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."