Together RPG - Persona 3 - 2/1 - 4/1

[MrPopo]

It is, but not for good reasons. You can't control party members in base Persona 3, so they like to do stupid stuff. You don't get any of the S.Link benefits for party members either (like the take a lethal hit). That said, I'd say P3P and P4 are pretty comparable difficulty-wise, as P3P basically backports P4's improvements.

[TSTR]

Popo's got it, the forced AI control and other slight failures of the P3 battle system vs P4's are where any difficulty difference between the two lie. As he said, P3P fixes that.

Now, The Answer epilogue from FES is definitely harder than either.

[Kuruwin]

Persona 3 was my first Persona but i don't think is really because of it that the game felt lot harder than fourth. A lot of the early Persona 3 bosses are tricky but the bosses in Persona 4 are just mostly about stamina. They are not hard, they just take tons of hits to be killed.

[Exhuminator]

A lot of the early Persona 3 bosses are tricky

I've noticed that. Many of them have this one "trick" you need to use. Like they are only weak to a certain magic, or you can only hurt them with melee attacks, or you have to cast a particular barrier skill on your party, stuff like that. Plain ol' knock-out drag-out boss fights certainly aren't common so far.

[TSTR]

That's basically the way the P3 bosses go, you gotta figure out what gimmick they're weak to. Later on they just kinda start combining them in different ways for variety.

[Exhuminator]

You still playing this Stark?

Where I'm at now...

Play time = 12hr 41m
My protagonist is at level 20.
I'm at floor 64 in Tartarus.

I'm at the point where I have to force myself to play this, and that's not good folks. It'd be great if by now the story had become more involving and interesting. But it hasn't. It's just a cycle of boring school life, boring Tartarus grinding, rinse repeat. Occasionally you get a half interesting boss battle, but that's relatively rare. I'm still struggling to understand why some folks love Persona 3 so much, I really don't get it guys. I'm not saying it's terrible, just not really for me apparently. It just goes to show how different gamers value different things in their games.

So I'm taking a break from Persona 3. May or may not come back to it. I'm having a far better time with Tactics Ogre, that's more my jam.

[TSTR]

I will say that the dungeons and bosses in P4 are more interesting (even though they're very similar to P3 in setup and execution) because they more quickly tie directly to the characters and story.

[Stark]

I'm still playing Ex, but I don't (read: choose not to) play at the clip you do. I'm on Tartarus Level 19 or 20? And character lvl 13 or so. I still like it, but my suggestion to you is to drop this and play P4 Golden after awhile. I would agree with you that the characters are nowhere near as interesting to me as the ones in Persona 4.

[Exhuminator]

my suggestion to you is to drop this and play P4 Golden after awhile

I will take your advice.

I find it humorous that so many people started the Persona series with P4, and loved it dearly. But those self same people expressed dire lamentations when trying earlier games in the series. So I am very interested in seeing how different P4 really is compared to P3. Furthermore, I think I'd probably enjoy P1 & P2A:B versus P3, from what I've read and seen at least.

Keep on trucking at your pace Stark. I will gladly ready your review once you finish P3P. I am certainly interested in how our opinions of the experience will contrast.

[Stark]

I find it humorous that so many people started the Persona series with P4, and loved it dearly. But those self same people expressed dire lamentations when trying earlier games in the series. So I am very interested in seeing how different P4 really is compared to P3. Furthermore, I think I'd probably enjoy P1 & P2A:B versus P3, from what I've read and seen at least.

I'm a weird one in that I played Persona when it came out (I don't think I beat it) and then never another SMT or Persona game until Persona 4 Golden came out for the Vita. I've since played SMTIV (loved it) and Devil Survivor 2: Record Breaker (really liked it up til the end, where I thought it got a little too hard/grindy.)