Thank you!!! I have to say, if anything was depressingly bad about Persona 3, it was the story. I won't harp on, because I really, really, (really) hate Persona 3, but you're on the mark about the story, particularly the antagonists.
As for splitting the physical damage types, one thing came of that that was good and one only: Mara got a "pierce"-type attack and a dick joke was created.
Great review, though the title makes it seem weirdly negative. It's a good thing that sequels are better. Let's hope 5 blows Golden out of the water.
You didn't need to play Golden to see P3P did not hold up anymore. I played Persona 4 on the PS2 and that alone made me realize how... inferior Persona 3 ended up in comparison. (Though I don't think I would like Persona 3 more, had I played that first...)
marcellX, from what little they've shown of Persona 5 up to now, it already has blown Persona 4 out of the water.
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P3:P: A Great Game With the Great Misfortune of Being Surpassed By Its Successor In Every Reasonable Way
Halfway through Persona 3 Portable, I realized that I'd ruined it for myself. I'd already played the excellent Persona 4: Golden, and I was hoping for more of the same. And I got it, only at a much lower overall level of quality.
Persona 3 is still an enjoyable game, for the most part, with its hybrid platonic dating sim/dungeon crawler gameplay. The characters are still vibrant and fun. But, and here's the rub, so many improvements were made in the sequel that it's hard to go back.
Between no non-romantic social links for the opposite-sex characters, a murky plot with no real forward drive, a shifting set of antagonists with confusing motivations and almost no real depth, the storytelling in general is much poorer, too shackled to the style of previous titles in the series. Character have depth and development, but their introductions are clumsier and their development shorter than in 4. And you're just climbing Tartarus because it's there, with no real motivation for doing so except grinding before, later on, victims start wandering into it.
The battle system is... okay. I prefer the better-rounded characters from 4, but a team of specialists is still interesting and puts a greater emphasis on strategy. Unfortunately, while splitting the physical damage types was theoretically a good idea, its implementation leaves much to be desired. Maybe if characters could shift damage types with different weapons?
I will say that, from what I can glean, P3:P does an excellent job of implementing 4's improvements to the gameplay. Direct control over characters is possible, especially nice since the originals suffered from Artificial Stupidity, and Social Links seem to take longer to reverse. And while I've yet to finish the female campaign, it's amazingly good, trimming out all the weaker Social Links to include every member of the main cast, and offering, to avoid spoilers, a chance to save one of only two sources of Strike damage from plot-mandated death. I'd go so far as to say I wish I'd done it first, and consider it the definitive version of the game.
P3:P is still a good game and an excellent remake. But I can't help but hold it to a higher standard than I really should.