#I'm probably doing myself no favors for the FES fans but im really not trying to bash on them

[casualotptrash]

Why the Persona 3 FES vs Portable Debate Makes Me Want to Fly Into the Sun Pt. 2

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Hello everybody and welcome to Part 2 of this emotionally fueled rant. In my previous post I went over a lot of the changes that Persona 3 Portable makes from Persona 3 FES, and how a majority of them can make the game more enjoyable for certain people. This spawned from the comment I see a lot, which is that instead of playing Portable people can just play FES with a controllable party mod and it makes everything hunky dory.

Below I will go over the next thing that infuriates me about this whole discussion: the idea that FES is objectively better because it has cutscenes and is not done in the “visual novel” style of Portable.

To cut to the chase, Portable gets shit on quite a bit for its presentation and some choices available in the game. One of the most popular suggestions I see when someone is asking which game to play is to first play FES and then play Portable for the FeMC route, if they want to see that one. This is in order to get the “real” experience first, and I think that is some bullshit.

It seems people forget completely that Portable has a Male route option! Newsflash, it does. As far as I know, other than the gameplay changes I mentioned in my previous post, the Male route in Portable is exactly the same story-wise as FES. However, I assume this isn’t brought up because people who enjoy FES and don’t like Portable consider the FeMC route the only reason to do a run of Portable. Normally, this wouldn’t be an issue....but this isn’t really the case.

What elevates this into being a part of the reason why I hate this debate is because I see so many people essentially demand that newcomers to the game play FES first. They say it is the “real” way to experience the game, and they say that everyone will have more of an impact from FES and enjoy the game more. Like I said, I see this so often that it frustrates me. Shout out to people who are actually cool about the comparisons and don’t sound like they’re forcing the newcomer into either game. Anyway, there is one glaring, serious issue with this type of statement about FES.

It is completely subjective.

Surprise surprise, an opinion is subjective. Now I know that sounds obvious, but remember I’m talking about the issue where people act like FES is factually better than Portable. So much so that they say it’s the “real” way to experience the game.

I’m going to be real with y’all, I know for a fact that if I had played FES first I would have taken way longer to finish it, might have not even finished it, and definitely wouldn’t have enjoyed it as much. Thankfully I had a family member who got me into Persona, so when discussing which version I would play I decided P3P would be better based off of what he said, and he also happened to have the game on Vita.

I think the main reason that this statement gets thrown around is because 1. FES was the first of the two to come out, so it could be seen as the best experience by the people who played it first or became a sort of “classic” among the fans, and 2. it is coming from a specific crowd in the Persona fandom.

As anyone who steps into the fandom can see, people play Persona for a wide variety of reasons. Some play for the gameplay, and like to challenge themselves to beat the game on the hardest difficulty with one persona only. Others play for the social sim aspect of the game, and enjoy the dating, characters, and social links/confidants. Obviously the story brings most people into the game in the first place, but some might enjoy the story and the lore of the series the most.

I am not trying to knock anyone from any of those categories, but I think the reason that this statement about FES gets thrown around is because it comes from the first and perhaps third category of people.

For the first category of people, they think Portable is too easy (despite a harder difficulty than FES being implemented and the option to just use the tactics like FES) and prefer the FES combat. I have even seen someone try to explain the lack of direct control of party members by saying that the MC wouldn’t be able to “control” the party members and they would do whatever they want, aka the party members would have autonomy if they were real. I can see this being a nice little headcanon about the gameplay, but they also don’t mention that you can do the exact same thing in Portable and set party members to something other than direct command; so it’s not really applicable to the argument of why FES’s combat is better as far as the tactics are concerned.

I assume that the main gripe with the story of Portable from FES fans, aka some changes to the plot with the FeMC route (a rant for another time because the changes to the plot aren’t that well-done in the first place...so they don’t really change the story...) and the overall presentation of the story, is from the third category of people.

This is brought up with two factors: the lack of cutscenes and an overworld in Portable, resulting in a “visual novel” type of presentation. Like I mentioned earlier, this is a bad reason to say that one game is better than the other because it is completely subjective. Some people may really benefit from the cutscenes and overworld, while others might not care that much. That being said, I can understand the issue with the lack of cutscenes a lot more than the issue with the overworld. It makes sense that a cutscene could have a larger emotional impact, depending on if it is well done or not. However, I really don’t understand the problem with the overworld. I suppose it’s cool to see Port Island in 3D...but the mechanics are really not that different in Portable? An argument could be made that moving in the 3D environment makes people feel more connected to the locations, but like I just mentioned the mechanics aren’t too different so a player in Portable is still seeing all of the locations and “moving” around in it. The difference is that they’re just moving a dot instead of a character model. Now I do like the idea of an overworld better, and I agree it’s cool to see your model walking around and to see all of the party members in the dorm and such, but I think it is the weakest point to bring up when trying to say that it affects the plot in any significant way. Lastly, for the lore bits, I assume people in this category like the addition of The Answer, but even opinions on whether or not that is worth it are very divisive.

(Side note, I forgot this in my previous post but Portable also adds the fast travel mechanic like the one P4 has, so instead of needing to run everywhere like in FES you can just fast travel to locations)

However, this is still my subjective opinion on the matter so do with that what you will. Perhaps it does really affect someone’s enjoyment of the game, but claiming it will affect everyone’s enjoyment is just a false statement to try and spout.

If you’re wondering why I haven’t mentioned the second group, it’s because I believe they would either like Portable a bit more or not see much difference between the two. I personally fall into this category. To be honest I don’t think the visual novel style took that much away from the story itself, and I really enjoyed the additional social links with the male party members in the FeMC route. I think it gave them a lot more “life” per say, and elevated their characters from being good to great. I will agree that the lack of cutscenes made some scenes a little less impactful/cool, such as the MC persona awakening, but that didn’t negatively effect my experience with the game as a whole. In fact, Persona 3′s cast is actually my overall favorite of the three neo-Persona games, and in large part because of the additional characterization that Portable gives them.

Well...I think that’s everything I had to say? Overall, just uh don’t try and force someone to play either of the versions because of your own subjective views, don’t act like those views are anything but subjective, and let people come to the decision themselves based on facts about both of the games (Ex. They can decide themselves if no cutscenes would impact them or not rather than someone stating it will impact them less for sure).

I think this all really just boils down to needing a legit, definitive version of the game...but I’ll save that for later :)

(Last side note, I know emulation is a thing but why do people suggest buying/emulating/a mix of that for two games instead of just one game or the other? This is 100% me being lazy but that just seems like a lot of work when you could either buy one game and get the content, or buy another game and get the content in a slightly different way (barring The Answer).)