretty well, in spite of (or, probably more likely, because of) the emotional wringer of the last third of the storyline. Naturally I am immediately beginning a replay to try to actually max out all the S.Links this time.

Favorite character: Akihiko, which is not surprising; he was my favorite the first time I tried to play the game, too. The little sister issues pretty much did it.
Times a teammate flung themselves across the screen to shove Protagonist-chan out of the way of a death blow: about three.
Hours spent making the entire female side of the team run around Tartarus in maid outfits: too many. This wasn't intentional, the maid costumes were actually the best armor that they had for quite a while there. Go figure.
Times I paused in the middle of Tartarus to chat with Akihiko just to watch him fluster over the maid outfit: also too many. At least I didn't actually buy the swimsuit.