For some reason I felt compelled to give Persona 3 another shot, this time the FES version, whatever the hell that means. I hated this game when I first played it, described it as an abomination, and have gone around calling it one of the most disappointing experiences of my adult life.
This game is still pretty fucking awful almost all the time, though I have difficulty mustering the same amount of venom for it seeing how they took this busted-ass structural concept, fixed all the problems with the way the system generally worked, added legitimate content to it, and actually did something productive with this in Persona 4. A bit of a revisionist history way of looking at this not terribly good game I guess, but something that I saw as being tangibly good did come from this, so whatever. I guess to a degree I could look at it with a fresher perspective because I got to see what could be done with a game with this sort of structure, I didn't immediately get turned off by the vapidity of the social links, or how much of a fantastic nuisance the 250+ floor dungeon was. I still didn't like the way most of that worked, but I've come to see this game as a lot more productive and well-meaning with some interesting ideas as far as how you tell a story in the medium.
I didn't totally hate the game this time around, felt that certain things in the later parts of the game worked enough to offset everything else that the game did poorly. Rather liked the ending too, all things considered, I found the very last scene unexpectedly moving, somewhat irritating that it wasn't until the ABSOLUTE END that something worthwhile happened. I thought the Aigis character was actually rather well written and performed, even enough to negate how generally silly and contrived all the story elements were that she came from, just a shame they waited until the end of the game to do anything with her and only gave her a side storyline in the FES version for some fantastically stupid reason. I felt like the game got its shit together the more she became the focus point of the story, seeing as how she's the only character that really matters in the whole thing, you can lose just about everybody else without losing much of anything. Also, the music got really good by the end of this game too, enough to make you forget that this game is unmoving and shallow, Shoji Meguro deserves virtually all the credit for creating an interesting thematic atmosphere towards the end, like the soundtrack to a much better game.
I had been playing a lot of older RPGs lately too, stuff like Xenogears that didn't hold up enough for me to even get more than a few hours into it, and I'm almost inclined to give Persona 3 some credit for at least being more vivid than empty and hollow stuff like that, even if Persona 3 is only vividly empty and hollow. Persona 3 has some good ideas that they don't really do much with, the game ends up being just a 100 hour simulation of what it's like to have bad/uninteresting people in your life. I almost found the inexplicable suicide imagery inadvertently appropriate given how much the fantastic emptiness of all the people in the game's world do nothing but fill you with violent nihilistic rage. This is a backwards reading, of course, the game assumes you can care about the insipid dick whose function in life is to jerk it to older women, or the fat fuck somehow unironically justifying his existence by eating triple his body weight daily, or the devil incarnate selling worthless shit on his television show who manages to be infinitesimally less human than THE ACTUAL DEVIL INCARNATE that you bump into elsewhere in the game, or all the dull humorless jerks lazing about day and night in your dorm that fundamentally lack the capacity to get anything out of their worthless existences. Rarely did I ever find it worthwhile, but I did like a couple of the characters amidst the inescapable sea of repulsion the game has to offer. This is not what they intended, but I ended up finding this unusually real, this sea of faces you'll never be able to make a worthwhile connection with, even when you earnestly try to, making it a rather big deal when you find yourself actually caring about any of them. I didn't really get personal satisfaction from this very personal reading of the game, if anything I found it intensely depressing, engaged in a way where I probably didn't want to be engaged, causing reflection of things I maybe didn't want reflected. But that's more than I could say for something like Xenogears, the first few hours of which did nothing but made me want to never play videogames again. At least Persona 3 made me want to shoot myself in the head.