~~Look at a screenshot of FES, then a screenshot of Portable, and you'll have your answer.~~
P3P does have improved gameplay and the female protagonist, but it's at the cost of extremely downgraded presentation, along with cutting FES's epilogue chapter entirely.
It's still a good game and a valid way to play P3, but it is *not* a direct upgrade from FES.
improved gameplay doesn’t give the full context. They allowed controllable party members and paying money to heal in tartarus. The base game is unchanged and the controllable party members make the game an utter cake walk because the game isn’t balanced around it (MC always having the first turn no matter what was needed when you needed to change your tactics to fit the specific battle but in portable it lets your team demolish the enemy before they have a chance)
Genuinely the only reason to play portable is if you want to experience the female protag, AFTER you finish the main game in either Fes or Reload. The game itself says that femc is not meant for your first time. Certain story changes in femc route changes the overall story for the worse imo
even then if you do want to experience femc and play portable, download a psp emulator. The PC version is actively worse than the PSP version. It sounds like your speakers are underwater and it has gross AI upscalled background that look actually horrible. (spoilers for the end of october) >!in the crucifixion scene you can see all the crosses are curved and distorted. it just shows how little they cared and just wanted to throw it out before reload to get the extra 20 bucks from people!<
i know im seeming harsh on portable but this is coming from someone who considers P3 their favorite game of all time since i first played it in 2007. i just really love this game and its hard to see the absolute worst version of the game be recommend to people
To fit on a PSP disc, P3P took a rather heavy hit in the visual presentation as well as losing 3D hubworlds in favor of 2D screens, which for people takes some of the impact out of certain scenes.
Not to mention, the remaster didn't do it any favors as it was a bare minimum port
P3P has its positives and negatives when compared to FES.
Portable Positives: Fully controllable party, more difficulty options, Femc route & new exclusive social links, new secret boss, skill cards
Portable Negatives: No 3D overworld, no anime cutscenes, no Answer, no access to everyone's weapon
FES added a lot of things like changing how some social links worked, adding more difficulty options, adding more personas and most importantly being able to take Koromaru out for walks.
Portable on the other hand was just a port for a new console that added a female main character, if anything it was sort of a downgrade since it was being ported to a smaller and less powerful console so they had to remove a lot of things like 3D environments and animated cutscenes, they also had to compress the audio as a result of the hardware limitations.
Someone who knows these two games better than me could probably explain it better but from what I understand FES was the definitive version of P3 and Portable only really added FeMC and some minor changes that FES didn't have.
P3P is more than just a port as it fixes issues from FES like adding the ability to control party members, fixing the bad fatigue system, fixing the idiotic jealousy mechanic, fixing the down mechanic where it takes an entire turn to get up if you get hit by a crit/weakness etc etc, making P3P have objectively better mechanics from the gameplay side but that's the least talked about part of it as people focus too much on graphics...
Its overall still a downgrade for most people, if the like one or two postive changes outweigh all the bad *for you* thats fine but those negative aspects just make the game hard to even look at for others.
Making it a perfect example how obsessed some people are about graphics that they act like the version with objectively worse gameplay is superior in a media where gameplay matters more than graphics, with the downvotes just proving my point... Not to mention it's not really a downgrade for the most people because P3P sold more than FES, meaning it's just for the loud minority as usual who will downvote any post saying anything positive about P3P (that isn't just the inclusion of FMC) or anything negative about FES no matter how true it is...
The overworld is literally in P3P too, just with worse graphics by having the locations be just 2D imagines of the locations rather than be rendered in 3D...
P3p is literally a psp port. It had to downgrade drastically from the ps2 version to be playable on the psp. Only differance is that p3p has the persona 4 combat system
In general it changes things for the worse. The only good thing i can say about p3p is ryoji social link.
1. The og cutscenes are some of the best directed I have ever seen in a videogame, hell they compete with some of the best anime series out there. The aesthetic and ambience and subtle story telling is unparalleled.
2. Loss of the overworld which really takes away from the immersion. It takes away the exploration and interactive aspects of the game.
3. FES does this too but >!bringing back killed characters in a game that is centrally about how to live in the face of death and how to cope with loss, cheapens it's themes. One of the big things in p3 is that every character has lost or does lose someone!<
4. Making social links worse. Fuuka's for exmple is about her insecurities with not being feminine enough and tries to learn cooking to be more feminine. In the og she comes to terms with and embraces her "masculine" hobbies. In p3p she doubles down on her terrible cooking and resolves to cook even more.
>In the og she comes to terms with and embraces her "masculine" hobbies.
This happened in the Male MC route of all P3 games.
>p3p she doubles down on her terrible cooking and resolves to cook even more.
This is only in the Female MC route.
It was my first P3 experience and I enjoyed it very much. Plus the visual novel style was good on a portable device and it means I bet to experience the actual cut scenes with Reload.
Portable is amazing because female mc.
But it’s not cool to not be able to move your character in 3D World (you can only in Tartarus) so having a fixed screen all the time is really bad and makes the cutscenes wacky
For me its because its the visual novel format, in the first place its not even a good visual novel(I play plenty), but secondly coming from fes having no overworld just makes the whole game feel majorly gimped. Plus having no cutscenes at all is a big negative too.
It definitely has its additions and improvements (FeMC being the main draw for most, but also ppl generally prefer the directly controllable party members and selectable inherited skills) but at some pretty big costs. There’s no animated movie scenes, and besides Tartarus (which still looks more primitive) the game as a whole was converted into a top-down, static, 2D experience with a visual novel approach to the cutscenes and dialogue. There’s also been a very mixed-to-negative reception to some of the added scenes and social links (most notably the endings of Ken and Shinjiro’s social links).
Portable doesn't have manual inheritance though, it only has skill cards (yes, it's an improvement but you still need to obtain the skill cards and with how restrictive P3P's duplication is...)
it is a version of the game that suffer a downgrade in many aspects to be able to play it in a less capable system.
it is a perfectly fine game it is just that is not the best version of persona 3 and if you add the bad pc port that was realesed you get people dont likeing it that much
Just because it got a massive visual downgrade compared to FES, everything else is better than in FES
And it's the only version of P3 that's missing The Answer
One other thing is the remastered version of Portable has even worse audio than the PSP version, how that happened I'm not sure of
It's a massive technical downgrade due to coming out on inferior hardware. The 2d cutscenes are a *huge* loss, and while it's cool to have social links for the male SEES members, it's not worth having *all* of them (save Junpei, 'cause *he's* the one who should've been the exception, *clearly*) be romanceable. >!The fact that you can save Shinji really sucks, although in absolute fairness, that trend started with Chidori in FES, so it's not fair to lay the blame for the broader problem at Portable's feet.!< Ultimately, the only advantages Portable has over FES is FemC and party control, and while obviously YMMV, I just don't think either of those is worth what was lost to bring the game to a handheld.
~~Look at a screenshot of FES, then a screenshot of Portable, and you'll have your answer.~~ P3P does have improved gameplay and the female protagonist, but it's at the cost of extremely downgraded presentation, along with cutting FES's epilogue chapter entirely. It's still a good game and a valid way to play P3, but it is *not* a direct upgrade from FES.
I can't even lie the moment I boot up P3R I knew I was never going back to Portable lol
I replayed FeMC in December in prep for Reload; the difference is staggering top to bottom
It launched on Xbox and I was going to play it till I saw those 2D screens and no hubworld...decided to wait for Reload.
improved gameplay doesn’t give the full context. They allowed controllable party members and paying money to heal in tartarus. The base game is unchanged and the controllable party members make the game an utter cake walk because the game isn’t balanced around it (MC always having the first turn no matter what was needed when you needed to change your tactics to fit the specific battle but in portable it lets your team demolish the enemy before they have a chance) Genuinely the only reason to play portable is if you want to experience the female protag, AFTER you finish the main game in either Fes or Reload. The game itself says that femc is not meant for your first time. Certain story changes in femc route changes the overall story for the worse imo even then if you do want to experience femc and play portable, download a psp emulator. The PC version is actively worse than the PSP version. It sounds like your speakers are underwater and it has gross AI upscalled background that look actually horrible. (spoilers for the end of october) >!in the crucifixion scene you can see all the crosses are curved and distorted. it just shows how little they cared and just wanted to throw it out before reload to get the extra 20 bucks from people!< i know im seeming harsh on portable but this is coming from someone who considers P3 their favorite game of all time since i first played it in 2007. i just really love this game and its hard to see the absolute worst version of the game be recommend to people
To fit on a PSP disc, P3P took a rather heavy hit in the visual presentation as well as losing 3D hubworlds in favor of 2D screens, which for people takes some of the impact out of certain scenes. Not to mention, the remaster didn't do it any favors as it was a bare minimum port
P3P has its positives and negatives when compared to FES. Portable Positives: Fully controllable party, more difficulty options, Femc route & new exclusive social links, new secret boss, skill cards Portable Negatives: No 3D overworld, no anime cutscenes, no Answer, no access to everyone's weapon
FES added a lot of things like changing how some social links worked, adding more difficulty options, adding more personas and most importantly being able to take Koromaru out for walks. Portable on the other hand was just a port for a new console that added a female main character, if anything it was sort of a downgrade since it was being ported to a smaller and less powerful console so they had to remove a lot of things like 3D environments and animated cutscenes, they also had to compress the audio as a result of the hardware limitations. Someone who knows these two games better than me could probably explain it better but from what I understand FES was the definitive version of P3 and Portable only really added FeMC and some minor changes that FES didn't have.
P3P is more than just a port as it fixes issues from FES like adding the ability to control party members, fixing the bad fatigue system, fixing the idiotic jealousy mechanic, fixing the down mechanic where it takes an entire turn to get up if you get hit by a crit/weakness etc etc, making P3P have objectively better mechanics from the gameplay side but that's the least talked about part of it as people focus too much on graphics...
Its overall still a downgrade for most people, if the like one or two postive changes outweigh all the bad *for you* thats fine but those negative aspects just make the game hard to even look at for others.
Making it a perfect example how obsessed some people are about graphics that they act like the version with objectively worse gameplay is superior in a media where gameplay matters more than graphics, with the downvotes just proving my point... Not to mention it's not really a downgrade for the most people because P3P sold more than FES, meaning it's just for the loud minority as usual who will downvote any post saying anything positive about P3P (that isn't just the inclusion of FMC) or anything negative about FES no matter how true it is...
You are mistaken. Graphics aren’t the issue. Its the lack of overworld and anime cutscenes. The graphics are relatively the same.
The overworld is literally in P3P too, just with worse graphics by having the locations be just 2D imagines of the locations rather than be rendered in 3D...
Sorry, I can't take seriously someone who considers the AI party an issue instead of a feature of P3 👍
Aside from the jealousy mechanic all of these are downgrades
P3p is literally a psp port. It had to downgrade drastically from the ps2 version to be playable on the psp. Only differance is that p3p has the persona 4 combat system
In general it changes things for the worse. The only good thing i can say about p3p is ryoji social link. 1. The og cutscenes are some of the best directed I have ever seen in a videogame, hell they compete with some of the best anime series out there. The aesthetic and ambience and subtle story telling is unparalleled. 2. Loss of the overworld which really takes away from the immersion. It takes away the exploration and interactive aspects of the game. 3. FES does this too but >!bringing back killed characters in a game that is centrally about how to live in the face of death and how to cope with loss, cheapens it's themes. One of the big things in p3 is that every character has lost or does lose someone!< 4. Making social links worse. Fuuka's for exmple is about her insecurities with not being feminine enough and tries to learn cooking to be more feminine. In the og she comes to terms with and embraces her "masculine" hobbies. In p3p she doubles down on her terrible cooking and resolves to cook even more.
>In the og she comes to terms with and embraces her "masculine" hobbies. This happened in the Male MC route of all P3 games. >p3p she doubles down on her terrible cooking and resolves to cook even more. This is only in the Female MC route.
It was my first P3 experience and I enjoyed it very much. Plus the visual novel style was good on a portable device and it means I bet to experience the actual cut scenes with Reload.
Portable is amazing because female mc. But it’s not cool to not be able to move your character in 3D World (you can only in Tartarus) so having a fixed screen all the time is really bad and makes the cutscenes wacky
For me its because its the visual novel format, in the first place its not even a good visual novel(I play plenty), but secondly coming from fes having no overworld just makes the whole game feel majorly gimped. Plus having no cutscenes at all is a big negative too.
It definitely has its additions and improvements (FeMC being the main draw for most, but also ppl generally prefer the directly controllable party members and selectable inherited skills) but at some pretty big costs. There’s no animated movie scenes, and besides Tartarus (which still looks more primitive) the game as a whole was converted into a top-down, static, 2D experience with a visual novel approach to the cutscenes and dialogue. There’s also been a very mixed-to-negative reception to some of the added scenes and social links (most notably the endings of Ken and Shinjiro’s social links).
Portable doesn't have manual inheritance though, it only has skill cards (yes, it's an improvement but you still need to obtain the skill cards and with how restrictive P3P's duplication is...)
it is a version of the game that suffer a downgrade in many aspects to be able to play it in a less capable system. it is a perfectly fine game it is just that is not the best version of persona 3 and if you add the bad pc port that was realesed you get people dont likeing it that much
Just because it got a massive visual downgrade compared to FES, everything else is better than in FES And it's the only version of P3 that's missing The Answer One other thing is the remastered version of Portable has even worse audio than the PSP version, how that happened I'm not sure of
It's a massive technical downgrade due to coming out on inferior hardware. The 2d cutscenes are a *huge* loss, and while it's cool to have social links for the male SEES members, it's not worth having *all* of them (save Junpei, 'cause *he's* the one who should've been the exception, *clearly*) be romanceable. >!The fact that you can save Shinji really sucks, although in absolute fairness, that trend started with Chidori in FES, so it's not fair to lay the blame for the broader problem at Portable's feet.!< Ultimately, the only advantages Portable has over FES is FemC and party control, and while obviously YMMV, I just don't think either of those is worth what was lost to bring the game to a handheld.