So...just finished Persona 3 (Portable, specifically). Thoughts (Mostly a fusion of two copypastas since the places they were originally posted in didn't really have people who played Persona with edits):
I feel like the female has the better SLs (though I was sad when I found out Yuko wasn't an SL in this one). Shame the female protag is so underrated. The more I played this, the more I realized that she would have been a great pick for the movies. Especially mine, who was sexually devious lesbian that ogled and gushed about girls with guys, got intentionally touchy-feely whenever possible, would make suggestive comments on the reg, never really got what she wanted (because the game doesn't support female-female romantic relationships, unfortunately). Ah, I'll miss playing as her, she was fun. But even apart from mine, I like her design more than aaaaangst Makoto/Minato's (props to the movie, by the way, because they really did a good job making him a likable character).
Tartarus, though...I feel the same about that as I did when I was playing FES. It's no wonder I didn't like the game for the longest time, it prided itself on a not-so-well implemented feature that already generally isn't liked. I had to make it interesting this time around so I wouldn't bore myself to death. It was good deal of what stopped my FES journey, as well as generally not caring about what was going on. The solo-squading and the mostly-Orpheus only in Portable also played a huge part in making Tartarus less than tedious because, due to how EXP works, I always felt like I was making progress. Made things fun, and leveling everyone in the endgame was fun, too, since they soared in levels. That said...no other Persona or even any Shin Megami Tensei game's on level with the amount of grind in P3, and I can't really say that that's gotten better. So still tedious, but less so.
Other than that, the story's...good. It and the characters don't really become interesting until...well, until the name Chidori enters the picture. That's when I started to like Junpei (and by the end, I ended up liking all of the main characters, and I enjoyed pretty much all of the SL characters). Really, I think that's the game's biggest fault, though. It doesn't really pick up character or story-wise until later on, two or three dozens of hours in, and that's a long time to be stringing a player on before they get to the good stuff, and that's why I stopped playing my FES file (which was 30-something hours in). I still definitely wouldn't put the characters or the story (which is darker, but I don't know if I'd call it better or more engaging) anywhere near Persona 4, and certainly not the gameplay. But it was a fun experience that, surprisingly, I don't regret despite getting to supposedly 65 hours. I, unfortunately, knew about the ending beforehand, but I still enjoyed the execution and didn't know exactly how it played out other than minor details. Now I can go on and finish Persona 4 Arena Ultimax :q.
