It took me so long to get into this for some reason... I remembered pretty quickly that while I LOVE some of the characters in this game, I also cannot stand a lot more of them so I was not really enjoying myself at all... but I really wanted to play the weird beach spinoff game that came in the Switch bundle and I knew I'd enjoy it more if I took the time to actually play V3 so that I was refreshed on its characters... #DoItForGonta.
I think I played the first two chapters over the course of three or four weeks and then forced myself to do the last few all in a week. It got better as I went and I actually had forgotten quite a bit of the game, surprisingly. The presentation of this game is so much more impressive than the others. The trials are so much more dynamic with the varying text and animations and the QOL all over is so much better since you can run around much easier. I wasn't huge on the like... instead of having lots of things to examine in each room, there's only a couple and the rest of the clutter can be whacked away and out of the room to clear it up and that's how you get extra monocoins. It was nice to have the source but I'd much rather have been able to examine more things for flavour text.
I remember being pretty ambivalent to the story of this game. I remember people haaated the twist in it so much when it came out because they thought it was insulting to fans of the series but honestly, I liked it back then and I liked it again this time. I guess part of it is people didn't like how it kinda closed the door to more games in the series but I'm sure they could manage it if they really wanted to keep milking it.
Anyway do not get this game on switch, the port is
garbage. For whatever reason it just could not handle class trials. Playing for longer than a few minutes would make the menus slow to an absolute crawl (like 3fps) and sometimes if you opened the menu too often, even just to read back what people said, the music would unsync in a weird way. I had to constantly save the game because every time it switched to a new section of the trial, be it a minigame or a debate, there was a decent chance the entire game would crash and you'd lose all your progress. I don't understand how they managed to mess this game up because the other games worked just fine?? It's not like this is a AAA title from PS3 or something, it's a visual novel with little minigames from a less powerful handheld!
I did a bit of postgame stuff here and to be fair I think it has the best postgame of all of them, but in the end I was actually just missing the DR2 characters so I went back and completed that game by getting all the relationship link things and doing Island Mode. Putting that here so I don't have to do a whole heading for it. :P I'll also add here that I'm tentatively playing through the beach side game I mentioned above but honestly, I think the scope of it is way too big so I'm not certain I'll finish it. The board game in DRV3 that that game is based off of is much better.
Now I have to watch the anime even if I hear it's awful. u_u