Final P3P Port thoughts

I woke up this morning and somehow it smelled like summer. Turns out we are having  a heatwave named “the 92 hours summer” right now, and since it felt great (it’s kinda windy, so the temperature is bearable) I decided to finish P3 this morning in the same way I finished it the first time I played.
So, here are my thoughts...

Did I enjoy it? Yes.
Was it a good port? NO.

I tend to disregard people’s opinions (especially from this fandom) because they usually over exaggerate everything & are nitpicky, but unfortunately this time around they were right. Seeing the word “remaster” during the credits hurted my soul.

I cried with Saori, Aigis and Ryoji, laughed with Elizabeth’s dates, danced at FeMC’s amazing OST… It was enjoyable, but only because P3P itself is good,  the port added nothing of value.

I heard bad things about it, but I didn’t care about them back when I started to play. Since I bought it for the Switch Lite, I didn’t notice the blurry backgrounds and bad sound quality at first, but I did notice something. The better resolution of character portraits & text! That alone made me happy, specially since the portraits’ quality was my main gripe with the original game. The port really felt like P3P with  a few improvements.

Original | Port

But the more you play it, the more you start noticing things.. Even with the Switch Lite’s small screen and mid speakers, there are locations and songs that just look/sound bad, without trying hard to notice them.

To not speak of the  mismatched graphics.Aside from the AI upscale for the backgrounds, the CGs are another world. They used the ones they had the og file of, but for the others they kept the blurry PS2 ver. Or the blurry PS2 upscaled.

And the quality alternates with no apparent sense, they just dropped the original assets they had & then upscaled a few others, not all.
 Was it really that hard to trace the 4 & half CGs this game has...? Or even just leaving the blurry PS2 screenshots. There’s no coherence during all of the game.



And for the sound… I’m not the best at noticing quality, but even I could hear some things (for me, the dorms’ theme, Memories of You & the persona change effect) sounded crunchy.

The only reason someone should buy the port is if they don’t speak jp/eng, and even then, there are fes/p3p fanstranslations around. Actually, I only purchased it to support the translations, and even that disappointed me. They aren’t bad per se, but they feel plain since the translation team only had a year to translate P3P, P4G and P4U, so they’re direct translations from the eng one.

So TLDR, just pirate P3P on your nokia. Or buy the actual PSP game if you don't mind scalpers.
I actually would love to play on the original hardware, it just feels different.. Anyone got $150 to lend me?



I would put my hope on the imaginary remake, but seeing Atlus’ past and recent record, I don't trust it, especially after seeing they consider this a remaster.

It makes me sad, all the supplementary media is great and made with love, but then they put no effort on the game itself because they know it will sell regardless…

P3P was my first experience with P3 and it saddens me how lazy this was, I even regret giving them money.
Again, I did enjoy it because it was P3P, but ths is no way to port a game, Portable and P3 deserve much better.