[a bunch of replies to my Persona 3 posts]
I gotta say, between all this blatant misinformation, I almost don't know where to begin.
But to begin at the beginning:
go for portable the other 2 versions lack qol features like being able to control your party members, skill cards ect.
Both of which are entirely unnecessary to either reaching level 99 or beating the game at level 60. You don't need perfect control over your party members—the more generic commands are more than sufficient, especially in FES where the AI is slightly better. Mostly, as I mentioned earlier, you're going for knockdowns, and there are commands for that. Skill cards are nice, but not as nice as having SP as the only limiting factor on fusion spells (instead of having to buy them in a store). Most of the other changes they implemented from Persona 4 just didn't mesh with the existing gameplay well.
And femc route is significantly better than the mc's route thanks to changed social links.
I love Hamuko, but her story isn't substantially different than the MC's (and quality of social links is subjective); in the course of one of her social links it's quite possible to cheapen the impact of something that happens with one of the party members; and most importantly, her story is completely non-canon. The cameo from P4 is neat, though.
You also have things like getting tired while in dungeons or social links reversing nearly removed.
I actually liked the challenge of having to manage your time (via how much time you spent in Tartarus), and I've always thought the potential for reversed social links actually made the social links more dynamic. It's not like getting a reversed social link was easy in any version of P3, anyway—I've only ever gotten one reversed social link in all my playthroughs, and that was early in my first playthrough when I started a social link with a girl and then ignored her because I was petrified of crossing romances.
Oh and social links no longer force lovers route on you so you can choose boy or girl friends instead of having to romance them all.
That was a nice change in P4, and it's one of the few ones from that game that
did improve P3P. I've never actually played MC route in P3P, though, does it also affect his social links?
It's worth noting, though, that even with the chance of reversing social links when raising multiple romance links, it's still possible to max all social links in your first playthrough in vanilla P3 and FES.
fes is the second worst version since the only reason to play it is the stand alone extra section you can't use compendium for or carry over anything from the game.
I wasn't even thinking about The Answer when judging the different versions—I actually still haven't played that. P3P may have featured most of the improvements from FES over vanilla P3, but there are still several changes between vanilla and FES, and P3P compromises way too much of the core experience. You can't get nearly as attached to a town that you're only moving a cursor through still images of, instead of one that you have an avatar exploring. A lot of the emotional impact of most of both the originally in-game and originally animated cutscenes is lost without any of the actual action on display; even the time you spend with Elizabeth loses a lot of its comedy when you're reading what she's doing instead of seeing it. And turning fusion spells into consumable items makes the late game grind practically intolerable. For those reasons, I'd say not only is P3P worse than FES, but it's even worse than Vanilla, as well. P3P is absolutely worth playing, but only after you've played one of the others—preferably FES.
ai is still stupid as well though not nearly as dumb as mind charge marin effin karin from vanilla.
The AI may be stupid, but you can still issue general behavior commands that makes it work pretty well for you. If you just leave it on the default Act Freely, then yeah, you're going to have some issues, but even there, enemies are so easy to defeat, even playing Hard mode, that it doesn't really matter outside of boss fights.
all out attack is almost NEVER worth using however as there is almost always a better option.
There may always be a more mechanically powerful option, but there's rarely a better one. All-out attacks sacrifice the slightly higher damage you get for attacking while an enemy is down and the extra action you get for knocking the enemy down for a high damage attack on all enemies that doesn't cost any HP or SP. You'd probably get more damage overall by having the party use all their best attacks on the enemies while they're down, but if you've attacked the enemies' weaknesses to knock them down, they'll rarely have enough health to survive an all-out attack, making AOA's the best bang for your buck in HP/SP conservation. The more HP/SP you conserve, the less time you have to spend running down to the first floor to be healed. And of course, defeating the enemies with an AOA also guarantees Shuffle Time, which, with some luck, can dramatically reduce the amount of time you need to spend grinding for experience or money. In essence, you want to try to end every battle with an AOA unless you're fighting a boss—in which case yes, you'll want to forget about HP/SP conservation and go for the highest damage possible.
Either hitting them with the weakness which also stuns them [...] Only rec using all out if you know it will finish off enemies and you have no other options. though you could always use the downed enemies to your advantage and drain sp on mc's turn and let someone else finish it off.
You don't even really need to worry about stuns for normal enemies in P3 since neither enemies nor characters can get up and attack on the same turn, anyway, so if you've knocked them down, they still lose a turn; and while yes, you need to worry about ways to regain MC's SP in P3P where recovery costs money like in P4, in FES and vanilla, recovery on the first floor of Tartarus is free. Even in P3P, you'll generally conserve more SP by using AOAs frequently instead of wasting SP on double-attacking weaknesses, and using cups cards in Shuffle Time to keep party HP up so you don't have to waste SP on healing, than you'd get out of SP draining downed enemies and letting some other party member finish the fight without a Shuffle Time.
