Persona 3 Portable is an expanded port of the PS2 game. The main addition to this version is the female protagonist. However, this is far from the “definitive” or “complete” version of the game as it lacks the additional content from FES. There are a few differences in this port. The first is that the game is mostly the same as the PS2 version if you play the male route, but the female protagonist changes a lot of the social links portion of the game. The second difference is the presentation. Gone are the in-game cutscenes, they are replaced with a visual novel style of storytelling. You will have static backgrounds and character portraits whenever there is a scene. It’s most striking when even the animated cutscenes are replaced by screenshots. During the times when you can move across different locations, they are replaced with a pointer system. You move the onscreen pointer to where you want to interact. Not surprisingly, this isn’t great, but it is probably a limitation of the PSP hardware at the time.
The story is predominantly the same whether you play as the male or female protagonist. You are a transfer student at Gekkoukan High School, which is a school situated on the island. On your first night you experience the Midnight Hour, an extra hour after midnight that most people cannot perceive. It seemingly pauses time, turns all people into coffins for its duration, and shadows roam and attack anyone who isn’t a coffin. At the same time, seemingly connected, are people who suddenly lose consciousness, becoming apathetic. Together with a group of other students who can retain their consciousness during the Midnight Hour, you investigate what is happening as it is connected to the giant tower that only appears at this time, Tartarus. The game is a unique mix of story and combat. A huge part of the story and game is on the high school aspect, where you befriend and spend time with other characters, each with their own story arc. These are known as social links, and getting all of these done within one playthrough is tough given that there are very specific requirements and time management is crucial. Social links interact with the combat side of things as they help improve your persona fusing abilities.
The game has a turn-based battle system. characters can perform a physical attack with their weapons. However, each character has something equipped called a persona. Only the protagonist can equip and change to different personas. Each persona has their own stats, weaknesses and resistances. They also bring their own skills, where physical skills use up HP and magic skills uses up SP. Personas have their own levels separate to the protagonist and leveling them up by battling is so slow that it encourages you to create new personas by fusing two or more different ones together, which will usually be of a higher level. The battle system defaults to AI controlling the other party members. While you can change it to manual control during battle, it will default back to AI in the next battle, which is quite annoying. Playing smart is a big part of the game because if you hit an enemy with a weakness or a critical hit, then you get a bonus turn. This is a double-edged sort given the enemy can do the same to you. Knocking down all enemies with their weakness or a critical hit will allow your party to attack all at once with an all-out attack, and this is a nice sight to see.
The game takes place over the course of a game, and you play through each day. It is split between slice of life as you play through high school trying to level up your charm, academics and courage, and dungeon crawling. The main dungeon is Tartarus, a sprawling tower that is procedurally generated. Enemies roam the environment, so you trigger a battle by getting into contact with one. Considering how tight the corridors are, you usually cannot avoid a battle. Unfortunately, the gameplay loop and structure of the game becomes too repetitive. It can end up being a chore to play towards the middle of the game as it has massive pacing issues. Its biggest sin is the boring dungeon of Tartarus. It just isn’t varied enough to keep you going for 250+ floors and the enemy variety quickly turns to just being recolored versions of previous ones. The weakness carries on to the final sections of the game where there are just swathes of in-game days with not much plot going on as you are waiting for a set date to arrive to progress. Doubly so if you have completed most of the social links so you have much else to do. The story ending is as ambiguous and odd as it was in the original.
The game takes a long time to finish, roughly 35 to 40 hours if you follow a guide and rush through the dungeon crawling without worrying about min maxing or creating the best personas. There is a New Game Plus mode that allows you to carry over certain things, and of course, there are two routes to play through. However, it is hard to recommend playing both routes back-to-back since the general story remains the same, and the different social links aren’t enough ot justify playing through everything else, waiting for time to pass, and go through the same story beats. Overall, Persona 3 Portable is an impressive version of the PS2 game. The addition of the female protagonist, which changes up most of the social links so that effectively half of the story content is new, along with the quality-of-life updates, means that this version is still worth playing even if you have played the original. The graphics aren’t much to be amazed about and the usage of static backgrounds to tell the story in a visual novel style doesn’t do parts of the story justice. However, it was a compromise due to the hardware, and this game is still a valiant effort that isn’t too watered down while bringing plenty of other improvements.