P3P doesn't have the entire 30 hour epilogue, you don't really learn what happened to you at the end! That's the main issue. It has a lot of cool elements like the female protag and saving Shinji's life but yeah it's more of a supplemental experience.
I'll be honest, I'm not sure an extended epilogue would've really changed my opinion on the story or how the game played. By the time I got to the end all I could conclude was "It was alright." That may have been at the fault of what the game removed, it's hard to tell. I just didn't jive with P3 like the others. I can safely say though, it wasn't the 3D environments and exploration that sold either P4 or P5 for me, it was everything else.
And hey I actually liked adventuring tired and just using spells and being careful, I just found the extra difficulty fun, it felt like playing Nocturne. Oh and on that note, Nocturne is the main SMT experience, the newer ones are decent but being on handhelds has had some impact. Nocturne is just a masterpiece in general though. So glad they did a remake of it.
Personal preference and all that. I didn't think it was a very enjoyable mechanic.
After seeing some of the things I've seen with Nocturne in terms of difficulty... "masterpiece" is not what I would conclude either. But, I have a feeling a lot of this depends on what you like from your gameplay experiences. I personally feel that the game pointing the finger of god at you and going "
NO" before blasting you to pieces and forcing you to redo a bunch of grinding and progress is not good game design. I'm all for a challenging gameplay experience, but if the idea of the game going completely 180 on you and you could be wiped out at a moment's notice is supposed to be fun... then by all means, have fun. I, however, like to have the opportunity to at least react first and try to pull myself out of a tight situation, rather than have the enemy get the advantage due to RNG and decide that I need to go back an hour or two.
As for the guns, in p5 they were there to let you hit weaknesses mainly, a couple would do good damage like Ryuuji's and Haru's, and Anne had this one that charmed and she had (comparatively) lots of ammo so you could use it to get a ton of charm out of it, but overall I think they had their niche and they were totally fine. By making them have infinite ammo in p5r you are dumb if you don't magdumb on almost each fight cause the dps on that is insane, it's like a free attack skill or two without using up any hp. It got to a point where I just shifted the game's difficulty from normal to the highest, not sure what it was called, and it was still more or less the same outside of a couple of bad rng instadeaths where you get critted into megidolaon or something else.
True, which is why I think a middle ground could've (and probably should've) been met. Though, with more time to sit on the comments we made regarding it, I am starting to see the merits of the original's just a bit more. It just needed a slight tweak for P5R, not... what we got