Title: Persona 3 Portable
Platform: PSP
Genre: RPG

Unfair bias warning: I consider Persona 4 to be one of the best games in the last 10 years, and I pre-ordered Persona 3 Portable the moment it was announced, Junpei's hat be damned. So I should gush about how it is digital perfection, right? A flawless union of P3's story and characters with P4's enhanced gameplay mechanics? Well...

Yeah, most of the major the changes are great. So great in fact, that it makes some of the design flaws in the original game's release all the more apparent and baffling. At the same time, though, some of the changes have caused the gameplay to suffer by skewing the difficulty in completely weird ways. For instance, there is now the option to work part time some places, which gives stat boosts AND increasing amounts of money, so there is less "choice" about managing your time and more of "do this every single time just because it'll grind my stats and money faster." The original release had less of these and a more freeform, "I wonder what I should do today" feel. You know, like an RPG. The tiredness gimmick is thankfully made irrelevant now, but the costs of healing in Tartarus are way too low, and it is possible to clear an entire block in one night with no real sacrifice. So the overarching game has been made a lot easier and more accessible, but the difficulty of the fights ends up seeming even more like a slap in the face to newcomers. Weird, man.

The addition of the bubbly, slightly catty female character is a welcome change, as is forming links with your party members, but I found some of the new female-specific links to be rather...well...underwhelming. Almost half-assed, if you will. In addition, while I understand the limited storage of a UMD, the decision to convert the entire experience to one of those god-awful visual novel things really, really makes it hard to stomach the non-combat portions. To put this into perspective, I also absolutely abhor Aigis. Personal taste, of course. Lastly, the translation is absolutely plagued by bugged out strings and botched lines. This is 2010. Not acceptable.

God dammit, why you gotta make me hate on you, Persona 3? I really do still love the game. Despite the portability shrinking pains, this is still the most playable iteration of an already fantastic RPG yet. If you have a PSP and two neurons to rub together, you'll be doing yourself a favor by trying it out - though I will say that it helps immensely to already be familiar with the series and the third game in particular before jumping in. It's as engrossing as it ever was, even with some of the "STOP FUCKING WITH IT" changes and unfortunate limitations.