P3 is better, and here's why:
First of all, the pacing and flow of P3 was overall more consistent and felt less stop-and-go. P4 bunched up all your dungeon crawling days in 2 week periods, whereas P3 allowed you to spread it out over a month. P3 also didn't have those long gaps between completing a major section and being able to move onto the next one. In P4, once you rescued a victim, you had to wait a while before the next dungeon opened up. But in P3, once you finish the full moon event, you usually get access to the next section of Tartarus almost immediately.
Persona 3 also gave you more freedom in deciding when you wanted to dungeon crawl. The fact that rainy days have so much less to do in P4 effectively makes your decision for you in terms of when you decide to go in. It also forces you to spend more time exploring in each day because you need to make the most out of each day that you can. In P3, I felt better able to leave Tartarus earlier than normal if I got a little bored of exploring because it wasn't as imperative that I make the most out of the day as I can.
Persona 4 was also way too wordy, especially in the introduction. Although the dialogue itself in P4 was good, there was way too much of it, and it was redundant and felt unneccessary. I mean, it takes 2 and a half hours before the game really opens up and you have any real control over it. P3's intro was longer than it needed to be, but it wasn't nearly as close as that.
Persona 4 also has a strange difficulty curve. Yukiko's castle is the hardest section of the game, and yet it's the first dungeon of eight. And even after that there's still no consistency. The second dungeon is easier than the first, the third is much easier than that, but then it jumps up for the 4th, drops again for the 5th, goes up for the 6th, and then drops below that for the 7th and 8th. Overall it didn't feel like they did as good a job balancing the difficulty. P3 overall had a much more consistent difficulty level.
I also thought that they gave way too much health to the bosses in P4. The fights in P4 are long but not especially hard, making the biggest risk of failure coming from running out of SP. They just felt like big damage sponges. They aren't especially threating in terms of how much damage they do to you, but at the same time they have so much health that it takes forever to kill them. This results in the fights getting boring towards the end of them. The only exception I'd point out is Shadow Yukiko and maybe Shadow Mitsuo. P3 did bosses much better- they had a high damage output but only moderate HP, meaning that they were threatening but didn't take forever to kill. Granted, Nyx took longer than it needed to, but most of them didn't take forever.
The dungeon design was also better in P3. I'm not talking about the aesthetics, such as the art style or music. I'm talking about the actual layout that you have to navigate. P3's floors were smaller and more compact, and it made navigating them relatively simple and quick. P4 gave you these big floors that felt like rat mazes, and it felt like so much time was spent just getting from one end to another. Plus being able to send out the party members in P3 made things go even quicker.
To be clear I really love both games a lot, but whereas P4 is towards the bottom of my top 10 RPGs of all time, P3 would be number 1, easily.
(Copy + pasted from another forum where I got in a similar argument since I didn't want to rewrite all of this again)
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