Welcome to Persona 3

Hello everyone! I'm glad you've shown interest in this fascinating JRPG. With the recent release of Cathrine we can see that the structure Persona 3 has brought us isn't going away anytime soon and can be applied to other genres too! This is a great chance to get a new perspective on this classic game, or to relive old memories with others.

So, how can you get Persona 3? There are 2 easy to get versions of the title, Persona 3 FES for the PS2 and Persona 3 Portable (P3P) for PSP. FES can be found easily online for about 20-30 USD and P3P for 39.99 on PSN and retail copies for about the same or less. There are differences between these versions however and here is a brief list of some of the more important ones.

-Event Scenes are now just portraits over still backgrounds as opposed to 3D models acting out the events

-Exploration is done entirely through either menus or simple cursor moving over maps rather than exploring via a world map

-Battles are more similar to Persona 4 than 3. Changing various effects but most importantly changing the knockdown system and allowing you to directly control your characters, rather than giving AI general orders.

-You can now manually manage your teammates equipment.

-A female storyline, not considered canon, nor considered for core discussion in this playthrough.

These changes make Persona 3 Portable a much friendlier and easier game, although can be criticized for changing some of the mechanical story telling elements. P3P is still very enjoyable, and these changes also make the game a little faster to get through on the whole, and as such if you don't have a lot of free time or if you have large commutes this version is probably the better one to get.

So, some other notes.

Due to the nature of Persona 3 it's much harder to break it up into only a few topics, so there will be a much larger array of topics than you might be used to for a VGC playthrough. As such it's also going to be much much messier. To cover for that there will be a 'master topic' of sorts to keep track of all of these. Click here for that thread It's also stickied for easy access

If you make a new topic, could you please PM me so I can add it to this master list.

In those topics I'll try to place one or two questions to guide your thoughts, but don't feel like you must stick to those points. I've avoided mentioning any plot points in these guiding questions though. Which means for the most part they don't refer to any at all

For the purposes of this playthrough we will be assuming you are playing either Persona 3 FES “The Journey” or Persona 3 Portable Male main character route. The original Persona 3 has some minor differences to FES but it's mostly simply an addition of content to FES more than anything else. The default play mode of Persona 3 is “The Journey” for those not aware. Although you are welcome to play the female route please be aware that you are getting a very different experience, but the contrasting view would be interesting.

Please try to warn readers of potential spoilers in your posts, things like spoiler tags are great for that. This is especially important for the playable character discussions like Yukari or Akihiko as unlike the relatively self contained social links, those characters are going to be your conversational bread and butter for the next 70 hours.

All discussion of plot that was from the previous month does not need to have spoiler tags attached. You may refer to the events of May in the June topic with no worry or complaint about spoilers. That being said, don't enter later topics unless you are up to them.

DO NOT TRY FOR A PERFECT PLAYTHROUGH. There is a lot of content to all the Persona 3 games. You could get a perfect playthrough in your first attempt, however if you were to do so you would be stuck looking at a walkthrough and miss out on some of the charm of the game. How you spend your character's time is what makes the game a unique and interesting adventure.

So, have fun! Any general questions?

EDIT: For the purposes of general ease I will sticky the month I'm currently progressing through as champion. The goal is to get through a month every 1-2 weeks as champion too.

• Battle mechanics (no thread for that, if I see correctly, even though it's interesting...)
• "Gaming" the social links (this is adressed in the "Relationships" thread - would love to hear more thoughts about it, though)
  
• How the game tries to force you to make decisions about what to pursue during the limited time you are given - and how, towards the latter part of the game, those mechanics utterly fail, thus rendering the game more monotonous and sabotaging the idea that balancing the "superhero" identity with a normal teenage life is brutally difficult
• Etc.