Persona 3 Portable may lose a bit of visual flair in its transition to handheld, but what it gains in pace, customization, and emotional nuance is well worth it.
There’s a reason high school and demons often find themselves intermeshed in fiction: being a teenager can be hellish. From Buffy the Vampire Slayer to countless anime series, it’s a rich vein to mine — but one that’s seldom touched by video games. Because of this, Persona 3 Portable feels fresh, even though it’s a rerelease of a four-year-old game.
There are a few drastic changes in Persona 3 Portable, but the main points are the same. The game still revolves around a protagonist enrolling in a new school: Gekkoukan High. The island the school is on has a bad habit of turning into a bad place during the Dark Hour. This happens after midnight, every night, and it’s when bad things occur. Most people are turned into coffins, but there are a select few who are able to see what’s actually happening.
You play one of those unfortunate few. It falls on your shoulders to fight against the Shadows, whose attacks on citizens render them into slack-jawed vegetables. Luckily, these few chosen people can evoke Personas — mental representations of the self that fight against Shadows in this alternate world. The protagonist has the unique ability to summon multiple Personas. You and a group of schoolmates must balance school life with a demon-hunting career, while trying to uncover what exactly is going on.
The bulk of Persona 3 Portable is a social sim, asking you to juggle the demands of the school day. This isn’t terribly difficult; the only real negative social consequences come from cheating on a romantic partner or saying something incredibly stupid. The whole city is open to explore, and with the lack of serious time pressure, it’s a pleasure to poke around and meet new people. There are some social stats that can be improved, like courage, charm and academics, but most of the time you’re focused on building relationships. On a gameplay level, these relationships give stat boosts that carry over into combat.
These stories are some of the best parts of Persona 3 Portable, and there’s a wide variety of relationships represented. Aside from the obvious bonds of friendship or romance, there’s the sort of strong but odd camaraderie that comes from meeting someone online, or hanging out with an elderly couple who’ve lost their son, or comforting a young girl whose parents are going through a divorce. These relationships grow slowly and organically, providing some of the better moments in the game.
The plot itself is also top shelf. Large battles take place every full moon, and each month usually revolves around a central mystery. The pacing is strong, with major story beats every few hours of play, all tied into the broader narrative. The story is ambitious and, while it involves magic, the occult and demons, at its core it’s about the people who make up the crew.
The role-playing part of Persona 3 Portable is less successful. Tartarus, a tower that only appears during the Dark Hour, is where most of the action happens. Players climb its levels, encountering Shadows and choosing whether to engage in combat. The battles themselves are fun — the different characters have different strengths and weaknesses, which keeps things interesting.
It’s not overly complex, like rock-paper-scissors. Most enemies can be analyzed for weaknesses, which plays a large role in the tactics. Likewise, creating new Personas adds colour and variety. Personas can be won through battle, but most are created by fusing two or more together. There’s a collector’s urge to try to obtain them all, and plenty of minutiae to master for hardcore players. The game doesn’t demand this level of investment, though — on normal difficulty, there’s no pressure to dive deep into Persona fusion.
“Persona 3 Portable feels fresh even though it’s a rerelease of a four year old game.”
The problem with Tartarus is the lack of variety. Each block has a slightly different aesthetic, but you’re still going through randomly generated mazes. There’s the occasional mini-boss every few floors, and the full moon events are usually great set pieces, but there’s a lot of grinding. Gaining levels — for both characters and the tower — feels superficial and doesn’t offer a strong sense of reward.
Improvements in the port somewhat offset these old problems. While Tartarus is mostly unchanged, the social environments are no longer 3D spaces that you walk through, but instead static 2D screens. The game loses some of the energy that came with those living environments, but the trade-off is a smoother experience. Players can quickly bring up a menu to see what can be done in any given space or jump to specific rooms. Another trade-off: the lush anime cutscenes from the PS2 original are gone, replaced with a few gameplay tweaks borrowed from Persona 4.
Chief among them is the ability to control your teammates in battle. This is rarely a major issue — the AI fights competently and usually takes advantage of enemy weaknesses. However, some boss battles demand precision and subtlety the AI can’t quite manage. There are two new difficulty modes — one very easy, another very hard. Gone is the “The Answer” epilogue that came with the PS2 rerelease, but that’s more than made up for by the ability to choose a female protagonist. Playing as a young woman changes a few things: the romances shift, offering the option to pursue male classmates instead of the original male paths. Different relationships become available, though the bulk of the game remains the same.
It’s high praise that, despite its repetitive dungeons, Persona 3 remains an engaging game, even on its second rerelease. Atlus’s focus on story has paid off handsomely. Instead of feeling dated by its grind-heavy gameplay, Persona 3 Portable feels just as relevant and compelling because of its storytelling. If you’ve already played the game, there’s little reason to come back aside from a few tweaks — but for fans taking their first plunge into the series, it’s quite a treat.
