Between midnight and 1a.m. lurks a special time called "The Dark Hour." During this, all sorts of people-hunting demons come out and wreak havoc on unassuming humans. It is up to your voiceless protagonist and his (and now her) friends to strike down this evil all while maintaining friendships and good grades at school.

Wait, this sounds like Persona 3....

Persona 3 Portable marks the third release of the game spread between two different consoles. While the first time seemed good enough for anyone, the game's success tempted publisher Atlus to come out with a second version that kept all of the atrocious load times and added more content. So, is the PSP edition really necessary, especially since it removes the content added in Persona 3: FES and suffers from the handheld's slower processing power?

While I could give you a simple answer, one word hardly justifies the hours I've poured into Persona 3 in its various forms. Instead, I'm going to justify P3P's existence with a cleverly segmented article.

What's Wrong with Persona 3 and FES?

The combat. Clunky and punishing battle systems that offer limited control and can randomly turn on the player plague the Persona series. The PlayStation 2 versions of Persona 3 are the worst offenders. The player controls the silent protagonist directly and can set up the support characters to conserve their energy, heal, or attack full-force while in battle. What you absolutely cannot do is choose who a minor character heals, what types of attacks they use, and if they'll even attack.

That approach to combat is needlessly frustrating and only gets worse when the A.I. refuses to exploit battle-winning weaknesses or heal the main character. Controlling one active fighter out of four is an outdated RPG style, even if Square Enix is trying their damnedest to revive it in the Final Fantasy series.

Does Persona 3 PSP Address This Issue?

Yes. While I'd rather that Atlus remove the entire automated battle command completely, P3P does allow you to set combat to manual. This point is the single-most important in the changes made to this version.

What Are the Other Changes?

This shiny PSP edition lacks the extra content added in FES. Some diehard fans see this as a giant step backward, but I see it as a dedication to giving fans like me more in-game and relevant options. In lieu of reworking that content, P3P has an alternate female character. Her story is similar to the male protagonist's, but a few social links and key characters differ between them.

The interactive world outside of Tartarus takes a giant step backward. Rather than running your character up and down hallways and around various shopping centers, you control a hovering, colored blob. Though the PSP does have several technical limitations, I don't see why this change was absolutely necessary. The in-dungeon gameplay is exactly the same to the PS2 games. Perhaps running the whole game that way consumed far too much data? Whatever the reason, the daytime scenarios look silly to me, but they are still just as functional.

And finally, the load times. The PS2 games had such staggeringly bad load times that I could never tell if the game had locked up until I sat there for 10 minutes. That's an exaggeration, but I remember eating most of a sandwich while waiting for the game to boot up the first time. Atlus's clever new partial install for PSP games is a wonderful fix for the undeniable slowness of these load times, and it's is the perfect weapon in the fight against the terrible UMD format. I played a disc version of P3P, so I can't tell you if the download version runs as smoothly. 

I Own/Already Played Persona 3: FES. Is P3P Worth It?

And now for the closing argument. Yes. P3P is the absolute best Persona experience despite the change to the daytime gameplay and the removal of the entire answer quest. You won't find a smoother, better-controlling, fast-loading version of this game unless Atlus gives us P3PS3, but that's far too many 3s to ever exist.

Of course, now I demand a rerelease of Persona 2 with a complete localization of the first half of the game that never made it to the West.