I’m playing Portable on Easy so Tartarus is going quicker than it otherwise would, but I’m at around 15 hours
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This exact reason is why my play times on everything are mostly useless. I think I recall that my P3R clear save says 150-ish hours, but I couldn’t tell you how many of those were in the background, or while I was asleep at the proverbial wheel.
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Just finished the 8/5 Full Moon tonight and I had a bit of a struggle. Not the best team combo, went into it a few levels below average (the game says the average of other players at this point is 38 and my team’s average was 34), and I’d been away from the game since the end of July… but I made it!
Daily play’s been a pretty unique experience, but the rhythm I’ve been taking up over the summer months has been closer to a weekly check in. It’s felt appropriate for this stretch of the game - I can feel a tangible difference between the stressful daily Social Link balancing act and the comparably easy going summer break.
The downside’s been that I’ve only really been looking forward to evenings lately. In the week and a half leading up to 8/5, every evening in my notes starts with “Evening: Tartarus?” and then a blurb about the dorm hangout I decided to do instead. I’m not too fond of a lot of the Social Link folks who are in town for the summer. But I really do like the small opportunities to hang with the Scooby gang at the dorm - to the point that I had forgotten the gameplay reasons for doing these. I chose to hang out because I wanted to give myself and my friends the space to unwind and just be for a moment, to share and enjoy something without the pretense of Tartarus to bring us together.
What a way to live in 2009, to just hang out with some buds watching TV shows and old boxing matches on DVD all night!
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I’m surprised to hear people are going into that at level 38. I’m currently level 31 and didn’t have much trouble with it, but I’m playing on PSP so maybe the balance is different. I did all of the last section of Tartarus in one night because I’m trying to squeeze as much out of each evening as I can. I’ll probably do the same again, but not until late in the month in case of people going missing. I’ve got a bit over 40 hours on the clock at the moment, much of which is from trying to find rare shadows in Tartarus and from going around talking to everyone in town but some of which is probably from drifting in and out of sleep playing the game in the evening.
Was playing catchup last night doing the next stretch of Tartarus and then running through summer classes… Stopped playing when I was faced with an impossible choice.
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Triple brown
triple brown
triple brown cow
triple brown cow triple.
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I got way behind on this again, most of my gaming time through July and August went to playing FFXIV Dawntrail, but I finished that a couple weeks back and went into full catchup mode on Persona 3. Happy to report that I am now back in sync!
I have changed up my approach to the game somewhat - I need to be honest with myself about what I want from games like this, what frustrates me and how to avoid it. This attempt to “go in blind” has been a valuable learning experience for me, turns out the whole aspect of using external resources to find stuff out and plan plays a role in my enjoyment of this game type. Conversely, picking the wrong choice in a dialog, missing out on a timed event or spending hours hunting for a particular item are not things I want to do.
So, I have been looking stuff up and having a much breezier time. I am not following a full guide, rather just seeking out pertinent information as it comes up. I’ve played through a couple of full moon events and the summer vacation all in fairly short order. A ton of new characters have been introduced, every time I think they’re done another one shows up! The new party members are all pretty fun and varied.
My social skills stats are mostly maxed out, still got a bit to do on Academics but I did get top of the class in the exams before summer break. I’ve been mostly focusing on social links. I finished Chariot, Magician, Strength, Hierophant, Hermit and now I’m working on Emperor, Tower, Fortune, Hanged Man and Devil.
I’d say my favourite so far is probably Hermit, the character is fairly likeable and in the interactions are melancholy in a way I like. The main story is heating up too, although the last full moon event was just a single fight - a bit of an anticlimax!
Boss battles are kinda weird in this, as (as far as I know) there is no way to know what attacks they are gonna be using. Often my party members just can’t handle their elemental attacks and wipe, but my MC can switch to a Persona that resists it and just limp my way through the fight. I guess if I die, I can prep for the boss next time - but so far I have managed to scrape through each fight in a very uncool manner! Although I suppose there is something cool about the whole party getting knocked unconcious, then being woken up after the fight by the player character like “…it’s over.”
This just reminded me of one of my favourite moments in the game, although it happened a long time ago now! In the early game Akihiko is injured and chomping at the bit, complaining about being left out of the action and super excited to get back into it. Once he was available I put him in my party, and in literally the first fight, he took a hit before he was able to move that weakened him and was like “I don’t think I can go on, can you manage without me?” and ran away.
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I’m rubber-banding my way through this game like a Mario Kart but I am, again, caught up. I also had the distinct pleasure of explaining this game to a coworker who knows nothing about MegaTen in general.
I have some Big Suspicions about where the story is going, and I think Ikutsuki is likely the Big Bad or at least a future antagonist.
Also: really wish P3P had more to say about my party comp than “kinda weird you have a party of only girls.”
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Just got to September 1st! It’s time to go back, back to school again.
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I fell a bit behind a few weeks ago, finally caught up now (slightly ahead in fact thanks to midterms). Partly it’s not having time for the game, but also I’m tending to do Tartarus all in one go each month, which means a couple of hours or more spent on one day and a couple of minutes on all the rest, except I don’t generally have several hours for Persona so I’ll get behind each time I go in.
The big story stuff in November/October is Shinjiro (not sure if spoilers are necessary since in theory we’re all at the same point in the game, but I’ll err on the side of caution). I maxed out his social link - not sure if you have to hang out with him at every opportunity to max it but it’s pretty tight. Also I think my MC slept with him, just in time for bad things to happen. I enjoyed that he’s basically just a kind guy.
Something I didn’t enjoy was this month’s surveillance footage. The idea that these kids all have a camera in their room is pretty odd to begin with but I think the others have been pretty goofy. This one, where your character watches Mitsuru walk around in a towel, and it is implied sees her take it off, is just creepy and unpleasant.
I finally maxed out academics, which means I no longer have a default activity when nobody is available for social links, so I’ve started going to the arcade and using the persona stat boosting games. I assume the stat boosts don’t transfer when you fuse because it would lead to seriously overpowered personae, but I am wondering if just continuing to boost my Quetzalcoatl whenever I don’t have anything better to do will result in a super persona even though it’ll be relatively low level by the end of the game. I guess none of the games boost endurance though so it might result in a glass cannon.
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Alright gang, tonight’s the last full moon shadow! At last we finish this thing! Good luck!
I guess it’s fairly obvious that this isn’t going to be the end of the game, even if the characters in it think it is. Maybe they should have had the fool and death social links (I think those two - the ones that happen automatically) reach max or level nine by this point so it would look like the game really is about to end - I would have believed I’d just missed the Aigis and Mitsuru social link starts. I really don’t remember where the plot goes from here.
Edit: just got solidly wiped out by the boss - things were going pretty well, then it used Akasha Arts, which knocked out two party members, got a crit on a third, and put my MC in low health, then it did it again which finished off my two standing characters. That was pretty brutal. I’ll take another shot tomorrow.
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I’m on October 6th, just finished the October Full Moon and dealing with that fallout… Four short thoughts:
About the post-boss fight: I saw Aragaki’s death coming a mile away, and yet… All I can think of are the texts I ignored, all the times I brushed him off to hang out with others. Thinking of how, on the night before the operation, I had the choice to cook with him again, and instead I went to see Tanaka because the Social Link progress took priority for me… Feeling unexpectedly gutted by this! Intentionally rolling through the game with such a deliberate pace has made these characters bit of a fixture in my life. Alas, we roll on…
On the 10/4 Full Moon fight, Mitsuru’s theurgy hit Fortune for something like 2000 HP. It was incredible.
In the after school bit with Koromaru chasing off an angry dog at the park, I decided that I do not like any of the dog barks in the game. I couldn’t suspend my disbelief at the sound of what was clearly two men making dog sounds at each other in argument.
I realized a huge part of my putting the game down regularly the last couple of months is that I don’t connect with the Tartarus sections of the game nearly as much as I do with all the daytime stuff. I like fusing Personas (personae?) and engaging with the combat systems. Learning all the elemental resistances and nuances was fun! But I think the multiple times I’ve hit a loop of going broke creating equipment, seeing the fortune teller, and then spending hours in Tartarus picking up baubles to sell to a cop, it’s enough. I might kick it all the way down to Peaceful and just rocket through.
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I fell quite far behind due to Zelda coming out, but I made time over the weekend and yesterday to catch up.
Plot-relevant spoilers for 3-5 November (and also for Persona 4)
Yeah I was pretty spot-on with regards to Ikutsuki. I think this is one way in which being familiar with Persona prior to playing this game was a detriment, because Ikutsuki being a Bad Guy Actually was not a surprising moment. If anything, it felt like a proto-version of Persona 4’s plot twist. Naturally there were things I didn’t predict and there are still things occluded from my vision–like the exact nature of Pharos, who I have theorized is the MC but now think instead is potentially the final boss…or both! Which would be cool!–but it was almost kind of disappointing to be right.
Anyway I should be back to five-minute bursts for a little while. Admittedly I’ve been letting those short days wash over me and nothing really sticks, which is a shame! There have been some really interesting social link events and I wish they would have stuck a bit better in my memory. (Or that I had, I don’t know, written them down or something.)
I’m getting to the point where I often have nothing to do. I’ve maxed my social stats and a lot of social links, so on some days there’s nobody available to hang out with. It’s a bit frustrating that a lot of social links seem to just disappear - when it’s a party member who’s got something happening in the plot I suppose I get it but like the student council guy lately just hasn’t been there on his days. I’m wishing I’d prioritised school links earlier on and saved the bookshop and shrine links for days when school isn’t on. I guess you’re not supposed to be maxing them all out anyway.
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Pretty sure I aced the October midterms… Really hope I did, because I’m so tired of eating the seafood full course platter. Pretty sure at this point the MC’s got enough mercury in his system that he could start glowing.
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I’m a few days behind, working my way through the fifth block. The colour tone in there kind of gives the enemies a gold sheen that I was mistaking for rare enemies for a little while. I’ve only actually seen two of them though, both of which escaped me. I fused Daisoujou, whose special high-odds light attack was very good for just strolling through enemies up to the first couple of midbosses in the block. Between that and having ice, wind, and fire attacks available I rarely used my party for anything other than all-out attacks after knocking all the enemies down, though this did have me going through MP very quickly.
Once the enemies changed, I found a lot of holes in my persona setup, though Alice’s Die For Me! fixes a lot of them, again at the cost of rapidly depleting MP. Getting some all-target strike attacks is helping too.
I have been quietly chugging along with this. Unlike the people confessing that they have been struggling to play this game due to the added pressure of this experiment - I guess my confession is that I have been playing it but struggled to write anything about it!
I have settled into a cadence where I don’t play the game for a couple weeks, then I catch up. I am currently at December 9th - things are really kicking off! There have been a few story events in this game that really brought into focus one of my key issues with it, in that outside of the core group you don’t really get to see anyone interacting with each other. It’s just the completely perfect/attractive/smart/loved-by-everyone player character interacting with NPCs by themselves.
There have been a couple school events, some kind of festival I think and then the school trip, which had different classmates talking to and about each other and I really liked those - I suspect/hope this area of the game is more fleshed out in later entries.
It’s kinda crazy to think about how long I’ve been playing this game! My clock is sitting at around 90 hours over 9 months. I don’t think this style really suits me, I tend to go hard on a single game for shorter periods rather than spreading it out like this. Interestingly that often means a lot of game experiences don’t really stick with me in the long term - I suspect I am going to remember a lot about Persona 3 for the rest of my life, just because it’s been a small part of my life for the best part of a year. My brain is like “Oh I guess we need this stuff then.”
In terms of the gameplay, combat is fun enough but my team feels overpowered. I got the Thor persona and leaned into its abilities, leveled it up a bunch at the arcade and now my guy is just blasting everything effortlessly. I keep trying other personas but they are such a huge downgrade I end up switching back again. I went through a phase of really making the most of every Tartarus trip, going back over and over until every party member was tired and went home. Thus, I think I am a little overlevelled.
I am enjoying the story, it has taken a dark turn in recent months - lots of tragic stuff happening: betrayals, party members dying, other major characters dying. It seems important to the theme of this game that all the main characters have or will experience some major tragic loss in their lives and have to learn to come to terms with it. It’s broadly handled pretty well I think, and is quite unlike standard RPG fare in a good way . I have also been blasting through social links, I like some of those more than others. I am on track to have most of them finished by the end of the game I think, but I’ll likely miss out on a couple.
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I’m still chugging away at this. Got the bad ending, then went back and reloaded. I don’t think I’m going to get all the social links - I have several at like seven or eight. I think it’s a bit harder playing one day at a time because I can’t remember what I’ve done lately and who could benefit from a trip to the fortune box. Also I prioritised out of school links too much early on, and I think also non-party member in school links, which meant I used up days I could have been advancing party members and then had periods where they weren’t available but I’d already finished the ones that were. Oh well.
Elizabeth has told me her sister has opened a new door at Tartarus. I think that’s a bonus dungeon which I probably will not be engaging with, but I guess I’ll take a look next time I go.
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I can tell that you like to avoid spoilers:
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