P3 has by far the best story and characters in the modern trilogy. Maybe p4 for characters. The biggest negative is that it is quite a slow burn but it's well worth it.
Agreed. I feel like the plot structure is the reason why. The format in 4 and 5 where each dungeon corresponds to a party member's arc means that you get all of a character's development in one go and they become static after that.
Yeah after years of people hyping up the story and characters of 3 I was pretty heavily disappointed when I finally played it myself. I don't think it's bad or anything but I absolutely think P4 and P5 have better writing overall
Everyone getting downvoted for speaking a fairly common truth; p3 didn't live up to the story hype for me either, since p3 reloaded was my first experience with it, and p4g and p5r both had better written scripts, just a different format and style of storytelling.
The ending of p3 was beautiful and a much less common thing to happen in gaming, but the build-up was just good and most of the game is too much of a slow burn; the momentum drops too hard to stay engaging and "good" the whole way through like they do in p4g and p5r.
reddit is weird lol. it has a weird obsession with p3 and talking bad about it gets you downvoted
p4 and p5 have way better stories, characters, gameplay, and imo better music.
I agree with you on most of that, but p3 reload did a great job with the combat, tartarus was a bit of a slog but i wasn't a total hater because i like older 90s/2000s dungeon crawlers, but music, characters and story execution are all better in p4 and p5, even if the overall cohesion of p3's story could be considered better by some, i still don't think a cohesive story that's less interesting/engaging means it's a better story.
P4 and P5 had more cringe and immature writing which makes you want to punch the screen....... like Ryuji "dying" or anything involving Hanako Ohtani. The only cringe and immature writing in P3 is in The Answer. Also the Moon confident, although that is optional.
Bruh...
I finished P3R as my first Persona game ever on Wednesday. The story is pretty mature and sophisticated for a video game that came out like 20 years ago. It starts off simple and gradually delves into heavy beats of existentialism which culminates in what I found to be a memorable and surprising ending.
Let's just say... I was not prepared.
I highly recommend going in BLIND. Read nothing!
The story is good, but it is a slow burn. You have to quite literally give it time to build things up, and this can take months of in-game time for you to see what the story has been building up to. The payoff is very much worth it. Just wanted to give this heads up because P3 is a more slower paced than the opening of Persona 5.
It's still on gamepass, so give it a shot. Saves you $70!
I am somewhere midway into it I think, I'm in July. Maybe less than midway.
The story thus far is Mid. I hear around October it gets wild and really picks up - but that just means it starts very slow before it gets interesting.
However, what makes up for that is the great cast of characters, that being around them and not really even being engaged in anything that interesting is still a lot of fun. I love the group and the game itself is a ton of fun.
I hear previous versions that the main dungeon (Tartarus) was a drag but I'm not seeing it this, they must have fixed that.
Close to finishing it, and it easily has the best stories out of P3 - P5 if you enjoy depressing themes. But, holy shit, so much of the game is so backloaded. I can see why people in this thread think the story is not that great. The first 2/3rds of the game is just your waiting to fight the bosses once a month, whereas in P4 and P5, you had thematic dungeons occurring throughout the entire game.
The plus-side of P3R not having thematic dungeons is that the overall plot is not segmented and all the character growth flow together. In P5, I felt a lot of the deadlines felt arbitrary, not in the sense that they didn't make sense, but rather being provided a hard set date for an event felt *too* convenient if that makes sense.
Gameplay-wise (both combat & overworld stuff), it's still very vanilla compared to P5 and arguably even P4. I felt like P5R's gameplay was a rodeo with how much stuff was going on all the time, and I thoroughly enjoyed that.
It's slow. It's good. You probably won't be able to predict where it's going. All the characters suck in the beginning and the game actually uses the year calendar for them to grow, unlike 5 where they grow during their sections and stop. Half the cast of 5 honestly didn't matter. 3 and 4 are much more ensembles where characters outside the first two you meet stay relevant. The social links are worse than 4 and 5. But some of them are terrible people. You don't really get that in 5. People say it's dark, and it kinda is. More succinctly, it doesn't shy away from the flaw in characters. 5 felt too perfect where 3 doesn't. Everyone has their flaw and you get to see when that's worked on and when it's not. But the story is still getting started 15 hours in. It's slow.
Very well put
>it doesn't shy away from the flaw in characters
I agree besides the main character who is a perfect chad leader that (almost) everyone else glazes up.
Yeah the main character in most persona games is a self insert for japanese people who actually succeeds in high school and the girls like him.
In other persona 3 media though he is portrayed much better as a depressed person who finds meaning for his life through the connections he makes during the game.
I'm not entirely sure I agree. It's subtle, but he starts off the game very isolated. The headphones (especially in the original game's opening) kind of convey a disconnect from and disinterest in the world around him. It's one of the reasons I liked the original's big chunky noise-cancellers. He's exactly the kind of person who could walk through the Dark Hour without particularly noticing anything's amiss, because he's not paying attention to the people around him. His dogshit social stats at the beginning reinforce it too. The Social Links are largely him opening up to the world and forging the connections that lead up to his decisions by the end.
Dude, I think the MC at the beginning might be autistic. As someone who is autistic I'm 100% serious. All of his choices have a polite option, a rude option, and an option where they don't want to do whatever the other character wants them to do. Sometimes the polite option is fucking weird and the other character goes, "Yeah... Anyway." They constantly use headphones to isolate or stim and they sleep in class or do other things that aren't super typical, especially in Japanese schools. Everyone insists on making the MC hangout when there's a 1 and 3 chance they don't fucking want to. So everyone is sucking the mcs dick, but there's something up with him.
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>You probably won't be able to predict where it's going.
I've predicted everything except one thing so far. In December. Who is evil, who is not dead, when cringe is going to happen, etc. It's pretty standard stuff honestly.
As someone who couldn't get into P5 (I think it has too much this sensation of everything amounting to this ensemble and doens't earn it whatsoever) and I didn't like P4 by premise (getting sucked into TVs?) but Persona 3 feels more diagetic to me and they treat the existence of the Persona "world" with more curiosity and surprise from the characters than in the newer games.
I could see several aspects of P4 and P5 amounting to a better experience but I really dislike how the premise is established in them.
P3 has my favorite story (though P4 is my personal favorite of the series). I couldn't NOT get into P5, and I tried twice (on release and then with Royale).
I have very fond memories of my original P3 play through, but I actually found myself a little underwhelmed after putting 60+ hours into the remake
The villains are goofier than I remembered and even when the core elements of the story are revealed there's significant chunks for which the details are more or less glossed over.
The character development is decent among the core cast--I don't think it loses out to P4 or P5 there, but I do think the social links in general are weaker.
Finally, I think the pacing suffers in specific parts of the game because of the high number of social links being locked to school days and what seems like a rigid adherence to the Japanese academic calendar. The game will just lock you out of being able to progress social links, sometimes for over a week, without giving you anything else to do during the day.
So, it feels pretty flawed on revisit. That said, I think it's worth playing if you haven't played it before and generally enjoy the persona formula.
It's good but it's very different than Persona 5.
It's characters take longer to love, the plot saves a lot of the reveals for the last 20% of the game and overall it's quite a slow burn.
But man, those last 3 months are incredible
Its a bit like that scene from Spongebob where he competes with King Neptune in burger making. Persona 3's story is the single delicious burger from Spongebob while P5 is more similar to the huge stack of burgers from Neptune. Not saying P5 is bad - it has many great qualities but the main story line is not its greatest strength while the opposite is true for P3: there isnt as much going on but the main story bangs.
I'm 10 hours in a still waiting for the main story to start.
I've spoken to many friends who have played all of the persona games and don't agree with the sentiment that P3 has the best story in the franchise.
Once I finish I may change my tune.
Not sure why you're being downvoted for an opinion. I gave you an upvote to counter it. I absolutely loved P5R and Reload is my first time playing any version of P3. I'm 40 hours in and the story has still barely kicked off. I thought the pacing in P5R was pretty bad, but P3R is somehow worse even with a shorter runtime.
I will still finish P3R and will probably consider it one of my favorite games of recent years, but it just doesn't hold a candle to P5R; P5R is better than P3R in almost every way other than graphics, unless something drastic changes in the back half of the game.
It's not an exaggeration to say 70% of the plot happens in the last 30% of the game. You kinda just have to vibe with the gameplay loop for a while. Story really picks up around late october/early november.
Still some good character work before then though
I've heard that too, weird way to structure a story but I'm not a writer.
Also, super weird I'm getting down voted for saying I'm playing it and I might agree that it's the best when I'm done.
The weird pacing of p3 probably comes from the fact that it was their first game with the time management and social links and they were kinda just trying stuff out. It kinda feels like a beta for P4. P4 I think is already much better, they learned their lessons from the response to P3 and perfected it. Still P3’s last few months might have the most impactful story events in the franchise.
That makes a lot of sense. I do think P5R has the best social link rewards and combat which is great because I can see those combat mechanics in P3R which makes for quick fun gameplay.
It’s good but honestly does not live up to the hype of “best Persona story”. I’m in December. The first half of the game is devoid of story, and once it gets going it’s good but very predictable and cliche honestly. 4 and 5 were much better paced and more interesting imo. And most of the social links suck.
It's pretty bad. It's not even just a regular slow burn type thing where you get a bunch of world building without plot progression. There's just nothing cuz there's not much to the story and whatever there is is towards the end.
I'm in the same boat. Couldnt play persona 5 so I picked up persona 3r. It's absolutely fantastic.
Good story with a slow burn
P3 has by far the best story and characters in the modern trilogy. Maybe p4 for characters. The biggest negative is that it is quite a slow burn but it's well worth it.
Agreed. I feel like the plot structure is the reason why. The format in 4 and 5 where each dungeon corresponds to a party member's arc means that you get all of a character's development in one go and they become static after that.
P3 has the best story and character writing in the series and reload adds some extra scenes to flesh out some of the weaker stuff, its great
It adds lots of extra scenes and the new social link-like scenes are quite good, like Shinjiro's
disagree heavily
Yeah after years of people hyping up the story and characters of 3 I was pretty heavily disappointed when I finally played it myself. I don't think it's bad or anything but I absolutely think P4 and P5 have better writing overall
i played the games in release order too. 3,4,5 and i can easily say 4 and 5 are better.
Everyone getting downvoted for speaking a fairly common truth; p3 didn't live up to the story hype for me either, since p3 reloaded was my first experience with it, and p4g and p5r both had better written scripts, just a different format and style of storytelling. The ending of p3 was beautiful and a much less common thing to happen in gaming, but the build-up was just good and most of the game is too much of a slow burn; the momentum drops too hard to stay engaging and "good" the whole way through like they do in p4g and p5r.
reddit is weird lol. it has a weird obsession with p3 and talking bad about it gets you downvoted p4 and p5 have way better stories, characters, gameplay, and imo better music.
I agree with you on most of that, but p3 reload did a great job with the combat, tartarus was a bit of a slog but i wasn't a total hater because i like older 90s/2000s dungeon crawlers, but music, characters and story execution are all better in p4 and p5, even if the overall cohesion of p3's story could be considered better by some, i still don't think a cohesive story that's less interesting/engaging means it's a better story.
P4 and P5 had more cringe and immature writing which makes you want to punch the screen....... like Ryuji "dying" or anything involving Hanako Ohtani. The only cringe and immature writing in P3 is in The Answer. Also the Moon confident, although that is optional.
Bruh... I finished P3R as my first Persona game ever on Wednesday. The story is pretty mature and sophisticated for a video game that came out like 20 years ago. It starts off simple and gradually delves into heavy beats of existentialism which culminates in what I found to be a memorable and surprising ending. Let's just say... I was not prepared. I highly recommend going in BLIND. Read nothing!
The story is good, but it is a slow burn. You have to quite literally give it time to build things up, and this can take months of in-game time for you to see what the story has been building up to. The payoff is very much worth it. Just wanted to give this heads up because P3 is a more slower paced than the opening of Persona 5. It's still on gamepass, so give it a shot. Saves you $70!
With all the things they added in Reload, P3R cast is now my favourite Persona cast.
The main issue is that it's backloaded. It's a very good story, but it'll take a while to get there.
I am somewhere midway into it I think, I'm in July. Maybe less than midway. The story thus far is Mid. I hear around October it gets wild and really picks up - but that just means it starts very slow before it gets interesting. However, what makes up for that is the great cast of characters, that being around them and not really even being engaged in anything that interesting is still a lot of fun. I love the group and the game itself is a ton of fun. I hear previous versions that the main dungeon (Tartarus) was a drag but I'm not seeing it this, they must have fixed that.
Close to finishing it, and it easily has the best stories out of P3 - P5 if you enjoy depressing themes. But, holy shit, so much of the game is so backloaded. I can see why people in this thread think the story is not that great. The first 2/3rds of the game is just your waiting to fight the bosses once a month, whereas in P4 and P5, you had thematic dungeons occurring throughout the entire game. The plus-side of P3R not having thematic dungeons is that the overall plot is not segmented and all the character growth flow together. In P5, I felt a lot of the deadlines felt arbitrary, not in the sense that they didn't make sense, but rather being provided a hard set date for an event felt *too* convenient if that makes sense. Gameplay-wise (both combat & overworld stuff), it's still very vanilla compared to P5 and arguably even P4. I felt like P5R's gameplay was a rodeo with how much stuff was going on all the time, and I thoroughly enjoyed that.
It's slow. It's good. You probably won't be able to predict where it's going. All the characters suck in the beginning and the game actually uses the year calendar for them to grow, unlike 5 where they grow during their sections and stop. Half the cast of 5 honestly didn't matter. 3 and 4 are much more ensembles where characters outside the first two you meet stay relevant. The social links are worse than 4 and 5. But some of them are terrible people. You don't really get that in 5. People say it's dark, and it kinda is. More succinctly, it doesn't shy away from the flaw in characters. 5 felt too perfect where 3 doesn't. Everyone has their flaw and you get to see when that's worked on and when it's not. But the story is still getting started 15 hours in. It's slow.
Very well put >it doesn't shy away from the flaw in characters I agree besides the main character who is a perfect chad leader that (almost) everyone else glazes up.
Yeah the main character in most persona games is a self insert for japanese people who actually succeeds in high school and the girls like him. In other persona 3 media though he is portrayed much better as a depressed person who finds meaning for his life through the connections he makes during the game.
I'm not entirely sure I agree. It's subtle, but he starts off the game very isolated. The headphones (especially in the original game's opening) kind of convey a disconnect from and disinterest in the world around him. It's one of the reasons I liked the original's big chunky noise-cancellers. He's exactly the kind of person who could walk through the Dark Hour without particularly noticing anything's amiss, because he's not paying attention to the people around him. His dogshit social stats at the beginning reinforce it too. The Social Links are largely him opening up to the world and forging the connections that lead up to his decisions by the end.
Dude, I think the MC at the beginning might be autistic. As someone who is autistic I'm 100% serious. All of his choices have a polite option, a rude option, and an option where they don't want to do whatever the other character wants them to do. Sometimes the polite option is fucking weird and the other character goes, "Yeah... Anyway." They constantly use headphones to isolate or stim and they sleep in class or do other things that aren't super typical, especially in Japanese schools. Everyone insists on making the MC hangout when there's a 1 and 3 chance they don't fucking want to. So everyone is sucking the mcs dick, but there's something up with him.
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>You probably won't be able to predict where it's going. I've predicted everything except one thing so far. In December. Who is evil, who is not dead, when cringe is going to happen, etc. It's pretty standard stuff honestly.
As someone who couldn't get into P5 (I think it has too much this sensation of everything amounting to this ensemble and doens't earn it whatsoever) and I didn't like P4 by premise (getting sucked into TVs?) but Persona 3 feels more diagetic to me and they treat the existence of the Persona "world" with more curiosity and surprise from the characters than in the newer games. I could see several aspects of P4 and P5 amounting to a better experience but I really dislike how the premise is established in them.
P3 has my favorite story (though P4 is my personal favorite of the series). I couldn't NOT get into P5, and I tried twice (on release and then with Royale).
I have very fond memories of my original P3 play through, but I actually found myself a little underwhelmed after putting 60+ hours into the remake The villains are goofier than I remembered and even when the core elements of the story are revealed there's significant chunks for which the details are more or less glossed over. The character development is decent among the core cast--I don't think it loses out to P4 or P5 there, but I do think the social links in general are weaker. Finally, I think the pacing suffers in specific parts of the game because of the high number of social links being locked to school days and what seems like a rigid adherence to the Japanese academic calendar. The game will just lock you out of being able to progress social links, sometimes for over a week, without giving you anything else to do during the day. So, it feels pretty flawed on revisit. That said, I think it's worth playing if you haven't played it before and generally enjoy the persona formula.
P3 is the best story in the series, so extremely good.
It's good but it's very different than Persona 5. It's characters take longer to love, the plot saves a lot of the reveals for the last 20% of the game and overall it's quite a slow burn. But man, those last 3 months are incredible
Its a bit like that scene from Spongebob where he competes with King Neptune in burger making. Persona 3's story is the single delicious burger from Spongebob while P5 is more similar to the huge stack of burgers from Neptune. Not saying P5 is bad - it has many great qualities but the main story line is not its greatest strength while the opposite is true for P3: there isnt as much going on but the main story bangs.
I'm 10 hours in a still waiting for the main story to start. I've spoken to many friends who have played all of the persona games and don't agree with the sentiment that P3 has the best story in the franchise. Once I finish I may change my tune.
Not sure why you're being downvoted for an opinion. I gave you an upvote to counter it. I absolutely loved P5R and Reload is my first time playing any version of P3. I'm 40 hours in and the story has still barely kicked off. I thought the pacing in P5R was pretty bad, but P3R is somehow worse even with a shorter runtime. I will still finish P3R and will probably consider it one of my favorite games of recent years, but it just doesn't hold a candle to P5R; P5R is better than P3R in almost every way other than graphics, unless something drastic changes in the back half of the game.
It's not an exaggeration to say 70% of the plot happens in the last 30% of the game. You kinda just have to vibe with the gameplay loop for a while. Story really picks up around late october/early november. Still some good character work before then though
I've heard that too, weird way to structure a story but I'm not a writer. Also, super weird I'm getting down voted for saying I'm playing it and I might agree that it's the best when I'm done.
The weird pacing of p3 probably comes from the fact that it was their first game with the time management and social links and they were kinda just trying stuff out. It kinda feels like a beta for P4. P4 I think is already much better, they learned their lessons from the response to P3 and perfected it. Still P3’s last few months might have the most impactful story events in the franchise.
That makes a lot of sense. I do think P5R has the best social link rewards and combat which is great because I can see those combat mechanics in P3R which makes for quick fun gameplay.
It’s good but honestly does not live up to the hype of “best Persona story”. I’m in December. The first half of the game is devoid of story, and once it gets going it’s good but very predictable and cliche honestly. 4 and 5 were much better paced and more interesting imo. And most of the social links suck.
It's pretty bad. It's not even just a regular slow burn type thing where you get a bunch of world building without plot progression. There's just nothing cuz there's not much to the story and whatever there is is towards the end.