Persona 3 / YMMV - TV Tropes

YMMV Pages for other Persona 3 titles:

Accidental Aesop: Based on which responses grant you the most Relationship Values in many social links, the game seems to send an accidental message of: "If you want people to like you, you should tell them what they want to hear rather than what they should hear." For instance, it's easiest to rank up Kenji's Social Link if you encourage him to pursue his Student/Teacher Romance, and Kazushi likes it when you tell him to keep training and not seek treatment for his injured leg. Though, since many Social Links are able to overcome their issues on their own, it could also carry the Alternate Aesop Interpretation of "You can't force people to change, that's something they need to figure out for themselves," as for example, Kenji gives up on his teacher after learning that she's already engaged.
Accidental Innuendo:
- Ryoji will not stop talking about being inside of the protagonist. This is especially awkward if playing as the female protagonist, because that can happen.
- The reward for completing the Lovers Social Link? Yukari's (cell phone) Strap.
Adorkable:
- Yukari's Rank 9 Social Link where she's blushing and flustered says it all really. In her console video recording, it's revealed that Yukari wasn't completely honest about her contempt for wearing a maid outfit for the school cultural festival. She gushes and takes a picture of herself while wearing the uniform, contemplates on wearing the uniform in the dorm for a day, and comically imitates the guys' voices while imagining their reactions to seeing her in it. Yukari even mischievously drags Fuuka into the fun and helps her to wear a spare uniform, before the screen fades to black.
- Mitsuru's reaction to things like fast food and other common culture can be rather flustered and adorable. She seems to treat being in a fast food joint the same way she'd treat being in a fancy restaurant.
- Ken is absolutely adorable when he's geeking out, be it over an action flick or a cool manga. He tries hiding this, though, as he feels it makes him appear childish.
- Compared to Margaret, both Elizabeth and Theodore come off as adorably naïve and gullible, though more so for Theodore. In the spinoffs, Elizabeth somewhat loses this trait, whereas Theodore has it more pronounced.
Alternative Character Interpretation:
- Fanon characterizes the male protagonist as a Sugar and Ice Emo Teen and the female protagonist as a Stepford Smiler Genki Girl. These characterizations are supported by the manga, drama CDs and spinoffs such as PQ and PQ2:
  - Compared to the usual fan interpretation and his characterization in the manga, Minato is surprisingly less stoic and more expressive in the drama CDs, particularly in the second P3P drama CD, where he is shown happily conversing with various friends. Though reserved and still somewhat quiet, he's capable of expressing a number of emotions, including cheerfulness, annoyance, exasperation, anger, alarm and relief. However, he still retains his trademark stoicism, in that his emotive cues aren't readily apparent to others and he rarely voices his opinion on most matters.
  - Much like the male protagonist, the female protagonist is also given a tangible personality in her own drama CD. She's shown to be significantly more cheerful and energetic than her male counterpart. She even gets angry at one point ("Her mouth is smiling, but her eyes aren't...") and later attempts to pummel Kenji when she loses her temper.
- Mitsuru is an aloof Defrosting Ice Queen in the game. Fans like to make her a Dominatrix, based on her stern demeanor, beauty, and being rich and powerful. Persona 4 Arena just added fuel to this when she wore her Spy Catsuit and fur coat.
- Ikutsuki being his usual Pungeon Master self during his recording. Was he deliberately putting on an act, since he presumably knew about the cameras, or is this proof that aspect of his personality was real? Fuuka even brings up this interpretation after his betrayal.
Alternate Self Shipping: Pairing both the male and female protagonists, who are alternate versions of each other. It's even teased in Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth, where their first interaction looks like Love at First Sight along with their sense of familiarity with each other, which causes both Junpei and Teddie to believe they are soulmates.
Americans Hate Tingle:
- In the Western fandom, Yukari is a very divisive character. In Japan, however, she's one of the more popular characters in the game. She ranked 20th in a Persona Magazine poll that counted the entire franchise, which is no mean feat. This is likely not assisted by cultural issues in the game itself: it's infamously easy to reverse her Social Link if you're playing blind, because in a few places, what would be the natural reaction for most native Anglophones is what you don't want to do in Japan, which is just amplified even further by her own attempts at staying distant until you convince her it isn't necessary.
- Fuuka. Unlike Yukari, Western players take more issue with her English voice actress. Her poor in-battle comments, due to their monotone delivery, had made a lot of people cringe every time she speaks during battles. Despite that, many people like Fuuka for being a cute and highly compassionate young woman, as well as one of the relatively well-adjusted party members. It helps that subsequent spin-offs have her replaced with a better voice actress and/or given her better voice direction.
- Ken's romantic Social Link falls under this purview. Despite the consent between both parties and obvious tameness of the route, many Western fans feel that the Social Link is outright pedophilic and even celebrates mods that remove the romantic route outright. Japan, on the other hand, is far more positive towards the ship in general, even if the genre it comes with isn't without some controversy there. The contrast is especially noticeable in Twitter on both the West and Japan; while Western fans largely protest the Social Link even making it in, Japanese Twitter is largely entirely fine with it and happy to showcase fanart for the ship.
And You Thought It Would Fail: According to Shigenori Soejima on a Famitsu interview in 2006, Persona 3 got Tainted by the Preview for its Soft Reboot nature, with people who played the previous games commenting, "This isn't Persona!" By the time 3 was released, those comments had stopped and the rest was history.
Anti-Climax Boss:
- Strega can be beaten in a single turn every time you fight them after The Hanged Man. Justified since they're just Persona users, not all that different from your party, and you always outnumber them, so there's no particular reason why they should be hard. The game further justifies this by explaining Strega's link to their Persona as something forced and manufactured. Compared to the SEES kids, who all have natural links with their Persona, Strega doesn't stand a chance.
- Many of the Full Moon Shadows also come across as sort of pathetic as well, particularly in comparison to the tower guardians inside Tartarus. This is entirely intentional since the tower guardians give you the opportunity to heal, save the game and prepare your personas before fighting them, while the Full Moon bosses often restrict you to whatever prep work you did the day before. Of particular note, are the High Priestess, Hierophant and Lovers battles, which are fairly straightforward battles with no real gimmick to defeating them, and the Empress and Emperor Dual Boss which utilises a gimmick^note that can result in the boss battle being steamrolled because the player is hitting them with All Out Attacks on every single turn in combat.
Ass Pull: On November 4th, a Brainwashed and Crazy Aigis was somehow able to singlehandedly defeat and capture the other S.E.E.S. members (sans Koromaru). Not helping matters is that the confrontation is immediately followed by a Fade to White before cutting to the rest of S.E.E.S. being captured, providing no explanation as to how she was able to defeat them despite being outnumbered seven to one. The movie adaptation mitigates this by revealing that Aigis has taken Mitsuru's father hostage, preventing them from resisting.
Awesome Music: Has its own page.
Base-Breaking Character:
- Yukari Takeba is considered to be one of the most divisive characters in the series. Her abrasive personality can rub some fans the wrong way, while others appreciate her being one of the few who has the right mindset for the job, and appropriate concern about the older members' secretive nature. Her actions in The Answer don't help her much, either — some find risking The End of the World as We Know It merely to see the guy she likes again to be highly unconscionable, while others find her decision to be an understandable result of her grief, even if they don't necessarily consider it the right thing to do. However, due to the Western fanbase’s growing awareness of emotional trauma and Eastern cultural values, Yukari has received a more positive (or at least sympathetic) reception among old and new-time players by the time of Reload's release.
- While Ken Amada started out as The Scrappy, he's grown to be more appreciated in time by spin-offs giving him more screentime when he was largely Demoted to Extra in the original game and his conflict's been subject to Vindicated by History by people that dislike how the later Persona games lean too far toward being an escapist fantasy. That said, he's a huge case of Ron the Death Eater since his conflict is against the popular Shinjiro, and plenty of fans largely ignore the context around Shinjiro's death and solely blame Ken for it; it certainly doesn't help that Ken is largely a case of Low-Tier Letdown in the original game. His role as a Social Link in Portable also falls into this. While his Social Link is appreciated for giving him more characterization and plot outside of said spoilered moments(one complaint was that he stopped being relevant following the aftermath of the October Full Moon), plenty of fans (especially western ones) are uncomfortable with the optional romance route his Link could take. While he's generally regarded as the weakest member of the cast, it's more because him not standing out outside of his plotline. His portrayal in Reload has been seen as a massive improvement, and even the Ron the Death Eater bits have been downplayed with new content giving players a better sense of his perspective.
- Kenji Tomochika, the male protagonist's Magician Social Link, has a fair amount of detractors, whether because he's relatively bland or because he has a crush on a teacher who is already engaged while being insensitively oblivious to Rio's feelings in Portable, and those players generally prefer Junpei as a Social Link. On the other hand, he has many vocal defenders who like him as a relatively down-to-earth character, his friendship with the protagonist, and that his crush on his teacher ends up Deconstructed later in the Social Link.
Breather Boss:
- All of the times you fight the members of Strega require little to no strategy compared to any of the other bosses. Takaya and Jin are fought before the Hanged Man boss fight in November while Chidori is fought alone in the middle of the same month, and you fight Takaya and Jin once more separately before the final boss battle in January. Since they're susceptible to attacking characters' resistances (Jin's fire attacks being used on Junpei and Koromaru in particular) and only attack once per turn, even a somewhat underleveled player can wipe the floor with them with no problems. Despite the easiness of their battles, they provide a large number of Experience Points similar to the other Full Moon bosses.
- While the Hanged Man boss itself has an annoying gimmick (the player has to knock out three statues in order to actually attack it, and it can respawn them), the fight itself, compared to prior battles, is fairly straightforward. The Hanged Man mainly uses physical attacks, won't defend itself, and lacks status ailment spells, which basically allows any party to go at it.
- The Empress and Emperor bosses are basically just there to demonstrate Fuuka's advanced support abilities; at the beginning of the fight the Empress is weak to all physical damage while the Emperor is weak to all magical damage save for instant kill spells (they are notably the only Full Moon bosses with actual weaknesses), and while Paradigm Shift changes their weaknesses by the time their turns roll around you've likely knocked both of them down and initiated an All-Out Attack at least twice to inflict massive damage on them.
Broken Base:
- The Answer is quite divisive in the fandom, with debates about whether it should be considered canon or not. On the one hand, it does expand on the plot, especially what happened to the protagonist at the end of the game, and extends the story. On the other hand, the changes in several characters' personalities, especially Yukari's, have not gone over well. Some believe that S.E.E.S. fighting each other over the keys is a natural development given their low morale and conflicting desires, while others dislike it, noting that it's rather contrived^Explanation and goes against their Character Development. The much greater emphasis on dungeon crawling is also divisive- some enjoy it, while others dislike how most of the story development happens at the beginning and end, and/or find the gameplay frustrating (see Scrappy Mechanic). The absence of this mode from Portable is one reason why some fans consider FES to be superior, while others feel its removal is just another improvement the port made. Arguments about The Answer resurfaced when it was originally thought it wouldn't be included in Persona 3 Reload, only for it to later be announced to be arriving as DLC as "Episode Aigis: The Answer".
- The mere idea (or possibility) of sparing characters originally fated to die in the story. The Updated Re-release, FES, set the precedent with an optional scenario in The Journey and an explanation regarding the protagonist in The Answer. Those who like the idea are pleased to give these characters another chance at life and thus give them a happier ending after all the story's bleakness (in the protagonist's case, make up various scenarios about how he (or she) could be brought back some day), while keeping things bittersweet; Shinjiro is still in a coma for the rest of the game with a severely reduced life expectancy, while Chidori does not remember Junpei. Those that disapprove of it claim that it goes against the game's themes and even call Atlus cowards for not sticking to the message they decided on. The aftermath of the Moon S. Link on the female main character's route in Portable gets this the worst, with some claiming that the impact is as powerful as in the original scenario, while some others see this as an absurdity that ruins the storyline.
- Manual Leader, A.I. Party vs. Direct Commands. The former camp prefers it for giving the teammates complete independence as their own individuals from the protagonist, arguing that Tactics control is rewarding when mastered and worked around and that the game was balanced around it. The latter camp prefers not to deal with the occasional bout of Artificial Stupidity, especially during certain battles where direct control is needed badly (for example, the Chariot and Justice full moon fight), and are used to having full control of the party in most other turn-based RPGs. Note that some of the divide comes from the original game and FES using the former and Portable and later games in the series using the latter.
- Whether or not FES or Portable is the definitive version of the game is a hotly debated topic. While some fans prefer the former due to the ability to freely move around outside of Tartarus, featuring fully animated cutscenes, and incorporating The Journey and The Answer, others prefer the latter due to the female protagonist route, which some consider different enough to be considered its own game (more social links, different dialogue options, etc.), many quality-of-life improvements that modernized the combat, most prominently the ability to control your party members directly. Which version you prefer is more or less a matter of whether one version's high points make up for the shortcomings of the other, or vice versa. That only Portable has been ported to modern systems, despite many presentation compromises made for the PSP's limitations, is fuel for this fire, especially when many fans want the title outright remade. And when a remake was confirmed with the Reload announcement, this too proved divisive due to statements that no additional content that was exclusive to FES or Portable (such as The Answer or the female main character) would be included. It did not help even further when the Persona content creator Faz created YouTube and Twitter polls asking which one of the two excluded content would rather be added to Reload, where the vote counts were close to each other but skewing in favor of The Answer.
- The lore content in the official fanbooks. Some parts contradict the rest of the Persona subseries (like what Shadows truly are), so that it seems to be built around this game only, so some are comfortable considering them "canon" and some refuse to accept the plot holes.
- Whether the female route's exclusive Social Links deserve the More Popular Replacement reception or are not as great as the former camp made it out to be. While a few of her S. Links are received more fondly like Hermit (see Ensemble Dark Horse below), Magician and Fortune (which is a needed expansion to Ryoji's character who did not do much until the plot finally calls for his significance), some end up divisive, not unlike the male route's S. Links that got this reception helped by being Vindicated by History in the later years.
  - Justice, which is either a good link that helps exploring Ken's character without taking account of the romance route, or the cause of all FeMC-related jokes that have devolved her character perception completely, even if players can ignore the route easily (see Common Knowledge below).
  - Star is either considered one of the best female route S. Links or outright pointless for the associated character (Akihiko), as the latter camp thinks that much of his problems are already addressed more subtly in the main story regardless of route, not to mention that some even outright saw his SL writing to be ruining his character.
  - Moon, oh my. While this S. Link in her route is considered one of the best for exploring more of a character that only stays in the party for one month (also helps that this fills in night schedules which tend to be barren in 3), the aftermath from maxing it out is where the Broken Base tends to happen. The more innocent fans find the aftermath neat, like a mix of hopeful and tragic due to the character's circumstances, while other fans hate it for ruining the story and dampening Akihiko's and Ken's Character Development.
Catharsis Factor:
- If the player doesn't enjoy Junpei's pervy tendencies towards the female party members, the Female Protagonist is given numerous opportunities to call him out on his behaviour.
- Takaya not being a particularly challenging boss fight can lean into this, as you can enter the fight with a party consisting of the Protagonist, Junpei, Ken and Akihiko, and just use the Protagonist in a healing/support role whilst letting Junpei, Ken and Akihiko beat Takaya senseless to get some payback for the deaths of Shinjiro and Chidori. Alternately, have the Protagonist cast Thunder Reign and use the rest of the party's melee attacks to trigger three consecutive All Out Attacks until Takaya stays down.
Character Perception Evolution: Yukari and Ken tend to be viewed more differently by modern Western audiences than when the game was originally released. Modern fans, with a better understanding of emotional issues and trauma and a broader understanding of cultural differences, have a better understanding of what drives their divisive actions, whereas they were viewed as outright unsympathetic back then.
Common Knowledge:
- As funny as it is to joke about the No Fair Cheating quotes from Mitsuru or Fuuka, this sadly only applies to the vanilla version, not either Updated Re-release as the fandom thought. The lines are still there in the latter versions, just Dummied Out.
- The Social Link mechanics have the most common misconception among players which is not helped by word from fan guides, misinterpreted interviews, mixups between FES and Portable, or other players that have forgotten how they exactly work.
  - Broken S. Links are often said to be unfixable when they are not. It just takes a longer time than fixing Reversed ones. Broken S. Links will also not prevent Persona fusions under that broken Arcana, contrary to common belief spread around the internet.
  - Not every schoolmate shares the exact same fragility to being Reversed/Broken. While it is true that in FES the female schoolmates can Break from jealousy, the only female schoolmate where this mechanic does not apply is Aigis (and she cannot be Reversed either). Meanwhile, no male schoolmate can have a Broken SL. The worst the player could cause on them is the Reversed state from double-booking or abandonment (outside the Portable-exclusive joke one from Nozomi's SL), and even then not all guys are subjected to this (only Kenji, Kazushi, Keisuke, and Bebe).
  - Despite her relationship with the Protagonist and even featuring a love confession scene, Aigis' Social Link is technically not coded as romantic. As mentioned above, her SL can not be broken from jealousy, a trait shared among all romanceable Social Links on the Male route, even Mitsuru who is only available late-game and thus has no special events involving her. The elephant in the room is the absence of the message warning the player of potential jealousy that can be inflicted on her upon reaching a later rank, unlike with the romanceable SLs in the Male route, and the absence of the message informing the player that they have entered an intimate relationship with Aigis, unlike all of the romanceable SLs on both the Male and Female routes - and in the 2023 ports, the achievement for entering a romantic relationship not being rewarded if the player "romances" Aigis. This perception is caused by Aigis' closeness to the Protagonist (and the aforementioned love confession scene) as well as the easy assumption that they can date Aigis because other female schoolmates' SLs in the male route end with romance.
- Just the term "messy code" or the like is this, as much of the knowledge actually came from decompiling using third party tools, so the supposed "raw" result is just the best it could produce. What the actual source code actually looks like in Atlus' development environment is completely unknown outside of the development team.
- The Japan exclusive Append Edition of Persona 3 FES is widely believed to just serve as a standalone release for "The Answer" for people who didn't want to buy a second version of Persona 3. In reality, the disc requires the player insert the original Persona 3 disc, and it effectively patches the original game into the expanded version found in the standard release of FES.
- Many fans including ones in this very site consider the manga adaptation as having a happier ending when it is an Ambiguous Situation at best or a Bittersweet Ending like the game at worst. They tend to know this only from the very last panel where Minato, who'd been sitting with Aigis rather than laying his head in her lap, suddenly stands up and greets his friends despite the last bits of the story already showing obvious tells like Minato having difficulty standing and walking and his speech bubbles becoming translucent near the end as his life is getting close to fading away. Not helping matters regarding the ambiguity is that the mangaka admitted to disliking the game's (good) ending.
- The Answer being said to be locked at Hard difficulty (this very site is also guilty of mentioning this). Never mind that its save file mentions Normal and enemy encounters still work like in said difficulty, meaning no chance of Enemy Advantage unless the player is indeed hit first by an overworld Shadow. This perception seems to stem from the enemies having different but trickier stats compared to their equivalent in The Journey and the higher tendency of enemies being given Evade skills against elements they are weak to resulting in Fake Difficulty from missing skills unusually often. As additional debunking, peeking into the game code showed that The Answer was indeed coded to be played on Normal difficulty.
- Koromaru is frequently brought up alongside Teddie and Morgana in discussions regarding the franchise's respective Series Mascot characters. However, it is actually Aigis who is considered the Persona 3 mascot by Atlus, as evidenced by her presence in the logo to the dancing game spin-off. Koromaru being used to represent Persona 3 on the Nintendo 3DS HOME screen title for both Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth and Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth (and the latter's in-game title screen) does not help this perception.
- Similarly to the above, Junpei will generally be included in discussions regarding the "best friend" characters. This is despite treating the Protagonist with increasing hostility over the first half of the game, and a scripted late game event featuring Junpei admitting that two aren't particularly close; it's more accurate to place Yukari in that role, especially on the Female Protagonist route.
- Related to the original home console versions, technical reasons thrown around for not using FES as the base for the 2023 multiplatform port include the loss of the original source code or licensing nightmare related to RenderWare, the engine used by this game and vanilla Persona 4. These are all Wild Mass Guessing at best. It was eventually revealed through interviews with Kazuhisa Wada that this version was picked because of Persona 3 Reload. Reload was being developed long before the multiplatform ports were announced. Realizing the dev team would not be able to include the female route for time and budget reasons, they decided to remaster Portable to compensate so her fans would not miss her out on the modern consoles.
- The Broken Base around Portable saw misinformation about it thrown around as fact. Some of these supposed misconceptions were shared long before the port announcement, usually via memes or out of context screenshots and footage:
  - The only additions were the Female Protagonist route, direct combat control, adjustments to Social Link mechanics, and a handful of combat rebalances and tweaks. Many more quality of life features from later games, including several bug fixes, changing out party members via menu instead of in Tartarus, saving without advancing time, buying weapons at night, and so on, were also included.
  - Ken's Social Link requiring the Female Protagonist to romance an underage kid. Questionable decision to include the option aside, like all female romantic Social Links, this scenario is optional, and the dialogue choices needed to trigger this path are obvious enough that it can be avoided entirely and still end the Link on a friendship path. This misconceptions may have grown out of the fact that the Male Protagonist does not have the option to avoid pursuing romantic Social Links with his various potential love interests in the original game and Portable does not add them.
  - Romancing the Moon S. Link is the only way to prevent a death later in the game. This seems to stem from confusion related to a similar requirement for a different purpose that is only applicable on New Game Plus and the fact that the romance flag can only be triggered in an optional interaction post Rank MAX. The truth is that simply maxing the link is enough.
  - The male route plays exactly the same as in FES. This is incorrect, as S. Link scheduling is changed yet again and some of them have altered dialogue options - for example, that infamous Yukari Rank 5? No reverse-inducing hugs anymore.
- Kotone Shiomi is the only accepted Canon Name for the female main character once it has become widespread. However, she has one other official name, Gekko Lunako. The Famitsu special pages for Persona 3 Portable from 2009 have the articles written as if from the female MC's perspective, and she addressed herself with that name (though she was also aware that the player can name her whatever they like). Considering that the articles are in Japanese and the source is relatively obscure, it is not surprising this is not known.
Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
- A common party setup typically consists of the teammates Yukari (for healing), Akihiko (for enemy debuffs), and Aigis (for party buffs). As a bonus, the latter two are also capable of healing, even though theirs are single-target.
- For fighting the Reaper, at least in the Playstation 2 versions, having a Persona with Thunder Reign is a cheese strategy for most players. Thunder Reign guarantees the shock status when it hits, and a shocked battler will always take Critical Hits (thus knocked down) via physical attacks unless said battler nulls them (in this case, the Reaper does not). Thus, in those versions, this strategy takes advantage of the knocked down status taking away a battler's turn upon recovery. Without attacking it while it is Downed (which makes it get back up again) or using any All-Out Attack except to finish it off, this allows the player to stunlock the Reaper into oblivion.
- For both FES and Portable, more so the latter, nearly every player attempted (and won) the battle against Elizabeth/Theo using an Orpheus Telos with severe-tier magic, corresponding Boost and Amp passives, Mind Charge, a full heal skill, a status nullifier, and, most importantly, High Counter.^Explanation
- Portable version's Optional Boss Margaret is typically best fought with at least both the MC and Junpei with Great condition. Vorpal Blade^note has a high 500 base power and deals double damage if the user is in a Great condition — thus technically exceeds even Pralaya (most powerful physical skill) and unboosted severe-tier magical skills as well as the upper tier Almighty attacks (bar Armageddon, obviously). By having both characters like this, this helps cutting through the boss's HP (important due to turn limits, and the very turn-limited first phase nulls all elemental magic) provided the boss's current turn does not null Slash or the fight is not at the third phase, which imposes a different resistance rule altogether that does not allow any physical attacks at all.
Complete Monster:
- Kouetsu Kirijo is the man behind the terrible events of the game. Ten years prior to the events of the game, Kirijo tried to harness the power of Shadows after stumbling upon them as a source of energy. During this, he discovered the Fall, an apocalyptic event where Nyx would be summoned to bring death to humanity, and became so entranced by it that he resorted to numerous unethical actions to make this happen. These include experimenting on children; giving machines sapient life, and treating them as weapons, which killed many of them. He also corrupted many of the scientists under him to embrace death, and they nearly succeeded in calling out Nyx.
- Shuji Ikutsuki, the Chairman of the S.E.E.S., is in actuality a psychotic dedicant of the god Nyx, with a fervor to match his predecessor Koutetsu Kirijo. Playing the part of the Protagonist's quirky ally, Ikutsuki took part in the catastrophic attempt to revive Nyx in the past and used his own adopted son Sho in the experiment. The subsequent explosion killed hundreds, very nearly killed Sho himself, and brought about the Shadow-infested Dark Hour upon the city. Ikutsuki tricks S.E.E.S. into slaying the Shadows under the pretext of undoing the Dark Hour, all in preparation to secretly restart his attempt to bring Nyx to Earth. Ikutsuki tries to sacrifice all his pawns and manages to kill Mitsuru's father before he's sent plunging off a building, laughing to the end with the belief he's managed to doom humanity to Nyx.
Contested Sequel: Portable is this for some Persona 3 fans, especially for those that prefer 3 and/or FES to later games in the series. The main point of contention is how Portable "dumbs down" the original game and led to many lasting changes for the series in general, with some fans wishing that the unique ideas in Portable were instead adapted into a remake. Similarly, fans of later games in the series tend to prefer Portable for feeling closer to newer Persona games (and, of course, having an option for a female protagonist) and get into fights with those who prefer the original release and FES, whom they see as bitter snobs. This argument grew more intense when the remake, Persona 3 Reload, finally came and lacked a number of the unique features from Portable (although it does contain many of its gameplay enhancements and its script).
Crack Ship:
- Fuuka and Shinjiro are a fairly common ship in fanfics, but they only directly interact in Shinjiro's Social Link with the Female Protagonist.
- It's not uncommon to find fanfics that pair one of the Protagonists with a member of S.E.E.S. of the same gender, where the relationship is based on their Social Link with the Protagonist of the opposite gender. Whilst this isn't an example with the Female Protagonist, as she has Social Links with all of the female party members, it is an example with the Male Protagonist, as he doesn't have Social Links with any of the male party members - and in Junpei's case, the game even features a scene in January where he outright notes their lack of a relationship.
- Ryoji and the Male Protagonist, prior to the release of Persona 3 The Movie: #3 Falling Down, which provides a lot of focus to the budding friendship between Ryoji and Makoto. Whilst Ryoji is a romanceable Social Link in the Female Protagonist route, he not only lacks a Social Link with the Male Protagonist, but never interacts with the Male Protagonist in a one-on-one scene prior to the events of December 31st.
Demonic Spiders: The Phantom Mages from the second block. They're only weak to Hama, which is fairly unusual that early, and they toss out Mudo like it's going out of style. Toss in hitting the whole team with Maragi (which Unicorn, one of the earliest Personas able to learn Hama, is weak to) and you have a surprisingly deadly fight for a group of Mooks.
Die for Our Ship: In essentially any fanfiction that ships the Male Protagonist with a different character, Yukari will be reduced to the Clingy Jealous Girl to get her out of the way, at best.
Disappointing Last Level:
- The Answer is often considered this due to largely consisting solely of difficult dungeon crawling without any of the social links or sidequests in The Journey, to say nothing about the issues with characterization. It doesn't help that most of the plot development occurs near the end, after hours of uninterrupted dungeon crawling.
- If you succeed in finding the route to 100% Completion, then midway through December you should have maxed all but two or three social links^note. It's very likely you'll have absolutely nothing worthwhile to do over winter break. After New Year's Day, the plot is all done except for the last few battles, which can't happen until the end of January. January therefore boils down to an extended Action Film, Quiet Drama Scene where there's nothing to do except Level Grinding and wrapping up the last two Social Links.
Discredited Meme:
- Although memes about the Manual Leader, A.I. Party and resulting Artificial Stupidity (especially Mitsuru's Marin Karin), are still ubiquitous, they aren't as uncontested as they used to be. Players of the vanilla version or FES have argued that making good use of the Tactics system allows the party members to function well as a unit (especially for a Playstation 2 game), despite having hiccups here and there (which is not helped by how healing and support are grouped as one Tactics category).
- Fans of the female MC have grown tired of the Memetic Molester jokes surrounding her, especially after having to contend with Hype Backlash reception and mockery from other Persona fans, and especially mockery from Persona 3 Reload fans that support her exclusion.
Do Not Do This Cool Thing: According to Word of God, players aren't intended to complete all Social Links within a single playthrough. Doing so requires players to make choices to stay on their Social Links' good side, which usually involves encouraging their self-destructive behaviour at the expense of common sense. At the same time, the Social Link bonuses to Persona fusions and the lack of long-term consequences to such behaviour only reinforces the idea that telling people what they want to hear rather than what they should hear is the most optimal choice.
Ending Fatigue:
- Come November you suddenly run out of things to do apart from your few remaining Social Links (although, considering when Mitsuru and Aigis are available, you'll be down to the wire if you want to complete them all, even if you've done everyone else's by this point) and have no real pressure to hurry up in Tartarus anymore. Two solid months go by without real plot development.
- The Playable Epilogue The Answer is pretty bad too. The end is five boss fights in a row^{The fights} (thankfully, you can save in between them) and long cutscenes.
Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game:
- Compared to its sequels, 3 has the most generic gameplay of the modern Persona games. Most of your time on the RPG side of the game is spent running through randomly generated hallways fighting enemies who begin to have recurring models the farther you go. And there aren't many wrinkles added to gameplay the further you go up Tartarus. Aside from cosmetic differences, each section of Tartarus is largely identical as far as traversal goes. It essentially exists as a place to level grind in preparation for the month's boss, and occasionally rescue someone who's wandered in as part of a side quest. In fact, on New Game Plus, you can outright avoid setting foot into Tartarus for the majority of the game as the only time that exploring it is mandatory outside of the very beginning of the game is the final day where you have to reach the very top of the tower to finish the game. If you wanted, you could do the entirety of Tartarus on that day. However, the game's story and many of its characters are still rather well-loved even if the gameplay side hasn't aged as well.
- On the edition wars side, the console version. The gameplay lacks the refinements its sequels and remakes had, but its fans still consider it the best, most uncompromising version of its story.
Ensemble Dark Horse:
- Elizabeth, the world's coolest elevator attendant.
- A notable example is Chihiro, who is just a minor Social Link, yet gets to return Older and Wiser (and Hotter and Sexier) in Persona 4.
- Tanaka is relatively well-liked by having one of if not the easiest non-storyline social links to level up with it being one of the only nighttime social links (a boon for the male protagonist, as he only has two of them), not needing to carry a Devil Arcana Persona to boost points as Tanaka's link will always level up, no matter what responses you choose, and there are no "holdover" visits where the player has to wait^note, delivering hilariously petty threats, and for having a number of subtle Pet the Dog moments later down the link. It also helps that maxing his social link grants the player the ability to fuse Beelzebub, who is a Darkhorse for the Megami Tensei franchise as a whole. Tanaka even cameos in Persona 4 and Persona 5, continuing to host his item delivery service.
- Andre Laurent Jean Geraux, or Bebe, the Temperance Social Link, is a refreshing subversion of Ethnic Scrappy, with fans admiring him for his persevering nature, his adorkable love of Japanese culture, and his devotion to being friends with the protagonist. For all these reasons, Bebe is a very common shipping target with both the female and male protagonist.
- Saori, the Hermit Social Link for the female protagonist, only appears in the female route, but gets a lot of fans for her depressing backstory, her gaining the courage to move forward even after everything that happens to her, and her friendship with the female protagonist.
- Akinari, the Sun Social Link, is a popular contender for the best social link in the game among the fandom. This is thanks to how the game's theme of death goes very well with his SL story while also retaining the Sun tarot theme of optimism should the player learn more about him by going through all the ranks.
- Bunkichi and Mitsuko, the dual Hierophant Social Links, are almost universally beloved in the fandom for being a Cool Old Guy (Bunkichi) and a Granny Classic (Mitsuko) in how they almost immediately come to see the main character like a son/daughter (true to form for the Hierophant) and are relentlessly kind to him/her no matter what.
Epileptic Trees:
- One popular fan theory regarding the protagonist of both genders is that they are actually siblings (maybe even twins) and that one of them died in the car accident, with the surviving one becoming the player character. Though Q2 somewhat debunks this by clarifying they are actually alternate selves to each other, The Weird Masquerade uses the former theory.
- One fan theory speculates that the "Boy with a yellow shirt" from Yuko's Social Link is actually Ryuji from Persona 5. This stems from the fact that Ryuji's portrait looks so similar to the boy's that they could be the same character at different ages, the boy develops an interest in racing whilst Ryuji is a former track star, the boy has black hair and it's stated early in P5 that Ryuji bleaches his naturally black hair, and the fact that enough time has passed between the setting of both games that the boy would be around Ryuji's age by the time of Persona 5.
- The uncanny resemblance that the Reaper has to serial killer Tatsuya Sudou from Persona 2 as well as the creature's origins being left unknown to this very day has created an enduring fan theory that like the members of the New World Order, Sudou receiving supernatural power from Nyarlathotep was a trap but rather than becoming Demons like they did, he instead was transformed into the Reaper after the events of the game.
Fandom Heresy: Whatever you do, don't say that you ship Junpei or Chidori with anyone but each other. Fans generally won't have them paired any other way.
Fan Nickname:
- In fan circles, the officially nameless protagonist (later canonized as Makoto Yuki) has acquired the name "Minato Arisato (有里湊)," the name given to the character in the manga adaptation. The Gender Flip protagonist in Persona 3 Portable has been lovingly nicknamed "Minako" (an actual Japanese girl's name) by Western fans. She is also known as "Hamuko" (ハム子) by Japanese fans, loosely interpreting the last character of shujinkou (主人公), which means "protagonist," as katakana.
  - The Japanese fandom has also nicknamed the male protagonist Kitaro, a reference to the protagonist of Gegege No Kitaro, who has a similar hairstyle.
  - Other nicknames for the Female Protagonist are "MShe" and "FeMC" (presumably pronounced "fem-cee").
  - Recently, the Male Protagonist is being called "Door", "Door-kun" or "Doorisato", as a play on the name Minato Arisato above due to him becoming the great seal at the end of the game.
  - His true name is Roger Clever.^note
  - In discussions of Persona more generally, the Male Protagonist is sometimes called Mankoto to distinguish him from Makoto Niijima.
- Before the male Velvet Room assistant's name was released, fans referred to Theodore as Malelizabeth, Manlizabeth, and Flight Attendant Kanji.
- Some people like to call Aigis and possibly other Anti-Shadow Weapons "Toaster".
- Takaya is sometimes referred to as "Revolver Jesus," with the "Jesus" part partly due to his appearance and partly because he starts a Nyx cult near the end of the game, some time after his apparent death.
- Keisuke has been called Scott The Woz due to their similar appearance.
- Ken Amada: Fans have taken to calling his shorts "shota shorts".
- For a non-character example, the remastered port of Portable is called Mid3P in the Persona modding community according to its Reloaded II^noteA tool for loading mods. folder name. Portable by itself is a common punching bag in the community, and its badly-handled port is just the icing on the cake, hence the unpleasing nickname.
Fanfic Fuel:
- The month between the Protagonist sealing Nyx and graduation day, when the rest of SEES regain their memories is a fairly common go-to, especially in stories focused on the Protagonist dating a member of SEES.
- The inclusion of a female protagonist in Persona 3 Portable led to numerous stories in which the two Protagonists exist in the same world.
- Lots of fan stories continue from the ending where the Protagonist is freed from the seal in some way, the most common idea being to help out the next Persona user in the future years or to send them to alternate worlds.
Fanon: Shared with the rest of the franchise.
Fanon Discontinuity:
- A lot of fans dislike The Answer's story for lots of reasons, from the generally poor decision-making of the characters (e.g. Mitsuru supporting Yukari on a course of action Mitsuru knows is wrong just because she feels indebted to Yukarii), to the removal of lots of ambiguity from the ending, to just Cutting Off the Branches in a rather haphazard manner. If not for those reasons, others dislike it for outright confirming the death of the main character, whose fate was left ambiguous in the ending of The Journey. It is for this reason that some players ignore The Answer entirely so that it's easier to believe that the main character was just taking a nap in the ending.
- The fact that the female protagonist/Minako/Hamuko/Kotone is left out of any references to this game in spin-offs and later installments leaves many fans of Portable upset that in a series that otherwise tends to leave a lot of ambiguity about player choice, it's all but stated her journey never happened. Some ignore any implications the protagonist is male by default in said spin-offs. Her appearance in Q2 somewhat addresses this, and opts to portray the male and female protagonists as being alternate universe counterparts of each other.
- Certain fans, mostly Militant Shippers outright refuse to acknowledge the ending where the protagonist passes away on Aigis's lap, as the blatantly romantic undertones of the scene makes it clear that Aigis was the one who the Main character ends up with regardless of whomever the player romances with certain people favoring the New Game Plus of Persona 3 Portable's version of this scene more where The protagonist passes away in the lap of whomever the player chooses.
Fashion-Victim Villain: Takaya might be a vicious Hero Killer who killed both Shinjiro and Junpei, but because of his ridiculous Jesus cosplay, he can be sort of difficult to take seriously even when compared to his cohorts who at least dress in a convincing manner.
Fourth Wall Myopia: The audience is shown that Shinjiro is a cool guy with a genuine heart of gold that deeply regrets accidentally killing Ken's mom; but from Ken's perspective, he's the guy that killed his mom and ran away from the consequences for years. Shinjiro is also a decent party member to use while Ken is a major case of Low-Tier Letdown. Unsurprisingly, a good chunk of the fanbase sees Ken as unsympathetic and doesn't consider his point of view.
Franchise Original Sin: The Kyoto incident would become the first Hot Springs Episode in which the boys would become the victim of Unprovoked Pervert Payback. But unlike successive games, fans are more forgiving towards this one for two reasons. First of all, the girls' reactions are more justified given that unlike future games, Junpei and Ryoji did intend to peep on the girls whilst Akihiko and the protagonist end up getting punished in a Guilt by Association Gag; and secondly, the scenario can be avoided with the boys managing to avoid getting caught (whether because the male protagonist evades the girls, or the female protagonist fails to find the boys), while the perpetrators, Junpei and Ryoji, still suffer a dose of Laser-Guided Karma.
Game-Breaker:
- The Lucifer/Helel Persona when abusing his instant-kill combination attack with the Satan Persona. It also learns Victory Cry at Lv.94, which restores your HP/MP to maximum after every battle and makes spamming Armageddon (which will defeat anything but the Final Boss (only because of its multiple life bars; and dropping it on the last one allows the player to skip the hell with Night Queen) and Elizabeth in a single hit) even easier. Fixed in FES - Helel no longer learns Victory Cry naturally - and then further nerfed in P3P, in which the combination abilities are items that must be bought with gemstones rather than skills used by having both of the relevant Personas. Still, one can't help but feel a little guilty for just cheesing the Reaper or the final boss with a single use of that hard-earned Armageddon.
  - The Helel Persona alone, even with all the above nerfing, can be this due to its simply monstrous stats. By the time you can fuse him you will have more than enough SP to support spamming the Morning Star skill and wiping away everything in front of you. Its stats far outclass Messiah's, the protagonist's ultimate persona.
  - Satan is also a very strong endgame Persona with a powerful single-target Almighty attack- Black Viper. A Mind Charged Black Viper with Tarukaja and 99 Magic can take off a fourth of the final boss's last life bar.
- The Dreamfest combo skill (Succubus+Incubus) borders on this. It has a high-chance of charming (i.e. neutralizing) all enemies, and works on tough encounters and even some sub-bosses.
- In some instances, Thunder Reign. Anything that doesn't resist/block/absorb/reflect it is guaranteed to get the shocked status effect, and until their next turn, all physical attacks (that they don't block, absorb, or reflect) are guaranteed Critical Hits. So, if you're facing a single opponent whose turn comes after your entire party, you get three successive All-Out Attacks. In which fight can you benefit the most from this? Against The Reaper.
- Auto-Mataru is a Boring, but Practical game-breaker since it lets your entire party start the battle with Tarukaja. Many battles can be won within three turns, and Auto-Mataru makes doing so even easier for you. Note that Auto-Masuku and Auto-Maraku exist for the same purpose, but they buff your team's accuracy/evasion and defense, respectively. And yes, it is possible with enough patience to fuse a persona that has all three of these bonuses.
- Splitting your party up is usually not a useful mechanic unless you're overlevelled enough that all the enemies on the floor run away from you, or if you find yourself on an empty floor. However, since the game only spawns in enemies once the player is close enough for them to be in eyesight, you can split your party while you remain in an area free of shadows, and just wait for them to find the stairs so you can advance. This turns Portable's rescue missions from tedious to an absolute breeze if you abuse this.
- Mind Charge allows for double Magic damage the following turn, which is perfect for dealing with enemies or bosses who have extremely high defense. Mitsuru is guaranteed to learn it at Level 50, and combining it with both Ice Boost and Bufudyne, it makes any boss who doesn't have Ice resistance a complete and utter joke.
- Persona 3 Portable is broken in so many ways that it's the perfect game for beginning Megami Tensei players, especially the port. It's perhaps because of the below features that Maniac difficulty was added:
  - The game lets you directly control allies, unlike the PS2 editions. No more wrangling with Artificial Stupidity. Most preexisting bosses were not rebalanced to accommodate this, which makes several of them a joke.
  - Sometimes when fusing a Persona you'll receive a Persona that's holding an item, usually an accessory. By raising that Persona until it learns its final skill it will give you that item. By registering a persona that's holding an item just before it levels up to that point, you can resummon it as many times as you like and get multiple copies of whatever that item is. This is an easy way to make large amounts of money in the early game. The same process can actually be used to obtain multiple skill cards from the same persona.
  - When it comes to Social Links, maxing out all links in a single run becomes even easier if the player has maxed out Charm (no other Persona games do this), which gives bonus points to any correct answer, and this stacks with bonus from matching Persona Arcana. In a New Game Plus with this setup, this opens up more opportunities for the player to do other activities.
  - The remastered port has a setting to allow infinite revives upon defeat without having to watch the Game Over screen. Turn this on and those Nintendo Hard fights can be won by mere persistence alone.
  - The customizable difficulty settings are this too in the port. As long as the player has access to the system menu, they may change difficulties mid-game to suit their needs. Players have switched between difficulties to use the Persona Compendium at a lower price before resuming a higher difficulty combat.
  - Again from the port, the Suspend Save can be abused in Tartarus to refresh the current non-unique floor into a new layout (and put the party on a new starting point), which can also trigger accidents especially during certain dates where they have a higher chance, without having to move between floors. Players, once they learned of this, may purposefully use this feature to "reroll" the floor for a chance of advantageous accidents especially ones that can reduce Level Grinding and Luck-Based Mission aspects like a floor full of either strong Shadows or golden Shadows. Or the player can repeatedly search the same floor number for request/rare items. Or the player can also escape from Shadows or even the Reaper this way if they do not want to fight them (as a bonus, the Reaper also despawns due to the refresh). Their choice.
  - The above, combined with Not the Intended Use (easier to do on PC, of course), can allow one to do Save Scumming mid-Tartarus. Simply copy the Quick Save file somewhere else so that it is not erased upon loading, then copy it to its original directory if one wants to reload from that file. No more worries about hours of Tartarus progress being lost to a cheap death anymore, even with the rule of Suspend Save.
Genius Bonus: There's a clever reference to real-life events in the flavor text that only space enthusiasts are likely to catch. In Portable, if you turn on the TV at the dorm's lounge on 6/11 of the in-game calendar, the newscaster will say "Japan's lunar probe completed its two-year observation at 3:25 AM today and made a controlled landing on the Moon." This is the exact time the SELENE lunar impact took place, although there seems to be a bit of Alternate History going on (or just a mistranslation) because, in reality, "Kaguya" was a lunar orbiter that was made to crash near the crater Gill rather than a probe that safely landed on it.
Germans Love David Hasselhoff:
- Much of the FES version's popularity came from the Western regions, while in Japan, any talk about its content (especially The Answer) is less commonly brought up. This is not because the Japanese hate it, but because there are a few factors in play. First, according to data on VGChartz, FES sold less in Japan (~160,000 sold) compared to the vanilla version (~210,000 sold). In contrast, the same data showed near-equal interest in vanilla and FES for North America (at ~220,000 each), while PAL regions were more gravitated towards FES (~200,000) due to the vanilla version being marketed far less over there (at ~30,000) until Atlus made more effort in doing it. It also did not help that Europe got the vanilla version released close to FES, rendering the former quickly obsolete. Second, the idea of buying an Updated Re-release on the same console at full price already alienated vanilla version players, which the Japanese first experienced Persona 3 with. Though the Append expansion disc (priced less than a full game, think Downloadable Content) is a way for Japan to experience The Answer without buying a full game again if they already had the vanilla game, Atlus sold these discs in a limited amount before putting out the full director's cut that was FES.
- One official example: Atlus seemed to like the English localization of the PlayStation 2 games enough to feature a dedicated section on three separate pages on Persona 3 Portable's Famitsu article showing comparisons of iconic lines or snippets of dialogue in Japanese and English, complete with translation notes. For example, Junpei's nickname for Yukari (Yuka-tan; Yukaricchi in Japanese) has an amusing speculation that it is a pun of the Yucatán Peninsula.
- Shinjiro is surprisingly very popular in Korea. Not counting the male main character, Shinjiro ranked the highest among all male S.E.E.S. members in the 2023 Persona 3 Portable character poll for that region (at #6, beaten by the aforementioned male MC and all female characters except Fuuka). This is also supported by how a lot of the fan art shipping him and the female MC originated from Korean fan artists.
Good Bad Bugs:
- The game has an odd quirk with Analysis and All-Out Attack where if the player chooses to relent when the latter prompt shows up, but right after the turn ends, the Analysis shows its result, the All-Out Attack prompt will pop up again after that. As seen in a player's Twitch clip.
- There's a famous exploit in the original game and FES where pausing the game causes the on-field enemies to change which direction they're moving. Doing so makes it incredibly easy to manipulate the enemies into turning themselves away from you so you can attack them from behind and get an advantage. Unfortunately it was fixed in 4 and Portable.
- In FES, if you start Tanaka's social link on January 31 (the final day before the epilogue), his Rank 1 event takes up your nighttime activity slot, thereby preventing you from going to Tartarus. The game assumes you already completed the endgame, enabling you to go right into the True Ending.
- A rather funny one in Portable. Because Fuuka's lines from the fight against Elizabeth weren't re-recorded, when the PC fights against Theodore, Fuuka calls him a "she" at the start of the battle. On that note, she even gives the line if she hasn't joined the party yet. The line goof was at least fixed in the remaster so that "he" is used, though the fact that there is no new recording for this scenario means Fuuka will only voice the first line.
- Another one from Portable where, in the female route, if the player does not hang out with Ryoji on 11/15, which normally would block off the rest of his S. Link ranks from then on, but accepts a schoolmate S. Link's phone call invitation on 11/29 (which is also another date required to progress Ryoji's SL rank should the player never ignore him), the game will load the missed Ryoji event instead of the hangout with the character that originally invited her.
- An All-Out Attack may be executed twice if the player repeatedly mashes the confirm button fast enough during the prompt display. Again, a Portable-specific oversight due to how the All-Out Attack prompt is played out in this version.
Growing the Beard: Persona 1 and 2 were mostly standard JRPGs, with few unique features to separate them from the rest. Persona 3 is when the series found its own identity by introducing Social Links, creating the half RPG, half Dating Sim formula that made it famous. Nowadays, fans usually recommend that newbies start with Persona 3 or later due to the older games having aged poorly in comparison. It's gotten to the point that even Atlus themselves don't really acknowledge the first few games anymore.
Harsher in Hindsight:
- Akihiko expresses excitement about the upcoming October full moon. That full moon is perhaps the worst one for him, as his best friend Shinjiro either dies or goes into a coma.
- Should the player speak to Mitsuru in the days after Shinjiro's death, she notes that he gave his life to protect another and asks if the Protagonist thinks they could do the same. By the end of the game, the Protagonist has given their life to protect all life.
- Some throwaway, optional news reports early in the game mention a nuclear power plant leak and home Geiger Counters becoming popular because of it. The game is, obviously, set in Japan, from April 2009 to March 2010. The lines became a lot more uncomfortable following the Fukushima nuclear disaster in March 2011.
- In the days leading up to the typhoon, some students wonder if Japan will end up underwater. In Persona 5, Shido's Palace is a cruise liner that sails above the rest of Tokyo, which is submerged in water, symbolic of how the ruler doesn't care if the country sinks as long as he and his allies survive.
- Junpei's lecherous behaviour towards the female members of SEES over the course of the game, with Yukari directly calling him "the poster boy for sexual harassment" on the FeMC route, is a lot more uncomfortable in the English dub after Junpei's voice actor Vic Mignogna was accused of sexual harassment by other voice actors in 2019.
He's Just Hiding: The fanbase believed this about the main character (given that the ending is ambiguous as to whether he died or simply fell asleep) until the release of FES, which revealed that he did in fact die, at least physically. It's less ambiguous in the context of the original ending song, which is Aigis mourning him. However, Elizabeth states she's trying to find a way to bring him back in Persona 4: Arena.
Hilarious in Hindsight:
- The collected Volume I of the manga adaptation contains a crudely drawn comic from the manga's writer, Shuji Sogabe, thanking Atlus for releasing Persona 3 FES, but then noting that with the release of Persona 4 coming soon, it's making him nervous since any Persona 3 product is about to be overshadowed ^note. His solution? Pleading with Atlus do another Updated Re-release. Apparently somebody at Atlus liked that idea, as Persona 3 Portable was released a year after Persona 4.
- During one of her Sunday dates, Yukari will comment on the physiques of shonen heroes and the Protagonist can comment that Yukari looks like a hero, to which she takes offence; come Persona 4: Arena Ultimax, and Yukari is making a living playing Feather Pink in the latest iteration of Phoenix Ranger Featherman.
- An early conversation amongst the team during The Answer has Mitsuru mention that S.E.E.S is powerless to change society. Fast forward eight years, and we have ourselves The Phantom Thieves of Hearts trying to do exactly that.
- Strega are initially introduced as running a "revenge request" website, where users contract them to commit various criminal activities which they accomplish during the Dark Hour due to their power as Persona users. Come Persona 5, people are able to get the Phantom Thieves to use their power as Persona users to take action against people who have wronged them through the use of a website.
- Elizabeth's desire to turn the Velvet Room into a dance club, plus the memetic scene of Elizabeth dancing during one of her dates are hilariously prophetic following the announcement and release of Persona 3: Dancing in Moonlight, where Elizabeth has turned the Velvet Room into Club Velvet for SEES.
- Portable has an extended scene during the Yakushima Beach trip where Junpei is terrified of Aigis' "water gun" and he gets knocked down by her. How exactly this happened is mostly left to interpretation due to the scene being presented as a text-based 2D Visual Novel. Fast forward to Reload and this is now fully animated in 3D; Aigis is shown spraying a water stream on Junpei using her Finger Firearms and it's clear that he can't fight back. In retrospect, it explains Junpei's reaction and makes the scene funnier.
- Mitsuru's AI memetically spamming Marin Karin instead of, say, healing a dying Protagonist (hence the "Mitsuru I'm dying =<" half of the meme) became a lot funnier when in Reload, not only did she lose her healing skills outright, both her Characteristic buffing the party's crit rate on statused foes and her Theurgy being fuel by statusing foes encourage players to spam Marin Karin themselves.
Hollywood Homely: The infamous scene at the end of the Beach Episode, where Junpei, Akihiko and the Protagonist talk to an older women who's drop-dead beautiful... and the guys discover soon afterwards she's trans based on her slight facial hair, and run off with the moment being played for gross-out factor. This was a game, needless to say, that was from the Turn of the Millennium, sadly. Which is all the more baffling, because she is downright gorgeous◊, and it makes a lot of the transphobic joke outright unfair given how downright beautiful she looks. Reload avoids this and the original transphobic implications by making her into a bizarre conspiracy theorist, causing the guys to bounce off her personality instead of appearance in all versions of the game.
Ho Yay: So much... it even has its own page!
Hype Backlash: Following the 2023 remaster of Portable, some of the players experiencing Persona 3 for the first time have voiced their displeasure over the Female Protagonist route, and did not see the hype behind the praise and memes generated from the FeMC. As the game advises playing the Male Protagonist route first due to it being the original version of the Persona 3 story, these players are going in expecting a drastically overhauled experience on the Female Protagonist route, when it has been common knowledge since the days of the original PSP release that the story beats are largely identical and the only changes come from her exclusive Social Links and music, but to these players, these exclusive SLs and minor changes to dialogue to suit her do not justify a second playthrough, especially with the remaster including an achievement that requires clearing both routes.
Idiosyncratic Ship Naming: Mitsuru/Yukari is sometimes referred to as "DaddyIssuesShipping," since both of them are motivated to end the Dark Hour for their late fathers' sakes — Yukari's dies 10 years before the start of the game, while Mitsuru's dies late in the game.
Inferred Holocaust: Even if the Fall was able to be stopped before all life was killed, the fact that Nyx was able to bring the Moon so close to the Earth would've caused mass tidal damage around the globe, and would've especially been devastating in Tartarus' island nation of Japan and definitely caused more death than the Death Seekers who worship Nyx being transformed into Shadows.
Iron Woobie: Akinari is so positive during his last days.... Even more so if you complete his S-Link, and his soul comes in to cheer for you in the last battle.
It's Popular, Now It Sucks!: While popular in its day, this was the title made the Shin Megami Tensei games mainstream in the West, and started the Persona subseries' ever-growing popularity with each new title. Atlus has since built a franchise around the these titles^note. The more ardent old-school SMT fans didn't quite like this, especially since even the original release of Persona 3 was more accessible than most Shin Megami Tensei games.
It Was His Sled: With the majority of SEES appearing in Persona 4: Arena and Ultimax, plus the numerous jokes that arose following the announcement of Persona 3: Dancing in Moonlight, the death of the Protagonist has become this.
Jerkass Woobie:
- Ken. He lost his mother at a young age, resulting in him getting little besides pity from everyone else... and he plans on dealing with it by committing a Murder-Suicide against the person who was accidentally responsible. This ended up getting exaggerated in the American version, a bit too much.
- Yukari after she Took a Level in Jerkass The Answer. Her tendency to grasp the Jerkass Ball through jealousy of Aigis and desire to bring the protagonist back from his Heroic Sacrifice ends up causing a rift in SEES. However, once you look back at what she has gone through in both her backstory and her character throughout The Journey, it's easy to see why she's become so bitter.
- Yukari's mother is guilty of neglecting her daughter and repeatedly entering into shallow relationships, but not only did she lose her husband, but she also became a social pariah as a result of people blaming him for the disaster. Yukari feels a mixture of anger over her mother's behavior and pity for her being "weak," before she acknowledges that they're more alike than she wanted to admit.
- Junpei's also one, prominently early in the story where his jealousy of the protagonist brings out his nastier side. But he has a deep-rooted Inferiority Superiority Complex, his jealousy stemming from the protagonist outclassing him in something that Junpei felt made him unique.
- Though they have often crossed the Moral Event Horizon, particularly Takaya, you can't help but feel pity for Strega once you discover their backstories. They were once children whose personas were artificially implanted into them and were brutally experimented upon, and constantly have to take suppressants to control their personas even when those suppressants were slowly killing them.
- Nozomi Suemitsu is an unpleasant egotist who cons people (including children) into joining a Church of Happyology while charging them ridiculous amounts of money. But at the same time, he suffers from crippling insecurities as a result of stuck in the shadow of his brother, and his obsession with food is a coping mechanism after his brother's death. What's worse is that his Big Eater tendencies are actually detrimental to his health, forcing him to go to the bathroom halfway between meals.
Just Here for Godzilla: Lots of fans of Portable play for the female main character (whether because they like playing as a girl and this is the only modern Persona title to allow it before or since, they prefer her set of Social Links, or both) and/or the quality of life changes to the combat like manually controlled teammates. Meanwhile, the remastered port, despite the lack of improvements, is often purchased for better modding potential now that it is no longer bound by the restrictions of the Playstation Portable.
Launcher of a Thousand Ships: Both the male and female player characters are this being able to romance multiple characters at once with many of their S links implying they have sex.
Love to Hate: Tanaka is a Corrupt Corporate Executive who will try to milk people (including the protagonist) off their money, but a lot of players consider his sleaziness to be part of his charm.
Low-Tier Letdown: Ken and Koromaru are generally considered to be the weakest characters to use, due to their elemental focus being the luck-based Hama and Mudo lines respectively. Ken is hit with this even more, because besides having good agility, he's outclassed by everyone else in his other fields, which largely contributed to his initial negative reception. However, with Reload making characters focus stronger in their base elements and the damage light and dark element skill introduced in Persona 5 being added, these two got lifted out of this.
Memetic Badass: Tanaka gained this reputation due to the glitch that skips over the final boss if you initiate his social link on the day it takes place, with many fans joking that he's just casually more powerful than a god of death.
Memetic Loser:
- While your partners in the PS2 releases as a whole get shades of this for their Artificial Stupidity, Mitsuru is most infamous for this thanks to "Mitsuru, I'm dying..." "MARIN FUCKING KARIN!"
- While still a well-liked character, the Female Protagonist can be treated like this thanks to her not being canon as well as not being in Persona 3: Dancing in Moonlight. Fans like to treat her as Atlus didn't want anything to do with her. However, her appearance in Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth has been slowly helping her drop this status. And then it circled back to this again with Persona 3 Reload not including her.
- Per confirmation that Reload will not include The Answer within the base game, Metis is subjected to this as well, and this is after Portable not including said content as well — though that was justified by hardware limitations. Fortunately, she is treated less harshly by the fandom compared to the Female Protagonist despite The Answer itself also creating a Broken Base. Eventually, her status became discredited once it was confirmed The Answer shall be included as DLC.
- Orpheus, especially compared to the other protagonist Personae from Persona 4 and 5, as not only does he have two weaknesses, but he also has no resistances to speak of (Arsène also has two weaknesses — Ice and Bless — but resists Curse and there are more elements than in 3 which makes two weaknesses less glaring). This is further emphasized with the protagonist's first Persona awakening during the encounter against the Magician Full Moon Shadow, where Thanatos ends up bursting out of Orpheus and is the one who effortlessly kills the Shadow instead.
- Thanatos does not get away scot-free reputation-wise, either. Despite his cool design and is the closest to a mascot Persona of 3, Thanatos is a Power-Up Letdown incarnate with Guide Dang It! and Scrappy Mechanic involved. Combat-wise, his base stats are good but nothing to write home about and his level-up skills leave much to be desired.^note The Mudo skills gumming up his skill slots no thanks to the inheritance mechanics have become a Running Gag among players. In the end, it is commonly agreed upon by players that the only reason they get Thanatos after learning of his infamy is to fuse him right away to get Messiah, who is arguably not perceived to the same extent. Discredited with the release of Reload, wherein Thanatos' base level is increased from 64 to 78 and he also receives the Maeigaon skill and resistances to fire, ice, lightning and wind damage, making him a much more viable endgame Persona.
- To a lesser extent, Aigis. Despite her general popularity, her role in The Answer, and having her own spin-off, it has become a fandom meme that she is not protagonist material in the eyes of Atlus, as Protagonist-centric promotional artwork tends to leave her out, with even the Female Protagonist of Persona 3 Portable routinely getting included alongside the other Protagonists — even Shin Kanzato, of all people, was drawn alongside the 3 and 4 protagonists in promotional art released between 2008 and 2010. It's elevated to downright absurd levels when even Persona 4: Arena opted to use Labrys (Aigis' sister and a character who had only appeared in a Drama CD prior to Arena) as the "face" of the P3 side of the crossover, as evidenced by the box art featuring Labrys clashing with Yu Narukami, the Persona 4 protagonist, and Aigis inheriting the Protagonist's Wild Card ability is downplayed by restricting her to the use of Palladion and Athena, whilst Elizabeth gets to use Thanatos, one of the Protagonist's signature Personas.

also routinely get their share of the spotlight.

Although Yukari is considered to be an optimal party member due to her effectiveness as both a healer and spellcaster, her basic attacks have a tendency to whiff. This has caused a lot of jokes and memes about her being a lousy shot even though she's a member of the archery club.

Memetic Molester: The Female Protagonist, due to the strong implications at the end of Ken's romantic Social Link that they might have slept with each other.
Memetic Mutation:
- BURN MY BREAD!^Explanation Became an accidental Ascended Meme when the typo "Burn My Bread -Last Battle-" was made on the Spotify release of "Persona 3 & Persona 4 Vocal Sound Selection" (the katakana-titled compilation album dated Nov. 21, 2012, not a playlist from 2021).
- Sharing stories about how the AI did perhaps the worst possible move.
- "Mitsuru, I'm dying. Heal me, please." "Marin fucking Karin!"
- BABY BABY BABY BABY BABY BABY BABY YEEAAAAAAAHHHHHHH
- The whole concept of "I shoot myself in the head and a monster comes out" is ripe for edge jokes, both by fans and detractors of the game.
- Junpei/Stupei Iori, Ace Detective/Defective
  - Bringing you another installment of "Junpei's Believe It or Don't."
  - Who's da man?!
  - Ta-da-da-da! Junpei has leveled up!
  - Yukari gets cancelled.^Explanation
- Akihiko's "I've been WAITING for this!", a line he says when initiating an All-Out Attack, is one of the more well-remembered lines and often is used when people are particularly enthusiatic bout something.
- "Oteakezamurai", one of Junpei's neologisms that was Lost in Translation, is a meme in Japan. The word literally translates to "a samurai throwing up his hands in defeat" and it was changed to the "Ace Detective/Ace Defective" gag in the English version. Despite Junpei using it on one instance, there is some fanart depicting him and other characters raising both hands above their heads. It has become an Ascended Meme since Atlus included it as a conversational reply in Devil Survivor 2 and Junpei also tends to say it in the musicals.
- The charm salt is real. ^explanation
- Tanaka kills Nyx / Tanaka pays Nyx to fuck off ^{Explanation (Spoilers!)}
- "Very difficult and time consuming" ^Explanation
- Posts pretending a FES screenshot is a Portable playthrough (or dismissing the latter entirely — one reversed take called the latter a glitch), either by straight up playing on the original hardware or via emulation (bonus points if done on a modded console, like the Nintendo Switch), is a meme in the Persona subreddit to mock said port.
- Jokes about Keisuke’s resemblance to Scott The Woz have been fairly common on Twitter.
Memetic Troll:
- Nyx Avatar, the final boss of the game. With a massive roadblock of thirteen phases and the tendency to repeat the same quote over and over again, fans are wondering if it's deliberately trying to get on the player's nerves. But the high point is when it unleashes ''Night Queen'', as infamously displayed in DSP's playthrough where he rage quits the game. The charm salt is real indeed.
- Both protagonists, but especially the girl. The licensed Yonkoma comics may set a precedent as those often have either protagonist tease or put other characters in awkward situations, or just pull Insane Troll Logic (and usually get away with it). The female protagonist is so better known for this thanks to certain dialogue choices (like freaking out Junpei via picking "Adventure time!" on the day the main trio went to investigate the alleys) and her depiction in Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth that fans have considered her to be similar to Joker (and naturally ship them).
Misaimed Fandom: There has been a subset of fans that wonder if players really got the message or just emphasized the dark theme so much that they vehemently hate any manner of Plotline Death being averted/subverted. The other message being "live life to the fullest" is commonly lost on the fandom, and is usually brought up by Portable (or rather, just the female route) defenders, which do not help any matters, especially with it being more subtle.
Mis-blamed: All blame goes to Atlus when it comes to the troubled port of Portable. Sega is actually behind these porting plans, while the port work itself was outsourced to Preapp Partners, the same one that first ported Persona 4 Golden to Steam.
Moe:
- The manga made the main character very adorable. Ryoji too.
- The female protagonist certainly gives off this vibe, especially if you pick the most energetic, fun-loving dialogue options. The red and pink dialogue boxes and menus help too. She can also come off this way if you choose to be reluctant when joining the volleyball team, where she'll open the gym door to peak inside, only to close it, and is nervous when the girls look at her. D'aww.
- Fuuka, so very much. She's the most gentle and sweet of the female characters. It's even lampshaded by Junpei at one point, stating "She's the kind of girl you want to protect."
- Mitsuru, Yukari and Aigis can also count as this when they blush on their costumes or their social links. Aigis's difficulties with social interaction and human feelings also make her very endearing.
- Chihiro. Every quirk of her personality, and every stage of her Social Link brings her adorableness score even higher.
- Heck, even Akihiko is this when he tries to be a gentleman to the ladies.
- Shinjiro, of all people. Socially awkward? Check. Rough on the outside, squishy in the inside? Check. All in sharp contrast in his gruff appearance? Check.
Moral Event Horizon: See here.
More Popular Replacement: The female S.E.E.S. members' Social Links are generally better-liked than the ones they replaced in the male protagonist's route. And while Ken still isn't as popular as Chihiro, some will concede that his Social Link gave him much-needed development.
Most Wonderful Sound: The satisfying chime when you pick a good answer in a social link.
Narm:
- Fuuka's Dull Surprise voice acting can lead to a few moments like this. She gets better in The Answer, but that just leads to a whole new set of problems when the "I'm mildly surprised by everything" voice acting from the old lines frequently contrasts with the more flat and matter-of-fact delivery of the new lines.
- The Fortune Social Link attempts to portray that Hiraga is meant to be a doctor by giving him lots of opportunities to show off his medical know-how and natural impulse to help those in need... only it does so by having people around him suffering random medical emergencies at an absurd frequency.
- The events of November 4th, when on Ikutsuki's instruction, Aigis singlehandedly defeats the remaining members of S.E.E.S. sans Koromaru on the steps of Tartarus. Not only is it a one vs. six scenario, but the team had gone to Tartarus ready for a fight, which gives the impression that the Fade to White that occurs instead of a battle is simply because the developers realised how absurd the idea was. Tellingly, the anime adaptation outright rewrites the scenario so that S.E.E.S. arrive at Tartarus unarmed, and Ikutsuki reveals Mitsuru's father as his hostage, so the team can't fight back even if they wanted to.
- Speaking of November 4th, the standoff between Ikutsuki and Takeharu as they are about to shoot each other is a tense scene in the original. But due to its lack of fully animated cutscenes, the scene in Portable instead has them aim their guns directly at the screen like they're posing for a gangster movie, which makes an otherwise dramatic moment unintentionally goofy. Not helping matters is Ikutsuki's Slasher Smile expression that makes him look like he's high, or the shot of S.E.E.S. being crucified in the background which makes them look like they're t-posing.
- Toward the end of The Answer, a moment of unintentional hilarity happens when one of Akihiko's lines gets a voiceover from Mitsuru.
- The port of Portable features accessibility text describing some audio that was not given descriptive narration in the original. While it is not as awkward as the updated version of Persona 4 Golden due to the implementation in Portable being relatively rare and its Visual Novel format already having covered enough in the narrative department, the Post-Final Boss sequence is dampened by the only use of subtitles in the entire game. Specifically, Shinjiro giving support to the main character right before he/she was able to cast The Great Seal. In the original, there was no identifier that he was the one speaking, making his voice an element of surprise for the player since he was long dead/stuck in coma. Again, like in Golden, there is no way to turn this off.
  - The same problem hits in New Game Plus, where the player can pick another character other than Aigis to spend their last moments with. With Aigis, it was fine, but with other characters, all emotional feel is drained when the text box pops up and the speaker's name is untranslated. It's worse if the English localization is used for both text and voice, as one character has the text not match with the voice clip at all.
- Aigis' victory pose has her raising her arms, almost as if she's doing air quotes ("Ah, yes, 'Shadows.'")
Narm Charm: Many of the vocal themes could fall into Narm with ridiculous lyrics sung by over-the-top vocalists. Still, in every case, their catchiness and in-game context make them just plain awesome. Special mentions go to the memetic battle theme and the True Final Boss theme, a rap version of the opening theme that has no right to be as epic as it is.
Never Live It Down:
- Most conversations on Ken revolve around either him trying to kill Shinjiro during the October Full Moon or the female main character having the option to date him, which sours even people that like his added Social Link.
- Related to the above, even the female main character herself gets this because of the latter aspect. No matter how good her character/interaction/overall route is, she will almost always be known as "that pedophile protagonist," which in turn is either mere banter or an easy topic to start fandom infighting.
- A large portion of the fanbase judges Yukari purely based on her actions in The Answer.
  - And even taking The Answer out of account, the Rank 5 event of her Social Link is one for her in the eyes of Western players, where her Social Link will get reversed for choosing attempting to comfort her with a course of action so common it has its own trope. This isn't helped by the fact that the game had already allowed you to do this in a scene before the Social Link started.
- Mitsuru also gets it to a lesser extent. Her joining Yukari in going back to prevent the Protagonist's death, risking the revival of Nyx largely because she feels indebted to her has led some to believe that her intellect has become an Informed Attribute.
- The battle system itself gets this, thanks to your party mates' Artificial Stupidity. Even after Portable rectified it by allowing the player to control allies directly a la Persona 4, the game is still known for "Mitsuru, I'm dying!" "MARIN FUCKING KARIN!"
- Akihiko only mentions protein in one conversation, and that was when it was brought up by someone else. He's also the person you need to talk with for Elizabeth's request for protein (part of a series of quests in which you ask S.E.E.S. members for their belongings). Now, it's been a common characterisation for Akihiko to be a "protein junkie". It doesn't help that subsequent spin-off media have made his love of bodybuilding one of his only defining traits. Note that this is only a problem for the Western fanbase. He has always been this way in the Japanese version.
- For many fans, Kazushi will never live down actually approving of the protagonist telling him to tough out his knee injury and practice through the pain despite the risk of it getting worse. This also applies to the game itself, as the Social Link is frequently brought up as an example in which players are expected to disregard common sense and tell people what they want to hear instead of actually being good friend and giving them good advice, actively encouraging self-destructive behavior in order to get ahead with Social Links.
Newer Than They Think: Aigis' Social Link was not part of the original Persona 3, and was only added in the FES update. Because of Aigis' importance to the plot and the fact that FES and Portable - both releases including the Social Link - are much easier to get hold of^note, some fans are surprised when they learn this.
No Yay: Spending a long time with Ken Amada but subverted in that the scene is up to the player's imagination. A straighter version is the female protagonist and Takaya. Or the male protagonist and Takaya.
Older Than They Think:
- For all the praise Portable gets for giving the male party members Social Links, this idea was already done in (of course) the Japan-only Persona 3 em, which had S. Links for Junpei and Akihiko (though the latter follows his original Arcana, Emperor, instead of Star as in Portable).
- Some non-Japanese fans think that the speech bubble-styled dialogue boxes for when a character is speaking are new to the remastered port. It has been this way since the original PSP release, but only in the Japanese version.
- In the West, Akihiko is widely considered to be flanderised into a one-note protein junkie in the spin-off games, after his more balanced characterisation in this game; however, this has always been Akihiko's characterisation in the original Japanese, and the change in characterisation is because of the translation in the spin-off games leaning closer to the original Japanese.
- Many consider Portable to be the first game in the series to have a female protagonist. However, the protagonist of Persona 2: EP is Maya. And if you want to go even further back, the Shin Megami Tensei if... has a male and female protagonist, with the female character named Tamaki being canon to the series, as she appears in Persona.
- Persona 3: The Weird Masquerade is not the first official media to provide a name for the female main character. She first addressed herself as Gekko Lunako on the Famitsu special article dedicated to Persona 3 Portable in 2009.
One True Pairing: Junpei/Chidori is one of the most unambiguously supported pairings due to the Character Development their story-driven relationship gives them, which led to one of the game's most emotionally heart-wrenching scenes where Chidori sacrifices her life to save Junpei's, forming the core of his resolution to continue fighting and their personas fusing into Trismegistus.
Overshadowed by Controversy: The Ken Social Link having a romance option in it. Many people without playing the game came to the conclusion that it features FeMC grooming Ken and that they sleep with each other, or assume that the female route mandates all Social Links with romance do so as the male route does, eventually leading to the creation of mods that remove the romantic Social Link outright. This is in spite of the fact that Ken's Romantic Social Link is actually toned down in the West to be far more reflective of Precocious Crush Puppy Love, with several dialogue changes being made such as being the only romance in the series to not have an implied offscreen sex scene (it instead says "You spend a long time talking with Ken.").
Paranoia Fuel:
- Normal people do not remember the Dark Hour... which means it could be really happening every night and you'd never know. The Shadows can pull people into the Dark Hour whenever they want and the victim is powerless to do anything to stop it. This means they can kill you at any time. Sleep tight, and enjoy the next full moon!
- FES includes a series of video logs showing the S.E.E.S. members going about their daily lives, revealing that there are hidden cameras in every room of the dorms, constantly recording. This is lampshaded within the final video, as the existence of the camera is exposed.
Player Punch:
- Shinjiro's death on October 4, right after the day's accompanying Full Moon boss. Followed by a Player Kick Them While They're Down at his funeral, when a few classmates talk smack about him. The game gives you an option that amounts to telling them to shut the fuck up.
- The Final Boss. You finally have the power to defeat it, in the form of a battle skill. Just one very major problem though: the cost of the skill is all of your HP!
Polished Port: Portable, in spite of removing rendered cutscenes and simplifying out-of-combat movement, is lauded for removing a lot of sources of Fake Difficulty (such as lack of direct ally control and allowing the player to resume exploring Tartarus from the exact floor they left off) and adding a bunch of new content.
Porting Disaster:
- The PSN version of FES initially suffered from several emulation problems, such as the game failing to save or just deleting your saved games when you try to load, freezing, and lots of texture flickering. This has thankfully been patched.
- Unfortunately, much of the remastered port of Portable has largely met this fate, in contrast to the Polished Ports of Persona 4 and Persona 5. Many people have complained about the AI-upscaled backgrounds looking very unprofessional versus the tight PSP backgrounds of the original, not to mention losing out on quality-of-life features like selectable skills in Fusion and the audio being highly compressed versus even the original, which came out on a handheld released in the 2000s. Lastly, it has a Game-Breaking Bug not seen in any other version where the Final Boss fight can be rendered unwinnable because a glitch can make it refuse to drop its Attack Reflector which it puts up in the last phase even after many turns of waiting it out.
Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
- If a character you hate has a Social Link, chances are, they'll end up growing on you. Ken is more well-liked in the Portable version due to this. Evidently, it's easier to find fanart and fanfics of him with Minako than standalone fan work of him.
- Many detractors of Junpei (either because of his personality, or because the player ends up running into a long string of boss fights who exploit his weakness early on) find that he gets a lot better after he meets Chidori (and also because he serves as one of the few voices of reason in The Answer). And if the player is willing to stick with keeping him leveled after the aforementioned boss fights, he turns into a formidable heavy hitter (and the player will probably have access to skills to cover his weakness by then.) His consistent "true bro" attitude and behavior to even the Female MC in P3P helped him even more, as he openly refuses to put the moves on her if it'd make her uncomfortable.
- Mitsuru was fairly popular as a character, but never used in gameplay by most players due to her Artificial Stupidity. With the PSP remake allowing players to directly control her (thus avoiding her spamming of certain spells) she was suddenly finding herself on many teams and able to play her role as intended.
- Despite the general... disagreement with Yukari Takeba in the west, there's a surprising amount of (western) fans who welcome her inclusion in the update for Persona 4: Arena.
- Ken's inclusion in Persona 4: Arena has also been positively received, though he's more of a Base-Breaking Character than fully rescued.
- Starting from Persona 4: Arena, Fuuka receives a new English voice actress, giving her a more adorable and tolerable voice.
Ron the Death Eater: Probably the biggest reason why many fans dislike Ken. Some people hate Ken just for hating and wanting to kill Shinjiro, despite having understandable (albeit disproportionate) reasons for doing so. A fair amount of people ignore the fact that Shinjiro actually is accountable for the death of Ken's mother. In fact, some fans blame Ken entirely for Shinjiro's death despite the fact that Shinjiro voluntarily died for him without Ken asking him to. And many would have preferred that Ken died instead. And they seem to completely forget Takaya, you know, the guy who actually killed Shinjiro. While Ken had admittedly put himself and Shinjiro in the situation by calling for the meeting during the fight with the Strength and Fortune Shadows, it isn't exactly 100% his fault.
The Scrappy: Nozomi Suemitsu, the "Gourmet King", in Persona 3's Moon Social Link is widely considered the worst Social Link in the entire series, and not entirely without reason. He's disliked for having one of the weakest backstories in the series, as while the impact his brother's death had on him is genuinely sad, the fact that it's only revealed in the final event means it's too little, too late for many. He's an abrasive, ugly glutton who's revealed to be scamming people out of their money for a Church of Happyology, and he makes little to no attempt to better himself after befriending the player as the entirety of the Link just has him stuffing his face while wallowing in his (mostly self-inflicted) misery. As if Atlus was made well-aware of this, both he, Mamoru and Saori are the only Social Link characters who don't appear in any of the Drama CDs, and while Saori is both well-liked and has the excuse of being the only completely new character as the FeMC's Hermit social link, and Mamoru is decently-liked as a character and is universally-regarded as an essential Social Link for Helel alone, Nozomi has no such excuse.
Scrappy Mechanic:
- If the main character drops, it's an instant game over. Hand Waved with a very late explanation, which at least gives the main game a bit of feasibility for it. Still doesn't excuse The Answer having the same dumb mechanic, wherein Aigis is the protagonist and her death won't trigger the end of the world like Makoto's would have.
- Random chance light and dark insta-kill abilities. Most of the time they'll miss. Sometimes they'll hit and knock other party members unconscious. If it hits you, you'd better have a Homunculus item (which is not obtainable by the time you first encounter such attacks). Alleviated a bit in Reload which brings in Kouha and Eiha attacks from Persona 5 as regular damage options which allow enemies to be challenging without relying on hit-or-miss instakills, and also gives Ken and Koromaru utility in boss fights.
- In combination with the above two, Portable adds the fact that when your allies get hit by these attacks, they will use one of your very rare Homunculi to survive it, despite the fact you can simply revive them afterward and if YOU die, then it's game over.
- Another big one is Arcana Reversal and Breaking. In P3, it's possible to blow people off enough that they eventually get the idea that you don't want to hang out with them anymore; with some of the links (in particular romantic partners), it's possible to screw up social interactions so badly that you stop being friends entirely. Both require extra time to repair back into normal mode, and while in reversal it's impossible to raise the link higher, and broken links no longer contribute bonus EXP. The mechanic effectively disappears in 4 & 5 - there are three reversal possibilities and one break possibility in dialogue in 4, but you more or less have to be willfully dense to stumble into them^note. What can make this even worse for a lot of Western players is that the reversal/break land mines in dialogue rely on Japanese social cues, and there was basically no practical way for Atlus USA to localize around them, meaning it's very easy for well-meaning players to bumble into them without intending to. A particularly aggravating example for many is stage 5 of Yukari's link: ^note The sheer number of players who ran into this particular problem helped influence the removal of the mechanic in later games (and it also contributed to players getting annoyed with Yukari when Persona 3 was new). Reload keeps reversals, but makes them harder to stumble into by accident, and removes breaks entirely.
- Relatedly, the romance mechanics in the original campaign can annoy people, especially newer fans coming in from 4 & 5 - in those games, a romance state is triggered toward the very end of a Social Link (usually around stage 9, often with an explicit choice involving asking someone out), but in 3, it actually triggers much earlier - typically stage 6 or so. Unlike the newer games, the choice to pursue either a romantic or friendly relationship is nonexistent, meaning a full Social Link run will inevitably involve the protagonist having multiple girlfriends all at once and cheating on them all. This also means that the various romantic interests can get jealous of each other unless maxed out, which is another way to bumble right into a reverse. While it's a bit more accurate to the mercurial nature of teenagers, from a gameplay standpoint it's unbelievably aggravating to deal with and adds yet another factor into 100% S-Link runs, even on NG+, and also means you have no choice but to be a Casanova, even if you wanted to play your protag as being faithful to just one girl. Needless to say, one of 4's big banner improvements was changing how this worked to give the player more control and to remove jealousy, mainly by finally giving the option to remain platonic with any potential love interests instead; the design of which even got backported into P3P's female route. Later Persona titles instead invoke different forms of Video Game Cruelty Punishment to make the player feel like a cad for breaking girls' hearts when they all find out about each other.
- In the original and FES update you didn't have direct control over the party with the exception of the main character. This is thankfully fixed in the PSP remake and Reload.
- Your party members choose which skills to learn and which ones to forget when they level up, without player input. This can be frustrating to players who would rather have Mitsuru keep Ice Boost (which stacks with Ice Amp) rather than Marin Karin, since none of the party members keep the Boost skills for their respective elements after getting Amp.
- Fusion Spells are nerfed in Portable; instead of having the right Personas on hand, they're now consumable items that you trade gemstones for, so you're forced to grind for them.
- Want to level up the Hermit Social Link on the male protagonist's route? Have fun spending the entire day, including nighttime, doing so for one session!
- Hanging out with Social Links on days off. While it does give relationship points, unlike in the fourth and fifth games, you can't advance party member social links on those days, thus giving you fewer opportunities to rank up with them. Similarly, the fact that you can't advance school Social Links over the summer means that there's over a month in which you're unable to advance most social links (even if part of the time is spent training for the meet and in summer classes). While the subsequent two games have hang-out events that don't give rank-ups, they often give points for multiple Social Links, which is not the case here.
- Unlike the fourth and fifth games, Persona 3 won't tell you whether a Social Link is ready to rank up before you spend time with that person, so if you're not strictly sticking to a guide it's anyone's guess.
- It's possible for the enemy to begin combat with the advantage, even if you struck the enemy on the field, and this happens more often on higher difficulties or against rare forms. In the fourth and fifth games, striking the enemy on the field usually averts the worst-case scenario of being ambushed, but in this case, you can still get ambushed and possibly killed even if you aren't careless enough to let the Shadows sneak up on you.
- Small but simple: No guard feature. You can pass a turn like traditional Megami Tensei; but you get no defensive buffs for it unlike later games, so if your opponent has a mind/power charge ready, your only hope of tanking that attack is that you've got a persona at the ready to reduce, negate, or absorb the incoming hit. Thankfully Portable adds this ability for both you and your now controllable party members.
- The Answer does not have the Persona Compendium for some reason, which means that once you've sacrificed a Persona for fusion, you can't get it back until you make another fusion of it again. This is especially egregious for players who had to grind these Personas to learn certain skills, only to start from scratch. It doesn't help that there are also no Social Links, meaning that there's no way to gain additional EXP on fusion.
  - Speaking of The Answer, the developers decided to slap almost every enemy with skills that increase their evasion against the exact thing they're weak to. It wouldn't be so bad if it didn't activate over half the time, which hints at this being done for the purpose of invoking the most aggravating form of Fake Difficulty.
- Your teammates being separate entities from you in Tartarus, unlike earlier games' random encounters and later games making them an extension of the player. This means that changing their gear requires talking to the specific party member who you want to change around, the ability for shadows to see and attack your teammates forcing you to get ambushed to save them or stop your exploration and heal them until they win, and party members getting caught on walls or scenery leaving you without them if you enter battle. At the very least, Portable does allow you to equip party members from the pause menu, but the other problems remain.
- Portable forces the protagonist to use a single weapon type, instead of allowing them to equip all weapons like in the original and FES. This doesn't really matter much early on, but after Shinjiro dies or enters a coma his polearm/axe weapon type becomes unusable for the rest of the game. If you happen to be a fan of using Thor or Beelzebub's fusion weapons, you'll have to wait until New Game Plus just to use them, and it doesn't help that without him Akihiko has to single-handedly provide all the non-Skill Strike damage.
- In the vanilla and FES versions, if the player splits up the party and an ally finds money, it will not be given to the player. It is minor but can be an annoyance if the player does not feel like battling (or risking such) and is in need for some quick yen outside of selling items (which is not possible during Dark Hour). This is fixed in Portable.
- The superboss in the original and FES and the alternate endings in Portable being locked away in New Game Plus, which the fans see as Fake Longevity. The former was at least fixed in Portable, but the latter has no excuse, as if looking to make up for its lack of The Answer story.
- In New Game Plus, equipment are among the things carried over from the cleared save file, but in the original and FES, ones equipped during the final battle were not included. Considering the effort needed to get the most powerful ones, have fun buying/fusing/hunting rare chests for/trying to obtain the lost equipment again! Thankfully averted in Portable.
- In vanilla and FES, party members can choose to return their current equipment if the player talks to them in Tartarus if they got something else more powerful, depending on game progress. While this is good, they can also do this to their joke weapons, even if said weapons are their most powerful at that point in the game, forcing the player to re-equip them when this happens. Same for weaker equipment if the bonus effect attached has a better benefit than what they decided to get instead.
- A common annoyance when playing the female route, especially when going for Orpheus Telos, is the fact that there is no way to max out the Moon S. Link without having to find a particular key item, or at least with some other alternative way to max it out and still play the original scenario, which to many fans is the only natural flow of the game's story.
Self-Imposed Challenge: Maxing out all Social Links in the vanilla game, as according to Katsura Hashino in a 2006 Famitsu interview, the Social Link system was never designed for 100% Completion and was thought to be impossible by the debuggers. Even the most optimal guide out there required following every day-to-day activity to a T and had one Social Link reversed as part of the guide.
Sequel Displacement: Persona 3 was first modern Persona game, and it set the tone and standard of the entire franchise since. Persona 2 has a comparatively much smaller fanbase, and the original Persona barely gets a look in at all!
Signature Line:
- Akihiko's "I've been waiting for this!" You'll hear it a lot, since it's Akihiko's All Out Attack prompt, and is a simple quote that captures Akihiko's Blood Knight personality.
- The Final Boss saying, "The Arcana is the means by which all is revealed," at the beginning of each of the fourteen phases of the fight.
Signature Scene:
- The October Full Moon event, in which Ken confronts Shinjiro to avenge his mother's death, only for Shinjiro to sacrifice himself to save Ken's life is generally the best-remembered moment of Ken and Shinjiro's character arcs.
- The climax of the final battle, in which the protagonist sacrifices their life to seal Nyx away.
- The ending, in which the protagonist passes away in Aigis' arms on Graduation Day.
- Anyone who has played The Answer will remember the trio of boss battles against the other members of SEES, since, like the first example, it's a defining moment in Yukari's character arc. The music makes it particularly memorable.
Special Effect Failure: Since the moment of the reveal of the remastered port of Portable, fans and (especially) modders were quick to point out how every visual from the original assets is just AI-upscaled. Once reviews came out and eventually the release date arrived, it is even clearer how sloppily the graphical overhaul was done. The still image cutscenes all have some artifacting in one way or another, efforts to add graphical detail are nonexistent, resulting in blurry backgrounds, especially when played on large screens, background text details are completely unintelligible, and, in the audio department, all sound effects, voice clips, and music are somehow even more compressed than the PSP release.
Spiritual Licensee: This Kotaku article makes the claim that Persona 3 can be considered a video game adaptation of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with each character from Persona 3 compared to a character from Buffy.
Spoiled by the Format:
- A tip off that a Persona evolution is coming is when a Persona user has no new skills to learn but hasn't evolved yet. The lower level a character is when they stop getting skills, the earlier in the game their Persona tends to evolve. Shinjiro and Koromaru, whose Personas do not evolve, get new skills until Level 77, a level at which the Final Boss can feasibly be fought, while Aigis, whose Persona is the last to evolve, gets new skills until Level 60.
- When you face the Disc-One Final Boss, only two of your party members have evolved their Personas, at least one or two Social Links haven't even become available yet^note and the game has been going for seven months, whereas Igor said it would take place over the course of a year (although there is a Time Skip of a few weeks between the Final Boss and the denouement). It's easy to guess that the game is far from over.
Stoic Woobie: Shinjiro may act like a tough-as-nails badass, but that only hides the baggage that he carries deep down.
Tainted by the Preview: The eighth-gen port was a Portable re-release rather than a full remake that combined the best of both it and FES, with poorly-upscaled graphics and sound from the PSP original. There was also worries about the localization aspect since the remastered port was handled by a notorious figure in the localization community despite promises that nothing on the original script would be touched outside of typos or grammar mistakes, which, for the English version by the way, still retains some of the mistakes like the repeated "equipped" text on the Attack command's description for Strike- and Pierce-type weapons. Fans also worry that it is going up against Fire Emblem Engage, an entry to one of Nintendo's biggest franchises, once its release date was revealed. It was made even worse when a Nintendo Life review revealed that the one Scrappy Mechanic players were looking forward to be fixed, the lack of manual skill inheritance, is still in the port. And footage from reviewers like GameXplain also puts the final nail on the coffin by showing noticeable graphical artifacts indicating an even lower effort upscaling (and some graphics are not upscaled at all like the Tartarus introduction cutscene), broken transparency on the 3D models, unfixed graphical quirks (blood on Tartarus battle map remains off-ground) and missing details compared to the original (like the train still not moving during the 5/9 full moon mission even after the timer starts). Finally, the reviews themselves are mixed (contrast with Persona 4 Golden, which is very positive overall despite being a port of Vita game that began life as a PS2 game, but Golden has the advantage of having tons of quality of life updates and features to begin with) and most call out the lazy porting effort, driving many fans away right before it is released. Things didn't get any better when an interview stated that they were undervaluing the game regarding the release price with "how much work they put into it", something that didn't go over well with the audience.
That One Achievement:
- "The Nose Doesn't Always Know", the achievement for experiencing a Fusion Accident in the 2023 rerelease. There's no way to manually trigger the event, so unlocking the achievement is entirely based on RNG.
- "A Pair of Wild Cards", which requires clearing both protagonist routes in the 2023 rerelease, which many players see as Fake Longevity and, as noted on Just Here for Godzilla above, they tend to play this version for the female MC and would rather just boot up FES for the male MC experience. It says something when the percentage of (Steam) players getting this achievement is slightly lower than "A Cut Above" (both at around 2% each), whose difficulty is justified as it involves the game's infamous Optional Boss fight.
That One Attack:
- Night Queen, the final boss's most powerful attack, which it will only use once it has only a remaining third of the health of its fourteenth lifebar remaining (2,000 HP). It deals massive Almighty damage to the party and has the capability of inflicting any status effect on the party. Worst case scenario, if one or more of your party members is killed, charmed, enraged, or inflicted with fear, you have pretty much no hope of victory at this point. If just the protagonist is enraged or charmed, it can be just as bad if the protagonist had a persona that healed, since then YOU can end up FULLY healing (*6,000* HP) the FinalBoss, or getting your team in a nearly hopeless position depending on the tactics you had on them when you got enraged and can't heal the team. Between that and Nyx Avatar mixing things up with Moonless Gown, which allows it to repel everything you throw at it for a few turns, you can potentially end up screwing yourself over depending on how everything goes. Happened to have Infinity^noteNulls all damage until next turn. up? Night Queen bypasses it.
- Moonless Gown itself became this in the remaster of Portable due to a random bug that causes its effect to not be removed even after more than enough turns have passed, turning the Final Boss unwinnable.
- The Hermit Full Moon boss has Giga Spark. If your entire party lacks Elec resistance and you didn't have your defensive buffs active, it will cause a Total Party Kill. However, this attack is heavily telegraphed by three turns of charging, which would normally be plenty of time to prepare a countermeasure (barring poor preparation), and with sufficient preparation on New Game Plus to remove the boss's Elec immunity and set up attack reflection, it can be dramatically turned against it.
That One Boss:
- This being an Atlus game, most of the bosses are very tough, but Sleeping Table deserves a special mention. Megidola and Maragidyne (ma-spells hit all possible targets, and Megidola is a second-level Almighty — thus unresistable and very powerful — spell), plus Hamaon, Evil Touch (inflicts Fear) and Ghastly Wail (unblockable, instantly kills any character with Fear). You know it's bad when you're praying that it just spams its One-Hit Kill and misses. A lot of the Tartarus bosses can fall into this category, especially compared to the Full Moon Shadows, but the Table is the standout example.
  - Let's put it this way: The Homunculus item shields you from one One-Hit Kill attack, but is extremely rare to balance it out. Portable added a sidequest where citizens will disappear into Tartarus and give you items when they're rescued, including two of your Social Links, Bunkichi and Maiko. Your reward for rescuing Bunkichi, who's found a few floors beneath the Sleeping Table? Ten Homunculi. Yeah, Atlus knew that the thing was this trope.
- The Chariot and Justice dual boss, especially if you're not playing the Portable version, which lets you control your non-MC party members. They've both got very strong attacks. Justice's are multi-hits while Chariot's have added status effects (which often result in criticals from Justice's attacks). No big deal, just deal with the problem one at a time, right? Well, no. Because if you're unlucky enough to kill one of them and the other's turn comes along, he'll use Samarecarm to bring his partner back to life at full health. So if you don't lower both of their HP at the same time with even-handed attacks (and/or are really unlucky) you run the risk of starting the entire fight over again. Remember how before Portable, your AI allies couldn't be fully controlled?
That One Level: It's generally agreed that Harabah is the hardest portion of Tartarus, what with it being dark and the only light coming from moving rainbow circles, which is hard to look at and makes Shadows nigh-impossible to see. Empyrean is a possible contender in The Answer, what with pretty much every enemy having either Mahamaon or Mamudoon.
That One Sidequest:
- Certain Social Links are notorious for their requirements to max out. Then there are certain aspects of the SL system itself that range from Scrappy Mechanic to Guide Dang It! that land them on this list as well.
  - Mitsuru's (Empress) Social Link doesn't begin until late November (third-to-last month in the game), and your Academics need to be maxed out (while all of your attributes should be maxed out well beforehand, Academics takes the longest time, and it's possible to not have it maxed) and it's also required to score the highest results on at least one exam (which is dependent on your Academics stat too^note). She's also only available three days of the week (Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday), and is unavailable for much of December (due to final exams and trying to decide whether to kill Ryoji). Even if you do succeed in starting it at the first possible opportunity, Mitsuru becomes unavailable from the end of November until the start of the third term. If there is one Social Link that most players wind up not finishing, it's usually hers.
  - Hidetoshi, the Emperor link, is generally considered one of the most difficult male links to max out despite becoming available early on in the game. He's the only fellow classmate who will never call to hang out on weekends, limiting the time you can see him, and his link progresses faster earlier on if you approve of his borderline Knight Templar tendencies. (He gets Character Development later, but until then you have to take his side no matter how jerkish that seems, which goes against the norm for Social Link responses.)
  - Kazushi's Social Link is similar to Hidetoshi's in that the best dialogue choices are those that encourage his self-destructive tendencies; pushing him to play through the pain yields better results than discouraging him from permanently injuring himself.
  - Aigis (Aeon, only in FES and Portable) is even worse in that regard; it opens in January, which you only get if you choose to let Ryoji live. You fight the Final Boss by the very end of that month, so you're on a very limited time span to complete hers as well. Complicating things further, the Ultimate Persona of the Aeon Arcana (Metatron), which only can be fused after completing the Social Link in the current or a previous run-through, can be fused with a Nihil Weapon to obtain the best gun of the game for Aigis (Metatronius). Considering that the Antiques Store takes two days to complete it, this leaves a very, very small window of opportunity to get the weapon on the first playthrough. It doesn't help that she's often available on the same days that Mitsuru is, forcing you to choose carefully who to spend time with.
  - In both FES and the original version, Social Links with the female characters are even more complicated. After a certain point in each dateable girl's Social Link (which generally occurs between ranks 5 and 7), you're in a "serious" relationship with that girl. Pleasing one means upsetting another and woe is the protagonist if he double-booked and ends up canceling a date. The "jealousy" mechanic was removed in Portable, though the girls do still side eye you and each other during story events.
  - The female protagonist's links are both easier and harder at the same time; she has more links open at night, but two of them are on a one-month time limit (the Moon for Shinjiro, and Fortune for Ryoji); Ryoji in particular has to be hung out with whenever you are given the chance to do so (although some rank-ups do not require you to spend free time), including when he calls on Sundays (which, for every other social link, can't result in a rank up and is a waste of time in many cases). If you miss one opportunity, the link will simply stop progressing. It also trips you up because of a large gap between Rank 9 and MAX - choosing to let him live maxes it out, and that's at the end of December.
  - Junpei's Social Link is deceptively difficult to complete. Despite being among the first links to become available, he requires multiple holdover visits between Rank 4 and 5, and he's unavailable for much of the middle of the game.
  - Right up there with them is trying to become Akihiko's Love Interest in his link; unlike Shinjiro, Ken, and Ryoji, Akihiko's romance route requires triggering multiple flags that you likely won't know of without a guide, and mucking up even one keeps their relationship strictly platonic. What's more, the link freezes at Rank 7 with no indication of when it can restart if you get there before October (it coincides with Shinjiro's death), and it's possible to break his link altogether, although only if you do manage to romance him and reject him.
  - All the female main character-related S. Link woes culminate in unlocking the New Game Plus endings due to the different writing and mechanics compared to the male route. All this comes from how the female route has a S. Link writing style for the romance routes more akin to Persona 4, unlike the male one where simply maxing the non-Aigis female SEES member(s) is a prerequisite to the unlock (also helped by the lack of "jealousy" mechanic in Portable). Two of them require picking certain dialogue choices in certain rank(s) (a la the Fortune link in Persona 4), while the only other one is a Guide Dang It! unless the player somehow bothers to interact with him after the link is maxed (and even then, the player has to pick the correct dialogue option too). Notably, the only lover link with the simple "friend" or "lover" prompt to finalize the relationship is not a SEES member, thus not impacting the New Game Plus ending. Note that, unlike the male route (and Persona 4 itself), there is no prompt in the SL events telling whether the player has managed to establish a lover relationship, with one character's S. Link profile (in the localization) being the only one that changes its description depending on the relationship status.
  - Built on top of all the above difficulties, there is Orpheus Telos. Available in FES and Portable, the player needs to Max Up every single Social Link in the game in a single playthrough to be able to fuse the true Ultimate Persona of the Fool Arcana, which happens to be a level 90 Persona tailor-made to counter the Non-Standard Game Over conditions of the Superboss. Complicating matters, Orpheus Telos can be fused with a Nihil Weapon to get a piece of equipment that grants high resistance to magic^note and, as with Aigis' Metatronius, this means that there is a small window of opportunity to take Orpheus Telos to the Antiques Store before the end of the game. Especially true if the player aims to get both weapons in the first playthrough.
- Elizabeth/Theo's requests:
  - One of Elizabeth/Theodore's sidequests requires you to clean the restrooms near the movie theater at Iwatodai Station. You need a scrubbing brush in order to complete it. What kind of item is it? It isn't an item; it's a weapon - it's Ken's "joke weapon," in fact, and by the time the restroom sidequest is available, you've likely sold it off, since there are far more powerful spears available for Ken to use. In Portable, you also can only get said scrubbing brush by doing another sidequest that's available months before the restroom one.
  - Another request: "I'd Like to Sip Oden Juice". The drink-loving girl at school has it, but she'll only give it to you in exchange for a "rare drink". What she means is one of the drinks that's only available in Kyoto, and you're only in Kyoto at one point in the game. Not that hard if you know what to do, but if you don't, it's Permanently Missable Content. (Annoyingly, the game taunts you by giving the quest no deadline, when it really kinda does have one)
  - Linked with the Aeon link and Orpheus Telos above, Elizabeth's Fusion Spell requests. Past the halfway point, most of them require ultimate Personas, so if you're not on a max Social Links run you're probably not going to finish them. The worst part is that Last Judge, which requires Metatron, is far from the final request in the chain, putting the entire thing on hold until shortly before the Final Boss due to how late Aeon can be maxed out. And the reward for doing them all is one of the only ways you can get a Plume of Dusk outside of Easy Mode, which makes it very desired.
  - At various points, Elizabeth/Theodore will ask you to get things from certain members of S.E.E.S., by talking with the in the evening. Unfortunately, while the deadline is fairly generous, you can only get the items from the people in question on one evening, and only in the evening- Elizabeth/Theodore will tell you the date after you accept the quest, but will not specify that it's your only opportunity. If you're not paying attention, the window of opportunity can easily pass you by.
  - Among all the Shadow hunt-type requests, no one can forget the Medal requests, a Luck-Based Mission on multiple levels. First, the player has to find a golden Shadow on the block corresponding to the request, which is rare outside of accident floors that spawn only them (in Portable only). Second, make sure it is hit successfully before it flees/vanishes. Finally, hope it will not run away from battle especially on the very first turn (due to "enemy advantage" regardless of how it was hit). Thankfully, defeating one while the corresponding request is active will make it always drop the Medal, so the player can just stop the hunt right there outside of the need of Coins or Nihil weapons. However, on the last two blocks, the requests ask for more than one Medal, so good luck. Oh, and excessive Medals (if the player was oh so lucky) are not carried over to New Game Plus, so have fun going through these requests again on a New Cycle!
  - The vanilla game has the Shadow Shard and Shadow Crystal requests. There is a good reason why they do not appear in either updated version. Like with the special swords in FES, these treasures are Rare Random Drops that can only be found on certain floors, but they are so rare that casual players rarely, if ever, found one in a single playthrough. And like with the Medals above, they are not carried over to a New Game Plus.
They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
- Some fans dislike the visual style used in Portable. The comic panel-style reaction shots are gone and so the impact on a given scene is lessened. The game also recycles emotes, S. Link graphics and animations, menu style, and most battle visuals from Persona 4, making it seem like "Persona 3 in 4's clothing". This also extends to the summoning sound effect, which to detractors sounds bowdlerized compared to vanilla or FES (though the one used in Fuuka's first-time summoning scene is not subjected to this change). Same for the All-Out Attack sound effect, which sounds less impactful, even compared to 4.
- Either main character only being able to equip one type of weapon in Portable. Also Fusion Spells being reduced to (MC-only) items. See Scrappy Mechanic above.
- To a lesser extent, equipment no longer having randomized bonus effects attached in Portable. It is a double-edged sword, though, as in the original console versions equipment are not stacked because of the random effect mechanism, causing the player's inventory to quickly grow full from multiple equipment of the same name, the issue of which is fixed in Portable by limiting inventory by as many item types as stored in the game database (though limited to 99 per item, but at least this revision makes duplicates easier to sell) at the cost of player combat creativity that relies on particular bonus effect combos.
- Manual Leader, A.I. Party players look down on the removal of the unique Tactics commands Knock Down, Same Target, Attack Fallen, and Assign Target, which results in Portable upping the Artificial Stupidity for this playstyle.
- Crossing over with It's Easy, So It Sucks!, some fans hate the reduced difficulty overall in Portable thanks to Anti-Frustration Features, combined with nerfs to certain mechanics that the PS2 players had grown accustomed to.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
- In the original game, all of your male party members lack Social Links, with their Arcana being represented by a similar non-playable character instead (for example, Akihiko uses a Persona of the Emperor Arcana, while Hidetoshi is the Emperor Social Link). While they still get plenty to do during the plot, it makes the player feel much less close to them than they're supposedly meant to be. It doesn't help that the characters filling in for them in their Social Links tend to simply be more generic versions of them, making several Social Links seem almost redundant. This is remedied somewhat in Portable, as the female protagonist has Social Links with every playable character (even the one who dies after about one month, complete with the opportunity to avoid his demise).
- Ikutsuki. You'd think that after The Reveal, he'd be the game's Big Bad. Instead, he quickly gets killed off the night he's exposed as a villain. His betrayal of the team and his killing of Mitsuru's father have significant repercussions, but his Evil Plan to try to become Nyx's chosen goes nowhere.
- Despite being set up as major antagonists who oppose S.E.E.S. efforts to undo the Dark Hour and are responsible for the death of one of their party members, Strega are regarded to be rather under-baked characters. Their backstory and motivations are a mystery up until the final segment of the game, and apart from killing Shinjiro don't do much to drive the plot. Of the three of them, only Chidori is considered to be the most developed, and that is because she primarily serves as a Satellite Love Interest to help drive Junpei's own development.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
- It is mentioned that on occasion, Shadows besides the Full Moon bosses show up outside of Tartarus- Akihiko encounters one along with the Magician during the first full moon, Koromaru fights another offscreen and S.E.E.S. battled one during the incident in which Ken's mother died. This would seem like a good change of pace, and an opportunity to have boss battles apart from the Full Moon Shadows, the tower guardians and Strega. Unfortunately, the former two are Killed Offscreen and the latter is a backstory-related incident, so the player never actually gets to fight these Shadows.
- Volume 9 of the manga adaptation has Akihiko, Ken, and Koromaru fighting against Jin during the ascent to the top of Tartarus, rather than Takaya, who fights Junpei and Mitsuru. The latter would have been a much better opponent for Akihiko and Ken, seeing as how he killed Shinjiro.
- In Portable as the female protagonist, if you max out Shinjiro's Social Link, he survives Strega's assassination attempt of him. It would be interesting to see how the plot unfolds with him still being an active member of the team, and get a chance to finally max out his level and skill list outside of New Game Plus, but instead he's put into a months-long coma that he only gets out of at the very end of the game when you're about to die.
Too Cool to Live: Shinjiro Aragaki, the hard-as-nails asskicker, who dies midway through the game.
Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
- Concerning October 4th, Ken. Granted, he did lose his mother, but his planning to kill Shinjiro and then himself isn't something that anyone, except maybe Takaya, wants. While Shinjiro is guilty of manslaughter, his popularity and the fact that he's willing to accept being killed for what he's done, save for the fact that Ken will then have to live with the guilt Shinjiro bore for years (a lesson Ken ignores) makes him somewhat more sympathetic by comparison. The official English localization doesn't do Ken any favors either: in the original Japanese version Ken is understandably distraught that Shinjiro died because of him, but in the localization it's instead implied that Ken's angry that he didn't get to kill Shinjiro himself, souring Western audiences that aren't aware of the dialogue change.
- Nozomi, the male protagonist's Moon Social Link. One complaint many people, like Fither in his video, "Is This Persona's Worst Social Link?" had about the character is that while the death of his brother was genuinely sad, it's only revealed at the end of the Social Link, in which Nozomi acts unpleasant to the main character, eats too much and cons people out of their money for his cult. When people attack Nozomi in revenge for his stealing money from them, the game expects you to feel sorry for him, but it's easy to conclude that he actually deserves it.
Values Dissonance:
- In the "Operation Babe Hunt" sequence, the Unsettling Gender-Reveal for the one woman who expresses interest in the male SEES members can come across as being horribly transphobic today, especially with how it's Played for Laughs at Junpei's expense. Reload completely changes the end of this sequence; now the woman scares off the boys because she's a nutty conspiracy theorist.
- In the Portable-exclusive Female Protagonist route, Ken — an 11-year old party member — serves as a romantic option for the Female Protagonist, who is six years older than Ken. Many fans feel as though that this romantic route comes off as grooming and pedophilia, despite this ultimately being a case that is both even between both characters and Older Than They Think; in Japan, its sexualized or romanticized depictions of children are known under the Lolicon and Shotacon genres, and culturally speaking — while not without some controversy — is largely accepted as harmless and separate from depictions of actual child abuse for many Japanese. Nevermind the Ken Romance route being written with common Shoujo tropes like I Will Wait for You in mind. This doesn't translate over well to the West, so many people feel that Social Link is creepy at best and outright pedophilic at worst.
- The Rank 5 event of Yukari's social link with the male protagonist, as mentioned in Scrappy Mechanic. It would seem like a natural move for Western players to give Yukari a Cooldown Hug as a way to comfort her, but that would end up reversing her social link instead. In Japanese society, such a public display of affection would be frowned upon, especially since the protagonist and Yukari have yet to be an Official Couple at this point. In the localization of Reload, the options are changed to "I'm sorry," "It's okay to rely on others," and "You're a girl, so..." with the latter choice, which causes the reversal, being more obviously the wrong answer to a Western audience due to the sexist implications.
Vindicated by History:
- As the series has gone on, some fans have looked back on this game's initially-disliked traits more fondly, particularly those who dislike how later games can feel like a power fantasy. Ken and Yukari's arcs are viewed in a more positive light on account of presenting team friction that's rarely present in the later games, and the Tactics system in the original and FES does a better job than many of the sequels at letting the rest of the cast act without the main character's input. Additionally, some like how Junpei has more issues with jealousy of the protagonist than, Yosuke or Ryuji did- the former only admits to being jealous of the protagonist at the end of his Social Link, while the later is not jealous at all.
- Related to the above, there have been more defenders of the absence of party member Social Links (though the female ones do have SLs, they are just there for romance; Aigis' was only added in FES to tie in with The Answer), decrying how the way later games since 4 (including Persona 3 Portable) implemented and handled this mechanic caused a disconnect with the main story potentially resulting in They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character as this makes the party members unable to stand on their own.
- The Social Link consequence system has also been looked back into more fondly for allowing some realism and challenge in pulling a 100% Completion after some fans considered Persona 5 too easy when it comes to time management. The development team seemed to share the sentiment as Social Link reversal is included once more in Reload, but they tried to balance things out by making it less restrictive than the original, and breaking is not included.
- Same with the condition system, since unlike later Persona games, the dungeon-crawling occurs at night instead of day, so players that came from and enjoyed the vanilla version or FES understood the gameplay balance justification and realism and hate how this is absent from the later games (and downplayed in Portable to the point of being an Underused Game Mechanic) which results in an incentive to complete a given main dungeon in a single day and thus make the game less fun. Same as the Social Link consequence above, the development team for Reload seemed to echo the same sentiment but tried to rework the condition system so it is less Guide Dang It!.
- The Answer's story gained significant Critical Backlash in the New Twenties, with many Youtube video essayists and blind Let's Players praising it. With much of the Ron the Death Eater hate for Yukari wearing off, fans came to appreciate it as a fitting epilogue to the original plot and a well-executed metaphor for grieving the loss of a loved one, and like the main story, the team friction is more appreciated.
- In a way, theming-wise, the vanilla game as well. Even without The Answer, many more fans have come out of the woodwork late in The New '10s praising the message and theme about death, which are depicted well enough without being overly edgy, and some have complained about various re-releases "softening" that message by allowing the player to jump through hoops and save some characters originally fated to die.
The Woobie:
- Practically every member of SEES is a Woobie in one way or another, though these examples particularly stand out.
  - Yukari Takeba. In The Journey, she's spent the last ten years being ostracized because people blame her father for the explosion and she also has a strained relationship with her mother, who'd been deeply wounded by Eiichiro's passing. When Yukari sees the final video of her father, her faith in him is shaken after learning that he really was responsible for not only the explosion, but the Shadows and the Dark Hour in general. After the Male Protagonist comforts her, she begins to develop feelings for him and by the end of her Social Link, has fallen in love with him and begins to understand how her mother must have felt after Eiichiro's death, before the Male Protagonist dies, having given his life to save everyone else. In The Answer, Yukari's grief and heartbreak over never getting to say goodbye to him lead to her trying to find a way to save him, putting her in conflict with the rest of the team, and ultimately culminating in Yukari breaking down in tears when she's unable to save him. Things aren't much better for her on the Female Protagonist route, as whilst she doesn't fall in love with her, Yukari ends up considering the Female Protagonist her best friend.
  - Junpei Iori initially looks at his Persona as something that makes him special, but his low self-esteem coupled with the Protagonist being The Ace amongst the members of S.E.E.S. quickly leads to Junpei becoming jealous of the Protagonist. After learning that stopping the Dark Hour will strip him of his Persona, Junpei begins questioning what he's actually fighting for until he meets and falls for Chidori, realising that he's fighting to protect people like her. Then, he learns that Chidori is a member of Strega and she was only using him to gain information on S.E.E.S. To twist the knife even further, she ends up dying in his arms after she sacrificed her own life to save him, confessing her love for him with her dying breath. And then during The Answer, Junpei is forced to watch the rest of S.E.E.S. implode around him as they come to blows over whether they should try to save the Protagonist or not; The Answer and his Social Link with the Female Protagonist further increase how sympathetic Junpei appears to the player, by revealing that he had grown up with an alcoholic and abusive father before moving into the dorms. Even when FES throws him a much needed bone by allowing Chidori to survive her death, it comes at the cost of her memories of him - meaning that Junpei has to get Chidori to fall in love with him all over again.
  - Mitsuru Kirijo. She constantly dedicated her life to fixing the mistakes her grandfather had made in the past, as well as protecting her father. However, her efforts ended up affecting her social skills and she ends up not having many friends sans Akihiko and Shinjiro. Then, she discovers that her efforts to make amends were All for Nothing thanks to Ikutsuki's manipulations, and her father gets murdered protecting her soon afterwards.
  - Shinjiro Aragaki. Despite being cold and aloof on the outside, deep down he has a lot of issues. Growing up an orphan alongside Akihiko, they end up losing Akihiko's sister in a fire. Joining SEES only serves to make his life worse, as his inability to control his Persona properly ended up killing Ken's mother by accident. As a result, he's forced to take suppressants to control his Persona, but it gives him constant pain and is implied to be slowly killing him. His Social Link in the female route only adds more woobie points as we see who he really is beneath that hard exterior. Finally, he ends up sacrificing himself to save Ken from Takaya, even when the former attempted to seek revenge on him. He's left broken to the point that he's become a Death Seeker.
- Chidori Yoshino, while loyal to Strega, is constantly living a life of pain. Being one of the Kirijo Group's test subjects to be forcibly given Personas, Chidori's life is rapidly depleting due to the pills she takes that keep her Persona, Medea, under control. She's become a Death Seeker as a result of this, constantly harming herself and wishing the end would come soon, with her seeing Medea as her only reason for living. After she gets her Evoker confiscated and loses access to Medea, Chidori becomes a complete shut-in who won't say a word to anyone, until Junpei being nice to her causes her to come out of her shell, but it isn't long before her newfound affection for Junpei is stripped away by Strega forcibly taking her back to Tartarus, wherein she puts up a woefully pitiful fight against SEES. As soon as Takaya shoots Junpei in the stomach in an attempt to kill him, Chidori uses her powers to bring Junpei back to life at the cost of her own, and uses her final breath to declare her love for him.
- Maiko Oohashi is a young kid who's caught up in the crossfire of her parents getting divorced, and constantly goes to Naganaki Shrine by her lonesome just to escape her parents' heated arguments. She increasingly believes her parents don't love her, believing that her dad might not even show up for her birthday, and her last straw is broken when she directly asks her parents why they're getting divorced, only for her father to slap her. Her parents only open up to her and reinforce that they love her when she decides to run away from home following the slap incident.
- Akinari Kamiki is dying of an incredibly rare illness that can't be cured at the mere age of 19, and ends up having an existential crisis as a result of it. He initially takes to watching kids like Maiko having fun so that he can see firsthand happiness once again, but he eventually gives into despair and believes that it's everyone's fate to die; some are just destined to survive longer. He takes solace in books as a form of escapism and takes to writing his own story, but is so caught up in his newfound passion that he deliberately refuses to take his medication, surrendering himself to his fate. Come the endgame, he's long since passed away, and his mother now routinely visits Naganaki Shrine, the one place he found comfort in.
- Saori Hasegawa, despite always maintaining an optimistic demeanor, has nothing but misery thrown her way. In her early years, she had a crush on her uncle, and her parents blamed her for a stain on their family name, causing them to send her overseas. Her childhood of being taught to never have her own opinions causes Saori to become an Extreme Doormat, with people only getting close to her to take advantage of her. This comes to a head when she's manipulated into getting a picture taken of her, not knowing it's for a tabloid that falsely claims she's a prostitute, which causes everyone in school to ostracize her, the school staff to decree her a blemish on the school's reputation and suspend her, and her parents to relocate her to a private school. It takes infiltrating the PA room with help from the protagonist for Saori to finally clear her name and have most people forgive her for circumstances that weren't even her fault.
Woolseyism:
- The original titles of The Journey and The Answer were Episode Yourself and Episode Aigis in Japan. It's generally agreed that altering them from the Engrish-happy Japanese names to names that have thematic importance to the content within them was an improvement. In a similar vein, the very ominous-sounding Dark Hour in the localization was originally named the very generic "Shadow Time" in the Japanese version.
- As mentioned above, the Maya link is almost completely changed. Y-ko merely speaks with an accent, but the English version changed this to Maya using 1337 speak, offering a better contrast between her online persona and her real-life composition teacher self.
- Aigis in Japanese uses a very generic and to-the-point speaking style when first introduced but as she becomes more humanized starts to drop this in favor of speaking regular Japanese. Since this can't be done with English, the US version has her speak in a robotic monotone at first and gradually start to talk like a normal girl as she becomes more human.
- Junpei is the only character to make consistent references to Western media (specifically, he references Mr. T, Ripley's Believe It or Not!, and Brokeback Mountain) and at one point he laments not being born in the USA, giving him a minor additional character trait as a reverse Occidental Otaku. This fits him shockingly well.
- As mentioned above a Junpei joke that would've been utterly Lost in Translation was changed to the "Junpei, Ace Detective/Stupei, Ace Defective" gag in the English version.
- In the Updated Re-release, Persona 3 Portable, Ken, the Adorably Precocious Child, is a romance option with a "spend the night" event at S-Link level 10. This was heavily edited in the US version.
- In the Japanese version, Mitsuru would sometimes speak in English in order to highlight how cultured she was in comparison to the rest of the SEES members. This was replaced with Gratuitous French in the English Dub. These changes also apply to Akihiko in Portable when he follows Mitsuru in complimenting Junpei's lockpicking skills, as he says "Good job!" in the Japanese dub and "Oui!" in the English dub.
- Akihiko's wacky quirk of being obsessed with protein powder and working out got toned down in the localization in favor of focusing on his being a cool and stoic guy who keeps his feelings under wraps. This was so well-received that when later spin-offs' localization hewed much closer to the source material, fans found it very jarring and the English-speaking fanbase often mistakenly accuses them of flanderizing him for cheap yuks.
- In the Japanese version, Bebe talks in a very formal outdated way as if he was in a samurai movie. This was changed to a stereotypical French accent with some Gratuitous Japanese thrown in.

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