https://t.co/FU1jzSZvks

Also the game's ugly and ATLUS frequently engages in anti-consumer practices thanks bye

I wonder if the people who behave this way hold disdain for these values, or if they feel insecure for not valuing it enough. I'm not sure how else to explain the confusion and hostility.

It shouldn't be outrageous, or even a mystery, why someone who loves P3FES doesn't like P3R. It's obvious! And the values of appeal held in supporting that view are also, completely agreeable!

P3R didn't make P3P's mistake of taking a game balanced around no party control and just adding party control, they actually changed quite a lot. But they still somehow managed to make it so easy I've seen people argue if it's the easiest in the series.

Anyway. Persona 3 Reload isn't very unique or frictional in its design. Many comparisons to Persona 5 were made and it's obviously not identical but it's arguably closer to that than it is to Persona 3 FES.

You know, that's the thing about complexity. It's a bit hard to do by accident! You sort of have to put effort into achieving it. Typically I would assume "oh, this must be completely intentional." Hopefully that's a reasonable assumption.

The reason why Persona 3 was changed wasn't because it was flawed in the eyes of the people who actually made it (many of whom were not involved in the project). If that were the case the systems would become MORE complex, rather than having that complexity removed.

I've been talking a lot recently about the general casualization of the medium that happened around the time and I feel these changes that moved away from what made for unique challenge is a result of trying to appeal to larger audiences of people who don't play a lot of JRPGs.

SL reversing was made more conditional, fatigue was removed, the tactics system was gutted to the point of being unusable.

I feel it's easy to narrativize the design trends of the modern Persona games as a descent into frictionlessness. Unique mechanics meant to challenge the players with proactive strategy are removed. Punishments for failure are lessened, or removed entirely.

Tactics are in a way the peak of this because they not only lend themselves to the life sim in a ludonarrative manner, they also present a unique challenge of strategy, where the player has to be much more proactive throughout the game.

Fatigue exists to try and make dungeon-crawling actually feel like a factor in the time management aspect of he life sim. SL reversals are attempts at capturing what the developers believed to be realistic human behavior ([very carefully worded statement]).

What I would wager as being the two major tenets of P3's design are 1) accommodating the balance of life sim and JRPG elements and 2) creating a combat system that isn't just watered-down SMT. And I think it's at the very least respectable in its efforts, in this regard.

A game in the first place is defined by goals, rules and challenges. Why any one game is more appealing than another should be in the difference between these things, and what makes any game more than a boring cakewalk is chiefly in how it challenges the one playing it.

I'm going to make the controversial statement that not only are the values that can lead one to loving Persona 3 not unreasonable, they are in fact broadly agreeable if you enjoy video games, because some of the chief appeals of Persona 3 are in its uniqueness and friction.

These people are either pretending the two games are indistinguishable, a belief they surely wouldn't uphold if pressed, or they believe P3R must be objectively superior. That you must have some objectionable set of standards and values to enjoy something like FES.

I am bothered by the responses to this post, who aren't just baffled but indignant about someone making what should be an uncontroversial statement that the appeal of P3 is extremely different from the appeal of P3R.

It's been said more than once that Mike changed when Spamton left and for some reason no one has concluded that Mike was Spamton

Conversely, one of Katawa Shoujo's writers made a point about how it's supposed to be better than the otaku catered crap that Japan puts out and that it's intended to have universal appeal.