How persona 3 can change lives is a mystery to me. It did change mine for the worse though.
Epitome of bad jrpg design:
* Repetitive and simplistic combat: once you grasp a few concepts such as weaknesses and the importance of buffs/debuffs, that's it. Underleveled? good luck (instadeath). Not underleveled? hit weakness -> block enemy attack -> repeat. There's not much room for strategy. Well, there's some room if you're a bit underleveled and that's when I had some fun, but it's hard to not level a bit too much too easily even in hard difficulty. The gameplay overall falls extremely short and is very simplified compared to smt3 or smt5.
* Uninspired dungeons: every floor is procedurally generated. Besides some minor layout changes every floor and aesthetic changes that doesn't follow any particular logic every ~25 floors, they are all the same. Same enemies in different color over and over. Lesser enemies are easily avoidable and you don't have any reason to fight them other than keeping up with the occasional stat check.
* Flat and uninteresting characters: the social-sim aspect is but a way to gain social stats and boost personas' exp gain at fusion, so you can't say what you really think or whatever you want when socializing unless you're okay with sacrificing these. Or you'll have to spend time with a character you hate just for the stats. Anyway, there's not one character that has the complexity one might expect from such a praised story, not even the main cast. The difficult themes the game allegedly deals with are but scratched at surface level, if at all.
* Soundtrack: it's very good, but it gets old after the 5645th time you listen.
* Awful pacing: Too many floors. Too much free time to socialize between boss and boss. Not much happening storywise. I'm the kind of player that likes to experience most of what a game has to offer but this is a bit too much low quality content stretched ad-nauseam.
*SO F*CKING LOOOOOOOOOOONG.
*another remake of a remaster of a remake of a remake accordingly priced, which still somehow manages to leave content behind: apparently you were able to play as a female character in persona 3 FES whereas you have no choice but to play the male main character in persona 3 reload.
Pros:
* Stylish: the menu is cool.
