I Replayed Persona 3 FES To Remind Myself Why The Answer Might Be One Of The Worst Things In The Persona Series

WARNING: THIS BLOG CONTAINS SIGNIFICANT SPOILERS PERTAINING TO PERSONA 3! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

A Little Backstory

I have now played Persona 3 and seen its ending twice in the year of our Lord, 2023. The first and more understandable time was done as preparation for my blog about Persona 3 Portable's Game Pass release. To better put me in the shoes of those heralding the game's re-release on modern platforms, I gave P3P a shot and was largely satisfied, though still bummed that more effort wasn't put into smoothing off its rough edges. My second rodeo requires more context to justify. I have been following the developing story that is Persona 3 Reload since its initial reveal. Since the game's announcement, more details have emerged about how Atlus plans to modernize Persona 3 for contemporary audiences while preserving the heart and core of the original. One of the main sticking points by fans about Reload has been Atlus' insistence that certain relationships and social links from FES and Portable be present in Reload even though the female protagonist and certain FES additions (i.e., The Answer) will be absent. Atlus is doing a weird tightrope balancing act wherein they want to have the best parts of Persona 3's ancillary releases without committing to emulating either shot-for-shot.

The first of those has become a constant rallying cry for fans. It has generated the expected petitions and online essays professing a desire to see both the female protagonist and core elements from Persona 3 Portable in Persona 3 Reload. Things are notably different when it comes to The Answer. No one, and I mean NO ONE, wants Atlus to bring back The Answer, and its omission from the re-release of Persona 3 Portable on Game Pass and other non-Sony platforms was a broadly welcomed decision. And before any of you chime in that The Answer wasn't part of Portable in the first place, I'm aware of that, but you get my point nonetheless. Regardless, The Answer has a reputation. It is known for one of two things. First, it is a single expert-level dungeon that eliminates the social link dynamics and typical character progression trappings that make most of the games in the Persona franchise uniquely Persona. By lacking those trappings, it is a reminder of how little hook there is in the act of playing the Persona games when they are not connected with the expected character-oriented feedback loops that have since come to define the series. Second, it makes some highly questionable worldbuilding and narrative decisions that some have described as erring on character assassination or the outright ruination of Persona 3's best asset: its ending.

So, why did I play this thing? First, I have a penchant for torturing myself for everyone's entertainment, a fact my adventure game puzzle reviews all but prove. Second, with Persona 3 Reload looming right around the corner, I wanted to give The Answer a shot to see if there was even a fraction of it worth salvaging for Reload's purposes. Is there a way to re-write The Answer to make it fit the scope and sequence of Reload? Likewise, some in the Persona community have characterized The Answer as the worst official Persona product ever made. I wanted to test that theory by giving it a whirl. Finally, I wanted to return to FES to remind myself of ways Reload could modernize its source material for the better. And BOY was playing FES in 2023, a friendly reminder of how far Atlus has come regarding dungeon design and pacing. I complain about Persona 5 dragging when you get to the Momentos a lot. Still, vanilla Persona 3 and FES have some real slogs that weigh down their bright spots. For example, the evocative aesthetical choices and the audacity of the dark and moody narrative cannot entirely make up for the slog that is navigating Tartarus every goddamn night.

What Exactly Is "The Answer?"

Before I can answer that question, we have to review what Persona 3 FES was because there's some slight blurring between what people remember it added to Persona 3 versus Portable. FES was a glorified "Director's Cut" re-release of Persona 3 with some new Social Links and mechanical differences in how they work. In FES, you could now take Koromaru on walks, invade the privacy of your social links by spying on them using the security cameras in a control room, play the story in a hard mode, tackle new quests, and explore new Personas. FES also introduced improvements to the Naganaki Shrine in that interacting with the shrine would allow you to alter Tartarus. Yes, there's a new scene in FES that some people gravitate towards as a significant improvement from the original game. Still, FES was only a moderate deviation from the initial release. Portable, not FES, was the version that mercifully allowed you to control party members directly and made more than cosmetic changes to who you could romance and how they would connect to the ending. This issue leads me to an essential point of clarification, and I cannot make this point any more explicit. At the time, The Answer was FES' big selling point for people who had already played Persona 3. Atlus PR consistently presented it as a significant enough standalone expansion to justify people buying FES regardless of whether they played the original game. Atlus sold people a bill of goods, and they underdelivered by a wide margin.

The Answer is an epilogue in FES and has not been present in any subsequent releases of Persona 3 thus far. In my case, I had to find my FES disc and run it through a PS2 I borrowed from a friend. The Answer does NOT require transferring any saved data from the main story to play it. Instead, upon starting The Answer, the game gives you the remaining SEES team members at level twenty-five. This point will be one that I belabor continually throughout this blog, but The Answer is designed as a proper expansion pack, with most playthroughs clocking in around twenty-five to thirty-five hours. For reference, my playthrough just barely crested the thirty-hour mark. The story picks up immediately where Persona 3 ends on March 31st. However, let's review a few other nuts and blots before summarizing the game's introduction. The Answer entirely occurs in a single dungeon named the "Abyss of Time." This dungeon and all the enemies you encounter in it are locked to the game's "Hard" difficulty setting. Because the whole expansion takes place in this dungeon, there are no social links, and your exploratory efforts are combat-oriented. If you are someone who got into the Persona games thanks to Giant Bomb's Persona 4 Endurance Run or maybe even Persona 5, imagine playing a Persona game that is oriented around a single dungeon and doesn't have any Social Link mechanics. The story's progression is contingent on your in-game progress, but because this is an expert-level dungeon, every inch of it wants to kick your teeth in. That is how The Answer works.

While watching The Answer's opening cutscene, we discover the Protagonist is dead, and the remaining SEES members are in different stages of coping and mourning. Speaking of SEES, the team has disbanded, and their former dorms are moments away from demolition. With graduation complete, the school year is officially over, and everyone is about to leave to begin Summer Break. However, everyone discovers they are trapped in the dorms and stuck in a time loop wherein they appear to exist in a perpetual bubble that repeats March 31st. Eventually, everyone is attacked by an anti-shadow android named Metis, who later introduces herself as Aigis's sister. After Aigis finds the strength to perform her evoker, she discovers the Persona 3 Protagonist's Orpheus Persona has replaced her previous Persona, Athena, and finds she also has their Wild Card ability. After Aigis subdues Metis, we find out that underneath the dorms is a labyrinth similar to Tartarus, and Metis posits that it is the key to ending the time loop. She also starts calling Aigis "sister" and initiates a b-plot wherein Aigis teaches her how to control her human emotions. Most of these scenes are intolerable!

And therein lies the basic structure of The Answer. There is a dungeon grind in front of you, and you have to beat that grind to get some character-based vignettes. These character-oriented cinematics provide extraneous details about party members you have thoroughly explored in the base game. There are seven doors, and each time you complete the gauntlet it contains, something pops off with the main cast and their inherent traumas, which I should remind you we already dealt with in the previous game. Also important are their present emotional states following the death of the Protagonist. Because the structure of the game is frictionless outside of its often BRUTAL difficulty that is thanks in no part to the companion AI still sucking complete and total shit (i.e., Mitsuru still thinks Marin Karin is the most fantastic spell on God's Earth), the characters we know and love are not exactly how they once were. When they discover the Protagonist is not exactly dead but instead chained to eternal torment to fight back against the Apocalypse, and DO NOT WORRY MY SWEET SUMMER CHILD, WE WILL GET TO THAT, they break into cliques and begin picking apart each other's stances on whether they should free the Protagonist or move on and respect their sacrifice. What ensues next are either characters showing signs of maturation since we first saw them in Persona 3 (i.e., Ken and Akihiko) OR massive character breaks that make no sense whatsoever (i.e., GOD JESUS, WHAT DID THEY DO TO YUKARI IN THIS THING?!).

Now, if there is one part of The Answer that I want to defend, it's the fraying of the party's relationships as they navigate further into the dungeon. Watching the characters struggle to form teams and develop a consensus works for me. Most people dislike seeing characters they recall shirking away their recurring phobias or insecurities suddenly devolving backward in this expansion pack. However, I find that to be one of the more defensible creative decisions in The Answer. Seeing Mitsuru try and assert herself as the party leader and butt heads against Akihiko and Junpei, who do not put up with her alpha bitch attitude at all, makes perfect sense to me. While they did accomplish a lot during Persona 3, it was all on the shoulders of the Protagonist, and the in-fighting you see proves that had it not been for the Protagonist, none of these characters would have put up with each other in the first place. The Protagonist was the glue that kept them all together, and The Answer doubling down on that was clever. Unfortunately, that's about fifteen to twenty minutes of what The Answer accomplishes in its boorish twenty to thirty hours. Beyond that and the boss battle against Erebus being cool, that's all I have to say as positive aspects of The Answer. I know some people like Metis, but I'm not one of them. At its heart, The Answer is a dungeon grind where the likelihood of you needing to restart your progress from scratch is high and a given.

Why Is It So Bad?

Summarizing why The Answer is an awful playing experience is the easiest part of this blog. Maybe you read my brief biography of The Answer and thought, "Oh, a series of challenge dungeons with a few character revelations here and there sounds like what From Software or Team Ninja do with their post-game epilogues or DLC!" And that attitude is what many people thought, though they did not have From or Team Ninja as a reference, going into The Answer when they first started it. There's just one massive problem. The Answer is twenty-five to thirty-five hours long. Each sub-dungeon you complete is as long, and sometimes longer, than the main story dungeons in the base game. Worse, without the social link trappings or non-dungeon-based world exploration, you usually would have to break up the combat's monotony; the dungeons, while visually diverse, quickly become tiresome. And The Answer LOVES kicking you in your teeth in the cheapest ways possible. Even the basic enemies have one-shotting potential right from the rip, and the entire epilogue locks its difficulty setting to "Hard." Battles that would typically only take two to three minutes take double that because the jump in difficulty is that noticeable. I get that it is designed to be a series of "expert-level challenges." Still, characters leave and re-enter your rotation without warning, making planning and preparing for some of the combat scenarios The Answer puts your way a complete pain in the ass. If there are certain characters in the main party you dislike using, tough, because there's no way you can avoid them in The Answer, as there are whole sections where you have no agency over your party composition! And did I mention you cannot control your companion's actions during combat? Because that SUCKS, especially when you get to the final few stages of The Answer, wherein everything is capable of murdering you in two moves.

I might get into trouble with some Persona die-hards, but I'm not too fond of most of the character work in The Answer. I obviously cannot speak for every Persona 3 fan, but it's not that some of these new character traumas and neuroses are bad or poorly written. The real issue is that we have already played a fifty-plus hour experience that previously purported to have surfaced everything worth addressing with these characters. There's something profoundly "cheap" about Mitsuru having EVEN MORE CHILDHOOD drama with her father or Junpei having an alcoholic father who abused him that you learn about for the first time in The Answer. No, the Hell with that, that's bullshit! These character-defining traumas are massive pipe bombs that should have come up during the original game, especially if each character is going to pine about the Persona 3 Protagonist being the most essential person in their lives. And a lot of these revelations feel incredibly "convenient." It's a bigger problem with Persona 4 Arena, but I have never liked the convenience of Aigis having her memory wiped, which permits her to forget that she has sisters. Ken's flashback provides the most vivid first-hand account of his mother's murder by a shadow. Why is this the first time we have heard this story? Also, some of the party members are complete afterthoughts. Surprise, Akihiko got scouted to join SEES by Mitsuru after a boxing tournament! It's a total nothing burger, but it's at least something compared to The Answer doing JACK SHIT with FUUKA!

Nonetheless, one creative decision related to The Answer always comes up when people talk about why they hate it: Yukari's character transformation. They do her so dirty in this game. Because the structure of The Answer is barebones, it desperately needs friction and a driving wedge between the characters, and for whatever reason, Yukari was selected to get that task done. Because I guess Atlus thought what Persona 3 fans wanted to see in The Answer was watching one of the funnier and more upbeat characters become "punished." Again, part of this works, and at the start of the game, she's not the only character that isn't jumping for joy at the prospect of SEES resuming its activities, and if it was just that, I think her being a darker and moodier character could have worked. Nonetheless, as written, her character transformation into someone who expresses jealousy towards Aigis and outright hostility to anyone who disagrees with her viewpoint of wanting to go back to the past to save the protagonist is a vicious character assassination. Watching her become envious of Aigis after the latter gains the ability to use the Protagonist's Persona isn't simply weird; it's uncomfortable. Yukari's jealousy reeks of "girl drama," which these games only make you stomach when you get caught philandering with others in your spare time. Even then, with The Answer not utilizing your Persona 3 save data, Yukari acting out as if she was the default romance for the Protagonist, which goes against my playthrough, feels disrespectful of the player's choices. Also, in the case of Yukari, her whole plot thread in the base game is helping her develop coping mechanisms related to loss. Her not knowing how to deal with the death of the Protagonist is a complete betrayal of everything we went through with her in the original game!

So, the plot twist in The Answer. It's something. Obviously, the Ken Amada romance option in Portable was terrible, but has there ever been a narrative thread or plot element in a Persona game as universally hated as finding out the Protagonist from Persona 3 isn't dead but instead chained up to a door to prevent the end of the world? Did that catch you off guard? If so, let's engage in another lore dump. After you watch all of the character flashbacks, which are sparingly spread across hours of grueling dungeon crawls, the party deduces that the doors connect them to events that establish their association with their Persona. As they make their way to the end of the dungeon, they fight the Shadow version of the Protagonist and obtain a key that can open a portal out of the cursed dorm. However, Metis reveals that they can use the key to travel back to when they fought Nyx and prevent the death of the Protagonist. This reveal is when Yukari suddenly gets up in her feelings and declares that the party must go back in time, and those who disagree with her are traitors. No one can agree on what to do, and the characters battle one another to determine what to do with the keys. When Yukari loses, you must deal with an incredibly discomforting scene where she sobs her eyes out and cements her "sisterhood" with Mitsuru. It's a scene that practically ruins her entire character. When Metis and Aigis win, they unlock a door that leads to a boss room and fight Erebus, who is the personification of humanity's malice. While they are victorious, they learn that Erebus will likely come back, and the seal the Protagonist has formed on the gate between Erebus and reality is all that is preventing the end of the world. So, in pure Disney logic, the Protagonist isn't dead. He's sleeping on a gate!

I have said it before, but Atlus back peddling the death of the Persona 3 Protagonist sucks. There's no better way to say it. It downright sucks. Persona 3 is a game about death and its inevitability, and it makes you come to terms with that, regardless of how many hours you spend fusing the best Personas. It outright refusing to give you the shiny happy ending you were expecting still stands as one of the series' most daring and audacious creative decisions. And with The Answer, we see the first attempt at chipping away at that emotional and narrative impact. Yes, it gets worse, especially with the spin-offs, but this trend started with The Answer. Likewise, the party-wide strife about how to respond to the revelation about the Protagonist is the most frustrating stuff in the entire game. Characters boil into two arbitrary camps, and for whatever reason, you, as the player, have no agency over how the party progresses. Mitsuru makes a choice, and then you have to live with the consequences. Despite the promise of this being a narrative journey where Aigis becomes an empowering figure, it only provides her with a few opportunities to assert herself. And people get shitty towards each other after they spent practically a year acclimating and learning how to compromise with one another. All that community building that took you hundreds of hours to develop is gone for the story's convenience!

Is It Good Atlus Continues To Pretend This Doesn't Exist?

Well, except they haven't. Not to completely undercut an eye-catching sub-headline meant to generate clicks and comments, but while Atlus has made playing The Answer virtually impossible, they haven't shown any signs of de-canonizing it. In fact, at this point, the idea of erasing The Answer from existence and sticking with the "original" ending is all but impossible, even if Atlus plans to use Reload to create an alternate canonical timeline, something that remains unconfirmed, considering core aspects of The Answer and Portable serve as the basis of the Arena games. Elizabeth's storyline in Persona 4 Arena does not work in a world where The Answer doesn't exist. So, the idea that, as some Persona 3 fans posit, the Persona 3 sub-franchise can march on as if it never happened is a falsehood. It is still a factor in the series' current steps and direction. Whenever we have seen Aigis outside of Persona 3 or heard about the Persona 3 Protagonist, the canonicity of The Answer has never been questioned. To return to the topic of Persona 4 Arena, Aigis openly references Metis and her sister's true origins. Metis was the manifestation of Aigis' emotions after she decided to separate them from her body. It is a story pivot you can see coming from a mile away, but it gets the job done and completes Aigis' story arc on a mostly positive note, and it is something that has been reinforced several times afterward.

The core issue here goes beyond dunking on The Answer for shits and giggles. Does Atlus plan for Persona 3 Reload to be the "definitive" Persona 3 experience, and if so, will this create a new "canon?" We already know they are being selective about which parts of FES and Portable they want to use without definitively locking themselves into either build or release. Nonetheless, at some point, Atlus will have to figure out and then communicate how Reload connects to everything else in the Persona 3 series. Only crazy people like myself give a shit about the Persona canon, but I feel safe in saying Atlus knows they have to be careful about their tightrope act. They could take a note from Square Enix and Final Fantasy VII Remake, opt for this new game being its own thing, and treat it like a fun on-ramp for people unfamiliar with the original. As much as I love the original Persona 3 and FES, that's likely the healthiest option.

But to return to the question I pose in this sub-section, it is telling that Atlus opted for Portable instead of FES for the Game Pass release of Persona 3. Trust me, I understand people like the female protagonist and rest assured, I'm one of them. I also can attest playing Persona 3 without direct control of your companions is an awful time. Nonetheless, the environmental exploration bits and the new anime cutscenes they added to FES are much better than not having them. Unfortunately, The Answer is so bad that I think Atlus will never again touch FES. They don't want to talk about it. They don't want you to talk about it. In many ways, FES is the superior experience, but simply cutting out one-third of it because it sucked shit isn't something that Atlus is ever going to do. The version of FES most people want is one that has some quality-of-life additions seen in Portable but without The Answer, and that would require a MASSIVE admission of creative failure on the part of Atlus with their Golden Goose IP. Few AAA studios would be willing to do that, let alone Atlus.

Is This The Worst Thing In The World Of Persona?

Goodness, this question is tricky. Regarding the mainline Persona games, I don't like the first game and its first-person dungeon crawling. The localization of the first Persona game has also seen a variety of questionable translation choices, even with the PSP release. I will be the first to say Persona 2 is one of the more underrated games in the series because it avoids the innate creepiness of needing to experience teenage romance from the vantage point of adult writers. That game opting for adult characters for half of its story makes way more sense than most people give it credit for and would be a welcomed change if Atlus ever decided to go with college students instead of high school ones in Persona 6. I'm not fond of anime fighting games and always disliked the Persona rhythm games. Furthermore, Persona 3: Dancing in Moonlight made some incredibly bizarre imaginative choices with the Persona 3 cast.

However, do any of these early games or questionable spin-offs compare to the frustration I and many others feel towards The Answer? I don't think so. When a spin-off game makes a few dubious creative choices, I have a far easier time yada yada-ing it out of my consciousness than with a siloed epilogue of a mainline entry in the franchise. There are few examples of the Persona writing team missing the mark from top to bottom, like in The Answer. Undoubtedly, the people tapped to write the stories for the Persona franchise have consistently been terrible at conveying LGBTQ+ life experiences with a modern lens. I don't want to diminish criticisms rightfully directed at them for that recurring issue. Nevertheless, almost everything attempted in The Answer is either a failure or a net negative. Characters like Yukari remain recontextualized because The Answer still exists. On top of that, Atlus has been teasing that there's some end goal for the Persona 3 characters since the conclusion of The Answer, and they continue to be gun-shy about what that will represent and when. They have been building toward Elizabeth and Aigis, finding a way to bring back the Persona 3 Protagonist, and as awful as that sounds, I want them to get it over with and close the book on this fiasco.

But, could I interest you in discussing a dogshit Persona anime Atlus greenlighted years ago? Now, I know what you're thinking, and no, I'm not about to make fun of the endless stream of Persona 3 movies Atlus has produced. While stunningly uncreative in how they engage the source material, those films are wholly well-made and have relatively impressive production values. The Persona 4 anime adaptation was a fun time outside of its inability to treat queerness with any semblance of tact or responsibility. However, to the show's defense, neither did the game. No, if we want to talk about something horrible, let's talk about Persona: Trinity Soul. It was a show that missed the mark so severely because Atlus didn't monitor the project during its production that it almost immediately had to be de-canonized. A point the Persona 3 Portable fanbook had to explain in fine print. Oh, and do you like the music in the Persona franchise? If you said "Yes," I need you to stop everything you are doing and listen to the song "Burning Men's Soul" from Persona: Trinity Soul.

This thing is twenty-six episodes of pure torture. It is an anime tie-in to Persona 3 that came out around the time of FES's North American release. Trinity Soul was animated and written by A-1 Pictures, a studio that was at the time still in its infancy and a few months from their first breakout hit, the anime adaptation of Black Butler. As questionable as I might find Trinity Souls, I have to recognize that A-1 Pictures learned from the experience and have since gone on to do the Persona 3 movies as well as bigger productions like Fairy Tail, Sword Art Online, Working!!, and Kaguya-sama: Love Is War. With Trinity Soul, they got very little guidance from Atlus, and that led to a twenty-six-episode show that is a Persona product in name only. Trinity Soul takes place ten years after the events of Persona 3 and is a murder investigation mystery wherein the Personas help the characters find clues and beat up bad guys. Does this show address any of the unresolved plot threads in Persona 3? NO, and there are few hallmarks from the game as well! It doesn't feel like a Persona product, what with its excessive amounts of gore and none of the iconic stylings of the franchise. Also, while I wouldn't say it outright plagiarizes Darker than Black, Trinity Souls GENEROUSLY borrows thematic ideas from that show, and the use of Personas in it more closely resembles the abilities of Contractors in Darker in Black. Oh, and instead of people falling into portals into alternate dimensions, people are randomly dying from their bodies turning inside out like that one classic Treehouse of Horror dancing scene. And the characters could be more enjoyable and interesting, but they are not. The Answer is frustrating and disrespectful, but Trinity Souls is a complete waste of time. Which of these two sounds worse to you probably nets the distinction of being the "Worst Persona Thing Ever Made."

I will say I never took this as any sort of backpedal on the protagonist dying though. To me I always felt like it's clear that he's fuckin' dead there's just some metaphysical soul bullshit going on and said soul is serving as a seal. I'm okay with this mostly because the thing that kills the protagonist in the first place in Persona 3 is the "Great Seal"

That being said I watch every new Persona 3 related thing with dread that they're going to eventually have a new ending where the protagonist wakes up at the end of the game and hugs all his friends as they come to meet him.

The thing I remember most about The Answer is in a lot of discussions online when it came out... there were so many people, so many, who started it and were like "Wait he died?!"

Still a little haunting to think about.

Huh... I always thought Yukari was the bland and pissy "mean girl" stereotype, right from the start of the game. Is she well-liked by fans? Was she really the funny, upbeat one? All I remember is her just ripping on Junpei the entire game and being weirdly standoff-ish with Mitsuru through most of the game for no real reason. She just always came across as mean-spirited to me, which made me find her entirely unlikable.

The thing about the Answer is that even back in the day it was recognized that it was an all around awful experience. As I mentioned in the last Persona 3 thread, I played through FES earlier this year. In doing so I looked up some things and inadvertently ran across some choice forum posts from like 2007 or 2008 and even then the consensus was "hey The Answer is a pretty miserable experience, huh?". I thought about playing The Answer after I finished FES but I just couldn't do it. I had tried to play it way back in the day when I first played through P3 FES but I bounced off it. It just didn't seem fun.

I have something of a hot take having played Persona 3 FES, Persona 4 Golden, and Persona 5 Royal these past several months: the added post-ending content they have for each of the enhanced releases kinda sucks. It seems like they actively struggle to add to an already complete game whenever they are trying to come up with new content. We've already covered why The Answer sucks so I won't go there. I guess for context I also played vanilla Persona 4 and Persona 5 back when they were released.

*** SPOILERS FOR PERSONA 4, AND PERSONA 5 BEYOND HERE ***

P5R's new post-ending content is the least bad of the three because the new character it is based around is at least interesting (and the character herself actually fits well into the main section of the game and works well with the main Phantom Thieves team), but the added dungeon is completely forgettable (the twist is good but that's it) and the addition of Akechi as a playable teammate is icky given what that he's a confessed mass murderer. At least with this one they tried to switch it up and make there be a new mystery to solve rather than "I dunno, here's another month to do S-links I guess" but it still felt unnecessary since the main story ended so cleanly. The padding out and rebalancing of content in the main portion of the game was welcomed though as my memory of vanilla Persona 5 is that it was kind of a slog.

In general, the Golden additions to Persona 4 Golden outside of the improved fusion stuff and allowing the Mysterious Fox to also refill SP during dungeons were all bad (especially an added anime cutscene involving Naoto but that's a whole different can of worms). Marie felt noticeably tacked on to the point that they didn't even bother fitting her into the ending sequence of the game. They didn't update the ending other than having you briefly talk to her when you are doing a final round of saying bye to your rank 10 S-links. She didn't fit in with the rest of the team, her Social Link was dull, her poetry was awful (not endearing awful, just awful), and her post-normal ending dungeon was actively not fun to play (it was the one where they take away your gear and as a mechanic take half your SP every time you fight an enemy so you have to actively avoid fighting until you get SP-restoring accessories). The ski trip and Valentines Day stuff was a fun bit of fan service but everything else after the vanilla ending felt completely needless or actively harmful to the experience. Persona 4 is already paced so well that the likelihood of you having any of the good Social Links left to do in that extra month is slim. I ended up using that month to try to get various Steam achievements because I had nothing else to do.

*** SPOILERS END ***

Now onto the question of "Honestly, have the dungeons in a Persona game ever been good?".

Short answer: Not really.

Long answer: I can't comment on Persona 1 or 2 as I haven't played them (they're on the docket to play along with Persona Q, a game I got 30 hours into back when it was first released before randomly dropping it despite enjoying it. The Persona 4 team's battle theme in Persona Q slaps so hard). For the newer games though, I think the answer is that Persona 4 Golden's dungeons are reasonably okay because they don't overstay their welcome and are proportionally much less of the game compared to P3 FES and P5R. The early P4G dungeons can easily be done in an hour or two at the most and all of them can be done in one or two in-game days. In general, they aren't so long as to feel like a grind which makes the combat feel fun and less tedious. There's no worry of losing progress like in P3's Tartarus (they chuck tons of Goho-Ms at you in P4G. I had 10 at the end of the first dungeon) and there's no forced leaving of the dungeon to do some other step before being allowed to complete it like in P5. Plus Persona 4 is the only game of the three to have a dungeon that has one of the best songs in all of Persona as its music.

In contrast to Persona 4's dungeons, I actively dreaded Persona 5's as my playthrough of P5R progressed. The first couple were manageable but they just became too much. Several of the later dungeons involved back-tracking and solving easy but time consuming puzzles that did nothing to add to the dungeons. I still enjoyed the actual fighting enemies aspect of the game but navigating and completing the dungeons felt like a huge chore. Then of course there's Mementos, which is also a grindfest. Eventually you can use a turbo button to cause the catbus to ram through enemies and collect the money and XP instead of actually fighting them (this completely breaks the game during the added content section of Mementos since it allows you to amass 10s of millions of yen and have everyone in your party hit level 99 in an hour or two, trivializing the last dungeon) but that seems like a bandaid fix to a bad segment of the game more than anything.

Tartarus in P3 FES is weird because, at least until the last quarter of the game, you don't spend long stretches in it. The tiredness mechanic forces you to spread out your time in there over multiple days, which makes it slightly less tedious than Mementos overall. There were several points in P5R where I did end up spending like 2 solid hours in Mementos and it never felt like I was truly accomplishing anything meaningful other than making some numbers bigger. I understand why they needed to include Mementos but the game would have been a lot better without it (since the palaces disappear, Mementos stays in their place as the means to grind for XP and money. I didn't like their decision to also put side quests in it as I liked the P4 side quest system a lot more). If Persona 5 kept the combat enhancements but had shorter Persona 4-style dungeons I think it would be a vastly improved game. All of the social link and other stuff in it is fantastic but the dungeons partly spoil the experience.

I have a lot more to say about Persona 4 having replayed it for the first time in 14 years so I'll probably save that for a blog post or something. I also New Game Plussed it (which cut the in-game time down drastically since I could level 99 Lucifer my way through every dungeon). It turns out I still really like that game, warts and all.

@ben_h: At the end of the day, why did Atlus as a studio start? The truth is that they were massive Wizardry dorks and in particular, really enjoyed the merciless cruelty of Wizardry IV. They are not alone in that regard as the same thing happens with the people that went on to found From Soft. There's no denying the fact that Digital Devil Monogatari: Megami Tensei is a Wizardry clone, and many of the people that have come up to replace the Old Guard of Atlus also have old school appreciation for traditional CRPGs. You can't have too many different permutations of what an RPG dungeon plays like or feels like if Wizardry is your point of reference.

Also, I don't know... Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey is pretty good.

The thing is... I think there is a large enough vocal minority that want it to happen and Atlus is of a same mindset as that vocal minority. At this point, they have dragged the P3 protag out of the grave to do all of these spin-offs and other media tie-ins that they might as well get it over with so the rest of us can move on and know where and when to stop caring about the Persona 3 narrative.

So, that's a slight modification that starts with FES and to a certain extent with Portable. Yukari is popular and has a lot of baggage and doesn't know how to react to either. The mean girl thing is something you strip away from her. Also, she has very good reasons to not like Mitsuru and anyone who rips into Junpei is good in my books.

@zombiepie: Weird. I didn't play original Persona 3. Between FES and Portable, I did play through it four or five times, and I couldn't tell you anything about her baggage or her issues with Mitsuru right now. I think I just found the character so initially off-putting that I just wasn't invested in her story.

It always felt to me like the general consensus was that her character was kind of annoying, but I would have been discussing the game at GameFAQs at the time so you know... that was a certain type of crowd.

This was interesting to read, since I've played FES 1.5 times and Portable 1.5 times, but never bothered with The Answer and really had no idea about its reception (I was not online enough at the time to have noticed, I think). I simply saw that it was just a dungeon with no social links and decided not to bother. Sounds like that was a good decision!

@ben_h The P5R post-OG ending stuff definitely felt bad in the sense that it retconned what was a very neat wrap-up, with Mementos supposedly destroyed and everyone's powers gone... then it's like, "just kidding." There were some interesting concepts there, but it made an already-long game even longer, and didn't really feel like it fit. On the other hand, P5R added so goddamned many other cool things to the base game that it's still easily better than the original release. I guess I just wish they had added all those improvements and maybe some new confidants without actually extending the calendar and doing the whole extra palace.

Honestly narratively the biggest sin I tend to give the Answer has always been "Who asked for this?" which is fairly egregious given the name but would have been forgiveable if it wasn't so miserable to play.

I had forgotten a lot of the annoying details but what did always stand out was that anytime a boss actually had a weakness you could exploit they also made sure they had the appropriate "Dodge" ability so that even if you adequately prepared for it you still got handed a "Nice try, but fuck off" for your trouble.

I have been searching for a video essay that lays out a similar thesis to mine that Yukari is only mean because she doesn't know how to react to the pressures of her popularity for about two weeks and only now found it. I don't think this particular YouTube essayist is perfect, as they are one of the people spear-heading the revisionist history for The Answer and claiming it wasn't that bad, but this video of theirs is largely on point:

Again, I think The Answer is, if anything, a clear reminder of how empty the Persona games are when it comes to their actual mechanics. As mentioned in a previous comment, I don't think this franchise has properly evolved to remove its vestigial DNA stemming from Wizardry, which is a problem as the dungeon-crawling aspects are starting to butt-up against the visual novel and life-sim aspects.

The combat system in OG Persona 3 and FES is straight up dogshit. I dare anyone to try the Nyx battle without direct controls, as many of us did at the time, and not want to eat your own eyeballs out. My issue in The Answer stemmed from party members having the attacks to knock back enemies and them not wanting to use them and instead wasting whole turns buffing themselves or others.

It's genuinely one of the worst boss battles I've played in an RPG. I mentioned it in the last Persona 3 thread but I went into that battle not knowing that you needed to level up to a minimum of level 80 to stand anything resembling a chance so I was way underleveled, which made the fight take an extra half hour or more. It's such a bizarre difficulty spike given that I was easily beating all of the top floors of Tartarus and hadn't had any issues with previous bosses. But that didn't get into how bullshit that boss was in my first attempt. I got to one of the later of the 13+ phases of the fight. In that phase, Nyx charmed Akihiko, who then cast diarahan on Nyx to heal her for 6000 health, resetting all progress. At that point I was over an hour and a half into the fight and out of items so I gave up and restarted. On my second attempt, I got to the phase where Nyx causes all party members to have the fear status effect. Before I could use an item to clear the status effect, Nyx cast ghastly wail and killed my entire party in one attack. After that I gave up, went to an older save and grinded a bunch of too easy fights in Tartarus until I was well over level 80, which made the fight a lot easier.

But also yeah, the lack of direct controls makes the entire fight infuriating at times. I didn't really need to change party member tactics for most of the game but suddenly I had to constantly during that fight because otherwise nobody would heal and the party members would get downed every couple turns.

I will say that while I ultimately prefer direct control of party members, I remember thinking at the time that I sort of enjoyed only controlling the MC because in some sense it felt more like a real role-play: you're not in charge of everyone else's actions just because video game mechanics, only yourself. And for everything except the Nyx fight, that was mostly fine, but yeah, that fight was definitely infuriating. And hey, doing only MC direct control is still an option in P4 and P5, rather than a requirement; as long as it ain't mandatory I'm happy to have it there.

I truly never had a problem with the AI controls in original P3. I know it's this huge sticking point with a lot of people but I always thought it was fine. Use your scan on everything and the team knows what to do.

Now is it better with manual control? Well yeah of course it is but the degree of scorn that the AI gets was always overblown to me.

I largely agree. Outside of the Nyx fight I never had too many issues outside of not using Mitsuru because of her AI's need to constantly cast marin karin (I know it's a meme but like really, every fourth attack she does is marin karin. It's silly). Like 90%+ of the time though in the rest if the game the AI does what I would have done anyway so it's not a big deal. It's just that specific Nyx fight and a couple other circumstances (like that roulette table boss) where it would get really frustrating.

...Dude. Chill.

@zombiepie: I found myself more troubled by the video essayist's use of Filthy Frank memes and zoom-in on Mitsuru's "bigger tittes" than their opinion of The Answer honestly.

That aside, those seem like fine justifications for why Yukari is the way she is. They just don't really make me find her to be a more endearing character.