Final Verdict: A
Final Playtime: 195 hours. Wait, shit, really? How did that even happen?

Alright, alright, I’m here, you all can quit your bitchin’ already. Sheesh, where would you fucks be without me telling you what’s shit and what’s slightly better than shit? So where’ve I been? Around. Fuck you, I don’t have to answer to you people. Ok no, but seriously, among other shit I’ve been playing P3P which happens to be a pretty longass game. You know how it is. I’m the only one keepin’ it real ’round here sinking 100+ hours into games while other bitches don’t even got the decency to post their playtimes. I mean, I ain’t calling no names but let’s just say some bitches better step their shit up.

But man, what was I supposed to be talking about? Oh right, how awesome I am. Wait, no, that wasn’t it. Wait, yes it was. No wait. Oh yeah, P3P.

So yeah, P3P. As you should already know, this is the third time we’re buying (and playing) Persona 3. First of all, what is that shit? I mean, don’t get me wrong, P3 is amazing, but it ain’t even the best SMT. Nocturne and DDS are both better, so why’s this one getting so much more love?

Oh I get it. Is it because it’s the one that put SMT on
the “map” for the fucktard masses? Yeah, I said it.
Not only is it no secret that P3 was the first SMT for
many people, but it’s also no secret that a lot of
these assholes irrationally proclaim it to somehow
be better than fucking Nocturne. That’s right, irrationally. This isn’t even opinion. It ain’t subjective. If you say P3 is better than Nocturne you are objectively a dumbass. Just accept it. Oh, and if you’re one of these dipshits who’s butthurt about learning the truth get the fuck out. Shit. My jaw is still on the floor from when I read EGM’s review of P3 where they rated it better than Nocturne and talked some bullshit about how the battle system was so improved and streamlined or some shit. What the FUCK. Not only is that downright dishonest but you know what else it is? Retarded.

I’ma tell you why assholes delude themselves with shit like this. It’s because they can’t face the truth that the reason they liked P3 more is because it’s so fucking noob friendly. It doesn’t kick your ass without mercy like Nocturne so these pussies are obviously happier. Shit. This is why the world needs someone like me. Someone who tells it like it is. Just straight up. No bullshit. Ok, maybe a little bullshit. But not the lie kind of bullshit. I’m not gonna fucking lie to you like those mainstream publications. You can trust me completely.

Shiet, that was some tangent. But sometimes you just gotta go on ’em y’know? You don’t like it you can get the fuck out. Anyway, like I was saying, so this is the third fucking iteration of P3, obviously because it’s the most popular SMT. And also like I already said, P3 is an awesome game, so from the beginning it was pretty impossible for P3P to be bad. I was hell of excited to hear it announced. Who cares that I already bought the exact same game twice before? I’ll fucking buy it again and play it again, that’s how much of a fanboy I am.

However, when it was announced that the game would be for the PSP, I was disappointed. After all, it’s no secret that I hate handhelds. As I’ve said too many times already, a game for a handheld will never be as good as if it had been made for a console. Worse graphics, worse sound, less space, smaller screen, worse controller. That’s how it is. The only people who are cool with handhelds are pussies who ride the bus to work every day like a little bitch.

So yeah. It was obvious that P3 was going to suffer from being ported to a handheld. And suffer it did. After all, there’s just no getting around the fact that a DVD has around 5 times as much space as a UMD. The game cannot be the same. Something obviously has to give. However, I’m not as unhappy with the results as I thought I would be. For one thing, I expected the quality of the music to either drop or for the songs to be cut short before looping but this didn’t happen. The sound is the same as on the PS2. If you play it on your TV, of course. The graphics don’t fare nearly as well as they’re just a little bit worse. P3P also does away with P3’s anime cutscenes and replaces them with still shots and text explaining what’s going on, which is gay, but oh well.

Another way that the PSP makes this game worse is that now you can’t run around town and school the way you normally would because all you control is a little pointer, clicking on areas of interest and whatnot. Though they added in a portrait of your character on the bottom-right corner of the screen. I guess so that we don’t forget that we’re supposed to be a person and not a cursor?

And yet P3P turned out to be better than P3 and better than FES. How? Simple. Because the game itself got a shit ton of improvements that outweigh the negatives caused by being handheld.

Let’s start with probably the most important one of all. It looks like Atlus learned their lesson and stopped being a bitch ass nyukkuh, because now in P3P you can finally fucking control your own party members. I’ve said it before, but there was just no fucking excuse for that shit. The battle system in P3 was already dumbed way the hell down compared to Nocturne/DDS. Not allowing you to control your own party members was akin to pissing on the wound. But now P3P’s system is more like P4’s. Which is to say, still dumbed down, but a hell of a lot better than what we had before.

Secondly, the addition of the new Maniac difficulty mode! I always said it. P3 was fucking offensively easy. Even FES’s hard mode was a walk in the park. So an even harder mode would be good right? Welllll, actually Maniac turned out to still not be hard enough for my taste. But hey, still better than normal and hard. More importantly, playing on Maniac allows you to fight the ultimate boss without doing a new game+, which is much appreciated, and also doesn’t transfer shit for you if you do start a new game+. One of the things that pissed me the fuck off about P3/FES was how if you started a new game+ (to be able to fight the ultimate boss), the game would transfer everything from your last playthrough. So you’d start the game at level 99 and be completely invincible and destroy everything. Do I even need to get into why that’s fucking RETARDED?! To take away the leveling aspect in an RPG is to destroy the game. Who could be jackass enough to play an RPG where they start maxed out? Not me, that’s for sure.

Next, and this was advertised a lot, you can now play the game as a girl. I thought this was pretty cool when I heard it, because it would change things up a bit. A lot of things that happen are heavily dependent on your gender. Just as an example, obviously the event where you’re picking up girls on the beach can’t work if you’re a girl yourself. So I expected some events like these to change, I expected them to have to revoice a bunch of lines since they’d have to change all the “he” instances into “she”, I expected a few social links to change, since obviously you won’t be dating the girls you could date in P3 if you’re a girl yourself.

But got DAMN. Never did I expect Atlus to go so far above and beyond expectations. Girl mode is practically a totally new game. That’s how much they changed shit up. The new stuff fucking never stops from the beginning of the game all the way to the end. I mean shit, back in FES I was just happy about getting new exam questions, but this is unbelievable. There’s ten shitloads of new dialogue everywhere, and not just where it absolutely had to be changed but just for no fuckin’ reason other than to make it better for the people who already played the game several times. All the new dialogue is voiced by the same actors too. And good thing too, because it would be heresy otherwise.

Indeed, there are new social links, but it’s even better than I imagined. You ever thought it was dumb how you couldn’t have social links with your male party members in P3? Same here. But P3P fixes this, and now you can hang out with Junpei, Akihiko, and what the fuuuuuuck even Shinjiro. And that ain’t even all, P3P also fixes something I’ve bitched about for a long time. In fact, I’ll just paste it from my FES review:

“This isn’t the full extent of my gripes with the dating sim aspect of the game though. Oh no, I have something else to bitch about. It’s simply this: the game trivializes relationships with girls. What do I mean by this? Well, there is no way to keep your relationship with any of the girl characters from becoming “intimate” after some time. In spite of this, the game wants you to develop a relationship with every character all the way. In short, it wants you to be some kind of pimp playah who doesn’t get emotionally invested in anyone. So what happens if you do what the game wants and go all the way with every girl? I think we all know what happens. Ultimately, every relationship becomes less meaningful. Less important. Less personal.”

Welp, not anymore. P3P now allows you to control the intimacy of your relationships the way P4 did. Another thing I really like is that you can choose to hang out with a person after their social link is already maxed if you want to take things further just for fun.

There’s so much more new stuff though I can’t list it all, including brand new songs using the same style as P3, new art and portraits, part time jobs, co-op attacks, missing people that you have to rescue, a totally awesome new ultimate boss as well as new boss challenges, completely new events, being able to easily manage your party from the menu, being able to leave the dungeon and then resume from the last floor you were at without having to reach a checkpoint, shiet.

The good things aren’t limited to new stuff they added though, I also like how they removed fusion magic, because some of that shit was seriously overpowered. Now if you want to use a fusion spell you have to get a card and you can only use it once per card, which greatly cuts back on how much you’ll want to use it.

Other than that, the same shit from P3/FES applies. Still pretty much the same type of gameplay, still the same story, Aigis still the best character ever, still the same shitty randomly generated dungeon. So if you want more info go read my FES review or something.

So yeah. This game is awesome. It manages to be even better than P3 despite being handheld due to improvements to the actual game. I don’t even need to tell you that it’s the best game you could ever hope to play on the PSP.

Final Verdict: A

Final Playtime: 195 hours. Wait, shit, really? How did that even happen?