Persona 3/YMMV

• 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 and drama CDs:
  • Compared to the usual fan interpretation and his characterization in the manga, the male protagonist is surprisingly less stoic and more expressive in the drama CDs, particularly in the second Persona 3 Portable 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 is shown to be significantly more cheerful, energetic, childish and certainly more rambunctious. 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.
• Anticlimax Boss:
  • Strega can be beaten in a single turn every time you fight them after The Hanged Man: they are the only boss fights on full moons, contributing to the Ending Fatigue. Justified in the case of Strega. 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 don'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. Strength and the Wheel of Fortune in particular are either this or That One Boss depending entirely on how good you are at manipulating the latter's roulette wheel attack.
• Author's Saving Throw:
  • The PS2 releases are notorious for AI teammates that can't be directly controlled and have to be given orders instead, resulting in, among other things, your teammates deciding that spamming Marin Karin for the ten millionth time is more important than healing you back from single-digit HP. The Portable re-release adds direct control of teammates similar to Persona 4, which has been well-received by fans.
  • Although there's the issue for Aigis' Metatronius weapon (see below), her own social link will always level up if you spend time with her (a bit like Tanaka's), likely because it opens during the final month of the game.
  • In a similar vein, for the female protagonist, although Shinjiro and Ryoji's links are on a one month time limit, both also lack "holdover" visits and will both level up with any response she gives them. Shinjiro is also a nighttime link, which leaves the heroine more room to work on other ones.
• Base Breaking Character:
  • Aigis seems to be this, some think she's one of the finest examples of Character Development in the Persona series, others think she's a bland Stalker with a Crush with Squick by the bucketload.
  • Yukari Takeba, whose insecure, overconfident personality tends to rub some fans the wrong way. Her actions in The Answer doesn't help her much either, but she more than makes up for that.
• Complete Monster: Shuji Ikutsuki starts off as a seemingly helpful mentor to the protagonists, but by the end of the game, he turns out to be a madman. Like Koutetsu Kirijo, he participated in a experiment to revive Nyx, which caused an explosion that killed hundreds, including The Protagonist's parents and Yukari's father. To make matters worse, this created the Dark Hour as well. He also experimented on children including the members of Strega. He manipulates the SEES into killing the Twelve Shadows under the belief that it would extinguish the Dark Hour. In truth, killing the Shadows would not end the Dark Hour, and this was what he needed to revive Nyx. Nyx, being the Death Arcana, would wipe out humanity. When Mitsuru's father tries to stop him, he shoots him dead before preparing to do the same to the SEES, and would have succeeded if Koromaru didn't stop him. A sociopath who would wipe out all life on Earth just to appease a God that is Made of Evil, Ikutsuki proved himself to be the most vile human in the Persona series.
• Critical Research Failure: A rather funny one in the PSP port. Because Fuuka's lines for the Bonus Boss fight weren't re-recorded from the fight against Elizabeth, when the PC fights against Theodore, Fuuka calls him a "she" at the start of the battle. It's also possible to hear Fuuka's voice for that fight, if you attempt it before she even joins the party.
  • During the Rank 8 event of the Tower Social Link, Mutatsu will mistake the protagonist as his son, even if the currently played protagonist is a female.
• Crowning Music of Awesome: The final battle theme "The Battle for Everyone's Souls". The voice for Nyx's Avatar between each phase only turn the awesomeness of the whole fight Up to Eleven.
• Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy: The entire game can sort of be this. Every character has been or is touched by death in some way, several are orphans or have lost at least one parent, and most are either subtly or overtly broken as a result.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Avenger Knights, which are largely a rehash of the boss you faced on an earlier floor prior to encountering them.
  • 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 the whole team hitting Maragi (which Unicorn, one of the earliest Hama-learning Personas is weak to), and you have a surprisingly deadly fight for a group of Mooks.
• Die for Our Ship: In essentially any character the Protagonist is shipped with, Yukari will be reduced to the Clingy Jealous Girl at best to get her out of the way.
• 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.
  • 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. It's very likely you'll have absolutely nothing worthwhile to do over Christmas Vacation. 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.
• Ear Worm:
  • "Mass Destruction" takes the cake. The Baby-baby-baby-baby-YEAAAAAAAAH and Dah-dah-dah-dah-doh-dah-dah-dah-daaaaaaaaah is hard to get out of your head.
  • Jika Net Tanaka. "Over the airwaves to youuuuuuu..." Even the NPC's aren't immune.
• Ending Fatigue:
  • Come November, you suddenly run out of things to do apart from your few remaining Social Links 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 (thankfully, you can save in between them) and long cutscenes.
• Ensemble Darkhorse:
  • Elizabeth, the world's coolest elevator attendant.
  • A notable example is Chihiro, who is just a Social Link, yet gets to return Older and Wiser (and Hotter and Sexier) in Persona 4.
  • Shinjiro, whose sheer fan popularity might make non-players think he's the main character in the game.
  • Koromaru is given a special spot in most players' hearts (and parties) for general usefulness in combat and coolness.
• Fan-Preferred Couple:
  • Main Character/Aigis and Main Character/Elizabeth are closely tied in popularity.
  • In the case of Persona 3 Portable, Female Protagonist/Shinjiro due to fact that completing his S.Link actually gives the player the ability to prevent his death. While the female protagonists' canonicity is markedly vague, some official side materials have jumped on this ship: they have some interaction in the Persona 3 Portable CD Drama, and they actually are paired up in the stage play.
  • Female Protagonist/Junpei is also becoming fairly popular in the English fandom despite (or perhaps, because) the fact that he is not dateable.
  • Among yuri fans, Mitsuru and Yukari is an insanely popular pairing, and there are even some subtle hints toward it in the game itself.
  • For couplings not involving either Main Character; Mitsuru/Akihiko received a decent amount of traction (helped by their established relationship and natural chemistry with each other) as well as Junpei/Chidori for Character Development their story-driven relationship gives them.
• Fanon: It's quite common for fanworks to have the male and female protagonists be fraternal twins, whether in Third-Option Adaptations (with them both becoming the SEES leader), or in personal background (typically with the protagonist you don't pick dying alongside their parents in the car accident). The male protagonist is also almost always the "older" one of the two.
• Fetish Fuel Station Attendant: Mitsuru.
• 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 even easier. Fixed in FES - Helel no longer learns Victory Cry naturally - and then further nerfed in Persona 3 Portable, 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.
  • 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.
• Good Bad Bugs: 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 Person 4 and Persona 3 Portable.
• Hell Is That Noise: Five words: "Be careful! I sense Death!" Or, worse still, the quiet jingling of chains that signals the Reaper's approach.
• He's Just Hiding: The Fanbase beleved this about the main character until the release of FES which revealed that he did in fact die, at least physically.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Chihiro's Social Link ending in FES is her outraging at the article against a Student Teacher Romance saying that love is important, no matter what age. Now what is the Justice Social Link in Portable again?
  • In PSP remake, one of Ken's Social Links mentions a manga about an alien who takes different forms to save the day. Although this is only in the female main character's playthrough, this is funny considering the male main character's voice actor's other role.
• Ho Yay: So much... it even has its own page!
• Internet Backdraft: The canonicity of the female main character and her path in Persona 3 Portable. You have fans that point to The Answer and The Reveal from Margaret in Persona 4 as proof that the female main character route never happened, while other fans counter that since FES and Persona 4 were written prior to Persona 3 Portable, they can't be used as proof of anything related to the female PC. Then you have other fans using The Amala Network as a way to explain that she could exist, just not in the same universe as the male main character. The debates were much larger in the weeks leading up to the release of the game, and still persist to this day.
• Memetic Badass: You've gotta be a chiseled badass to eat Fuuka's cooking. You must also obtain Badass status to initiate a social link with Ken as the Female Protagonist.
• Memetic Mutation: BURN MY BREAD! (in reference to the improper English in vocal songs by Yumi Kawamura).
  • Ken Amada: Fans have taken to calling his shorts "shota shorts".
  • Marin Karin!
  • BABY BABY BABY BABY BABY BABY BABY
  • The whole concept of "I shoot myself in the head and a monster comes out."
• Moe:
  • The manga made the main character very adorable. Justlookat him. Ryoji too.
  • Fuuka so very much, she's the most gentle and sweet of the female characters. It's even lampshaded by Junpei at one point in which he states "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' 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. Such a shame she sheds her Moe traits by Persona 4.
  • Heck, even Akihiko is this when he tries to be a gentleman to the ladies.
  • Shinjiro. Social Awkwardness? Check. Quirkiness? Check. Hard on the outside but squishy inside? Check. His gruff appearance makes this shockingly more effective.
• Moral Event Horizon: Subverted, thankfully. Yukari almost crosses it in The Answer. She causes all of SEES to engage in an all-out battle for the chance to see the main character again, ignoring the possibility that this could not only kill Aigis, but cause SEES to have to fight Nyx again, and possibly lose. Note that nobody knew the protagonist sacrificed himself to keep Nyx sealed. Once she loses the fight, and finds out the truth, Yukari admits that she was wrong... stupid, even, for causing all that.
• Most Annoying Sound:
  • The Hermit's screams every time you land an attack on it.
  • Don't forget the sound Shadows make when they're a much lower level then you.
  • Fuuka's English voice actress. Her Japanese voice actress, however...
  • "The Arcana is the means by which all is revealed..." You only said it how many damn times?!
  • "Yes yes yes, my skill level has increased!"
• 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.
  • Toward the end of The Answer, a moment of unintentional hilarity happens when one of Akihiko's lines gets a voiceover from Mitsuru.
• 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. Although, the Minako/Ken ship is popular with fans of shotacon.
• 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. Enjoy the next full moon!
• Player Punch: So. Damn. Many.
• 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.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Ken arguably, at least in the female path in the PSP game. He has a somewhat bigger role by being one of the female protagonists relationships, when in the original game, he stops being important after his storyline.
• The Scrappy: Fuuka, Ken, Natsuki and Yukari all get their own portion of the Hatedom, for reasons that are justified, and some that aren't. The actual page on the video games section explains it.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • If the main character drops, it's an instant game over. Handwaved with a very late explanation.
  • 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 it).
  • In combination to the above two, Persona 3 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 afterwards and if YOU die, then it's game over.
  • Another big one is Arcana Reversal and Breaking. In Persona 3, 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 effecitvely disappears in Persona 4 and Persona 5: there are one or two reversal possibilities in dialogue in Persona 4, but you more or less have to be willfully dense to stumble into them.
  • Relatedly, the romance mechanics in the original campaign can annoy people, especially newer fans coming in from Persona 4 and Persona 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 Persona 3, it actually triggers much earlier... typically stage 6 or so. This also means though, 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% Social 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 Persona 4s big banner improvements was changing how this worked to give the player more control and to remove jealousy, the design of which even got backported into Persona 3 Portables female route.
  • In the original and FES update, you didn't have direct control over the party. This is thankfully fixed in the PSP remake.
  • In order to lock down the very powerful skills in the PSP remake, they converted them to Fetch Quests... you now have to grind on shadows to get enough of a certain type of gem to drop.
  • The FES expansion basically forces Level Grinding upon the player if they want to finish it.
  • Want to level up the Hermit Social Link? Have fun spending the entire day, including nighttime, doing so for one session!
• Sequel Displacement: Persona 3 is probably most people's first Persona game, and it set the tone and standard of the entire franchise since.
• Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer: Many players forget to train their combat in an effort to do well on Exams.
• 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 HP of its fourteenth lifebar. 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 (*6000* HP) the Final Boss, 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. That Nyx Avatar mix 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.
  • The Hermit boss battle. Giga Spark. If you don't have every party member equipped with thunder charms (and even then it has a one in a hundred chance of working), the battle is all but impossible. Woe to you if Aigis is active.
• That One Boss:
  • This being an Atlus game, most of the bosses are very tough, but Sleeping Table deserves a special mention. Megadolaon and Maragion (ma-spells hit all posible targets, and Megidola is a second-level spell), plus 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.
  • The Chariot and Justice dual boss, especially if you're not playing Portable version which lets you control your non-main character 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 Samerecarm to bring his partner back to life at full health. So if you don't lower both of their hp at the same time (and/or are really unlucky), you run the risk of starting the entire fight over again.
• That One Level: It's generally agreed upon 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.
• Tier-Induced Scrappy:
  • As noted, Mitsuru in the original release version and FES. Not as a character, but due to how the gameplay works in battle: her AI is seemingly set to prioritize status ailments no matter the situation. This was remedied in the portable remake which allowed for full player control.
  • Koromaru is usually passed over in team-building due to his underwhelming stats. He has the highest agility and one of the highest HP pools, but his offense and defense are fairly low and his Persona skills all consume SP despite the fact that he has one of the smallest SP pools in the party.
• Uncanny Valley: Ken's 3D model. The smile on his face is just too wide.
• 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.
• 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.
  • As mentioned above (see mythology gag) the Devil Busters/Innocent Sin Online is almost completely changed. Y-ko mearly speaks with an accent, 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.
  • In the Updated Rerelease Persona 3 Portable, Ken, the Jail Bait Adorably Precocious Child, is a romance option with a "spend the night" event at Social Link level 10. This was heavily edited in the US version.