While I have not played P3 FES, I have read the difference between the two versions and know what's missing and not missing. I cannot say which version is better or definitive, but what I can say is that I enjoyed the overall story of P3 even with few limitations the Portable ver. had especially because of the FemC perspective :)
What the Portable ver. did not have were:
- Fully rendered world map (Iwatodai, Gekkoukan HS, etc.)
- Scenes that were animated for social links and others
- Anime cut-scenes (that one was the true bummer and limitations of PSP :( )
- Main character's arsenal is limited to one type
What the Portable ver. DOES HAVE were:
+ Play the game as a female character
+ New Social Links options as a FemC
+ New music just for FemC
+ Very few new characters for FemC
+ Party members can be controlled by the player instead of relying on game AI (which makes skirmishes much easier)
So... it looks like the new features are FemC-centric, huh? Welp. Still, the overall story did not change, and enjoyed playing through the game, meeting P3's interesting cast. I would say the story is much darker in tone than P4 or P5, but in such a small package of PSP, this is such a fun and memorable game :)
However, as I progress, I did noticed the limitation PSP placed on P3P, namely the lack of fully rendered world and anime/animated cut-scenes. While the dubbed voice acting (great, btw) and character portraits did a solid job of telling the story, lacking the animation hurt the overall story by not adding that extra effect animation can have on story beats like comedic or sad, poignant moments P3 have in many aspects.
Even with those hardware limitations, the dungeons were fully rendered and the dungeon-crawl was fun! It can be tedious as it can be very repetitive. I mean there were a lot, I mean A LOT, of floors to go through. For P5 players, it's basically the Mementos, but going upward. Finding and exploiting weaknesses are still there and fun as all heck. Although what threw me off for P3 were that there were 3 types of physical attacks (slash, strike, pierce), which were like whaaaa? Fusing Personas becomes a bit more difficult in this one as there's no handy preview tools from P4 and P5. Just go use a Persona Fusion Calculator fans have made for P3. Much easier! I found fusing and combat a bit difficult to understand due to the lack of tools I took for granted from P4 and P5. Took me a couple of tries to get into the flow.
P3P is definitely worth going back to play for new Persona fans like me.
Also, Burn My Dread opening is included in P3P! You just have to restart the game (or die in combat and have the game restart).
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