I clearly don’t learn from my previous mistakes very well. Two years after reviewing two 60 hour open world games within the span of a month and thoroughly regretting it, I opted to review two 60 hour JRPGs within the span of a month. It’s gotten so bad that I actually found myself momentarily pausing to try and check my SP before leaving my apartment at one point this week, before realizing how stupid that sounded. 

Persona 3: Reload, then. A remake of the original Persona 3, which I missed out on the first time around. Persona 4 was my entry into the series, so consider this more of an overarching review of the game and its merits, rather than how good of a remake it is (beyond a single point I want to touch on briefly). As is series tradition, you play as a high school transfer student who, in this version at least, is decidedly male, which felt like a bit of an odd decision to me given that the PSP version included the option to play as a female protagonist. While I usually prefer to play as a guy in games where I’m given the choice, removing previously established content feels like a bummer for those who would have preferred to play as a girl.

Setting that aside, the plot of Persona 3: Reduction in the Maximum Number of X Chromosomes unfolds primarily within the confines of a Japanese high school. Your transfer student moves into a dormitory that turns out to be run by a secret school club focused on fighting mysterious monsters called Shadows, which appear only at midnight by using Personas. As per series tradition, you discover that you have special powers, like being able to switch between a variety of Personas rather than being stuck with just one (in contrast with other team members), and being able to hallucinate old men and a child. You're also capable of making friends with anyone and immediately adjusting to a new school as a teenager, which is perhaps the most unrealistic part of the game. You join up with the aforementioned secret monster fighting club and work to unravel the mysteries behind why the Shadows are appearing and how to stop them.

It’s tough to summarize the plot much beyond that without spoiling significant elements; Persona 3: Revisit the Velvet Room Over and Over is on a much slower boil than its more modern counterparts. While Persona 4 introduced its TV World and kicked off a kidnapping/murder plot within a couple of in-game weeks, and Persona 5 threatened to kick you out of school even faster, several months pass before any significant plot developments happen in Persona 3: Restarting to Answer the Social Link Correctly. While I can appreciate working your way up to things, I think there’s a fine line between deliberate pacing and not having enough happening to maintain player interest, and I found myself feeling like the game was on the latter side of that line quite a bit at the start.

Once the story does get going, though, there's a lot to love. Persona 3: Repeatedly Visiting the Noodle Place to Boost my INT Stat really focuses on showing its characters grapple with complex and emotionally challenging topics, like mortality, finality, and learning to let something go and move on. While Personas 4 and 5 certainly tackled some weighty topics in their own right, and could be plenty dark at points, this entry goes well beyond its successors in those respects, and frankly I think it's better for doing so. I think Persona’s at its strongest when it's dealing with dilemmas founded in uncertainty over what the right course of action is, rather than cartoonishly evil villains, and 3 really dives headlong into that in the second half of the game. I’m usually against the “it gets good later” argument, but for what it’s worth, the narrative in Persona 3: Rearming Myself from a Sketchy Police Officer does get good about 20 hours in.

The gameplay is, probably unsurprisingly, similar to 4 and 5, with a mixture of combat and social life. During the day, you go to school, and can then opt to spend time afterwards in a variety of ways, including hanging out with friends, going to restaurants/entertainment venues, or gardening. Most activities either raise your character attributes (which you usually need a certain amount of in order to unlock other activities) or your social bond with an individual (which improves your ability to craft better Persona to assist in battle). All of these operate on an inherent timer of sorts; each activity takes up a “time slot,” and there are only two time slots per day, which means prioritizing how you want to spend your time is important. Certain activities are also only available during specific days and times, which makes it essential to plan these elements out in advance.

The links themselves are generally well written and engaging, with a good variety of characterization and interesting arcs for the characters involved. I still think 4 handles this aspect the best, but 3 isn’t that far behind. Nearly everyone gets some sort of interesting arc or development, with my personal favorite being Miyamoto’s, which hit pretty close to home as a former high school athlete myself. Like other Persona titles, there’s also a good gameplay incentive to use them, as improving links also improves your ability to fuse certain types of Persona.

Which brings us to the combat. In the Persona universe, being a transfer student comes with a mandatory year spent in an alternate dimension inhabited by monsters that real people keep slipping into. Like other entries in the series, combat works on a turn-based format, with usual magic attacks being replaced by skills from Personas. While the other members of the party are restricted to one Persona, your protagonist can freely switch between them, leaving him as a jack of all trades.

Combat is broken into two parts. Every month, a story event will occur where you go to a specific area and fight a boss. In between those events, you’re tasked with grinding your character up to appropriate levels in the game’s mega dungeon, Tartarus. And this is unfortunately the game’s biggest problem. Initially I thought Tartarus was going to be the predecessor to Persona 5’s Mementos: a grinding/predominantly side mission area that would exist alongside the main dungeons. Sadly, it’s the only dungeon in the game, and it’s just a bunch of procedurally generated, similar-looking floors one after the other, with random encounters along the way. There is some visual variety between areas, but within them everything is exceptionally samey. And worse yet is that it's absolutely massive, with a whopping 264 floors, and you’ll need to have explored all of them by the end of the game.

Perhaps people with a very, very high tolerance for grinding will appreciate this, but personally, forcing myself to go back into Tartarus for another round of samey floors, samey encounters, and the exact same two battle songs over and over was just never fun, and it made me start to wonder if the protagonists’ habit of putting guns to their heads to activate their Personas was meant to be some kind of subliminal messaging for what Tartarus will make players want to do to themselves. It’s not hard, it’s just tedious and time consuming. Tartarus really could’ve been about half its actual length and I don’t think anything of value would have been lost.

Although if that had been the case it might’ve just revealed how little there is to Persona 3. Without that grinding, the non-combat activities in the regular world get pretty boring too. There are no minigames like darts or fishing, and there are far fewer major story points where the gang just hangs out to break the pacing up. Basically every non-Tartarus night is just picking somewhere to hang out in the city and then watching some text appear on the screen describing how the night went. There’s nowhere near enough content here to justify the game’s length, and frankly even the non-combat portions are often pretty repetitive.

There is a lot to like, and even love about Persona 3, but it’s all buried underneath an incredible amount of tediousness - a very slow start to the story, an insipid amount of busywork and bland grinding in Tartarus, and a fairly unengaging overworld - so it’s tough to say I found myself enjoying it as a first timer. Perhaps it’s unfair to judge an older title by more modern standards, and I’m sure for people who enjoyed the original game, there’s no reason to dislike what’s here. If you're someone who doesn't mind a lot of busy work and a slow start in exchange for an interesting story (particularly the ending), then feel free to ignore everything written previously. However, it’s tough for me personally to view this as anything other than an average experience.