If you absolutely MUST play only one game, then play P4, the ability to control your party members alone makes it a better game. But seriously, if at all possible, play both games, in order.....its, like, a moral imperative!
For me, computer-controlled allies added a bit of artificial difficulty to P3 FES.ScrabbitRabbit said:I'm surprised at how many people are saying P4 is easier. I found it much, much harder than Persona 3. I actually had more trouble with Persona 4 than SMT: Nocturne!
A nice summary of the plots. Personally, I prefer the P4 plot, since the premise seems a bit more believableDanny Royer said:The primary reason to play a Persona game (for me) is for the story and the characters. Chances are you'll like one game's story over the other due to personal taste rather than one being objectively better than the other.
Persona 3's story is pretty standard supernatural mystery stuff with a huge devotion to character interaction and character development. The overall theme of Persona 3 is Death and how we each deal with our mortality. There's only one major character (Fuuka) who doesn't have a person she knows more than a couple of months die in her back story or during the game.
Persona 4's story is a murder-mystery with supernatural elements. The overarching theme is to reach out to the truth, to face your problems, not be tempted by comforting lies and this theme mixes beautifully in both the main story and the characters you interact with. There are a couple of times where the main characters are presented with a red herring that make sense, but don't answer all of the questions aka a comforting lie. The characters you interact with also deal with facing how they really feel and the difference between who they really are and who they act like. The biggest cliche the game uses for that theme is the character who acts like a jerk to cover the fact that he/she is really just a big softie inside.
My personal favorite should be obvious given the length of those two paragraphs so yeah have some fun.
I wouldn't call P3P the best version, it's missing both the extra scenario from FES and any kind of animation or cutscenes thanks to the PSP's limitations.remnant_phoenix said:I know what P3 Portable on PSP or P4 Golden on Vita may be the best respective versions, but I'm not going to spend the money I'd need to invest to access those versions.
I think that description makes the dungeon crawling in Persona 3 sound a lot worse than it actually is. It doesn't feel like you're climbing a 265 floor tower when you're playing the game, it just feels like you're fighting through a dungeon. The tower is divided into segments and there are teleporters roughly every 15 floors that take you to and from the lobby to save and heal. In practice, it's really not that much different from Persona 4. There are more floors per section, but you also go through them quicker since the floors are more open-ended. You also explore Tartarus in the evening as opposed to after school, so you'll end up making more trips on average and progress at a faster rate.Drathnoxis said:The goal of Persona 3 is to climb a tower consisting of 265 floors. Two hundred and sixty five bloody randomly generated floors. It is the very definition of a slog. And it's all randomly generated in the blandest way possible, the way that makes every floor feel identical. Also, even going at a decent pace it'll still take about 30-60 minutes to climb 10 floors. Also, Also, if you get insta-killed by one of the many monsters that know cheap attacks you get to do it all over again from your last save. If that doesn't make your decision for you, I don't know what will.
The big difference between the games for me is that Tartarus is largely irrelevant for the majority of Persona 3. You could literally ignore the tower until it's time for the final boss (well, if you don't mind being severely underleveled.) There isn't much in it except random monsters, some bigger monsters that are the same as the random ones, and once in a while the color scheme changes.Kingjackl said:I think that description makes the dungeon crawling in Persona 3 sound a lot worse than it actually is. It doesn't feel like you're climbing a 265 floor tower when you're playing the game, it just feels like you're fighting through a dungeon. The tower is divided into segments and there are teleporters roughly every 15 floors that take you to and from the lobby to save and heal. In practice, it's really not that much different from Persona 4. There are more floors per section, but you also go through them quicker since the floors are more open-ended. You also explore Tartarus in the evening as opposed to after school, so you'll end up making more trips on average and progress at a faster rate.
Also, the risk of loosing all your progress to an unlucky death is an issue in P4 as well. It wasn't until Golden that they added checkpoints for each floor, and even those don't auto-save the game.
Don't get me wrong, Persona 4 is definitely an improvement. The reason I'm defending Tartarus (and Persona 3 in general) is because it came first and set the template for the Midnight Channel. It's why I argued that people should play 3 before they play 4; 4 has better dungeons, better gameplay and better social links, but that's because it had all the groundwork laid by 3 to build on. To get the full experience, I would advise playing 3 first, because you'll get a great game, and you'll enjoy 4 a lot more from having the comparison.Drathnoxis said:The big difference between the games for me is that Tartarus is largely irrelevant for the majority of Persona 3. You could literally ignore the tower until it's time for the final boss (well, if you don't mind being severely underleveled.) There isn't much in it except random monsters, some bigger monsters that are the same as the random ones, and once in a while the color scheme changes.Kingjackl said:I think that description makes the dungeon crawling in Persona 3 sound a lot worse than it actually is. It doesn't feel like you're climbing a 265 floor tower when you're playing the game, it just feels like you're fighting through a dungeon. The tower is divided into segments and there are teleporters roughly every 15 floors that take you to and from the lobby to save and heal. In practice, it's really not that much different from Persona 4. There are more floors per section, but you also go through them quicker since the floors are more open-ended. You also explore Tartarus in the evening as opposed to after school, so you'll end up making more trips on average and progress at a faster rate.
Also, the risk of loosing all your progress to an unlucky death is an issue in P4 as well. It wasn't until Golden that they added checkpoints for each floor, and even those don't auto-save the game.
Persona 4 dungeons, on the other hand, were all related to the immediate story, were visually varied in a way that tied them to the story and characters, and (most important of all) were short. There were 8 dungeons in P4 with a total of 77 floors, that's about 1/3 of Tartarus with more differentiating them than a pallet swapping of colours.
Granted the mini story dungeons in Persona 3 were okay, but they were barely a blip compared to the monstrosity of Tartarus.
Tartarus could have worked if they cut the amount of floors in half and made ANY attempt to make it anything but a generic dungeon. It would have been all too easy to give the scenery some story significance in any way. I'm trying to avoid spoilers so I can't be too specific, but suffice it to say that I was intrigued by the idea of Tartarus, which looks really cool in cutscenes, and was really eager to get in there to explore. That is, until I got in and realized there wasn't actually anything to Tartarus but random floors filled with the same 20 enemies.
And yes, the cheap deaths still exist in P4, but it just seems that there were way more enemies in P3 that would come and target my weakness and stunlock me to death.