tldr; wait for sale to pick it up and pray for enhancement mods by then
or
play Persona 3 FES with controlled party member mod

first game I have 100% achievements on Steam

My experience with the Persona series, like a lot of others, started with Persona 5. Back when the game originally came out in the west during early 2017, I picked the game up on PS4 with a friend and didn't expect to like it that much due to never having gotten into a singleplayer RPG prior. I ended up playing the vanilla game three times over. Truly opened up my mind and broadened my horizons in terms of what aspects of games can be interesting and fun. Fast-forward three years, an enhanced version of the game, Persona 5 Royal released and it was a fantastic, justified and welcome adjustment to the original game. So when Persona 4 Golden was announced to be coming to Steam mere months later, I got excited to play the previous games. I played probably the first few hours of Golden and put it down after getting stuck at Yukiko's castle, which is kinda funny now.

First Experience with Persona 3 FES & Persona 4 Golden
I first originally properly played through Persona 3 FES using PCSX2 just over a year ago, during January of 2022. I decided to finally go through the Persona backlog because of my long-ass university break. Picked the game up and finished it within a couple of weeks. Something about the characters, their struggles and development truly resonated with me without being too cheesy or cringe. The end of that game made me genuinely sad that it was over. The difficulty was much higher than Persona 5/5R (despite me using a controlled party mod) and felt more raw in a good way. I know there is a stigma around "less popular opinion = cooler" or whatever but I genuinely connected with the characters more (except Ken -- ♥♥♥♥ Ken, he's annoying as ♥♥♥♥. I'M GONNA KILL YOU! headass dumbass kid). Kimi no Kioku hits hard to this day.

A few days after, I played and finished Persona 4 Golden within two weeks as well, with most of the combat systems in that game having various enhancements over Persona 3 FES. Objectively, P4G is the best Persona game, a great balance between gameplay, characters and writing, but in my personal opinion, after having finished P4G, it was still P3FES that was the favourite. Which got me super hyped when they once again, within a few months of finishing a Persona game, announced the 3/4/5 trilogy coming to all platforms.

Persona 3 Portable on Steam
I was shocked to see the version they decided to port over was Portable. I know for an absolute fact that the least powerful system out of all the consoles, the Switch, can run Persona 3 FES. I have seen video evidence of this, so it came across as a weird option. Though this announcement was kinda poorly timed, as I had just bought a PSVita (Persona 4 Dancing Edition) just to play Persona 2 and Persona 3 Portable. Persona 3 Remake Rumours; If the Persona 3 Remake rumours are true, this may be due to the remake not including the option to play the female protagonist, which would make sense considering Atlus' previous "Atlus moments". Still, this gave me even more of an excuse to give Portable a try, and to play the FEMC route.

Story (No Spoilers)
For my first Persona 3 Portable playthrough, I went with the FEMC on Hard difficulty as it's considered the more unique Portable experience, and it is true. Many would tell you to play as the male protagonist first and THEN play as the FEMC in another playthrough. I think that's ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and a waste of time, especially if you plan on playing the rumoured Persona 3 Remake. While the FEMC playthrough is a little different, the overarching story remains the same. What changes are the people that are attached to each Arcana's social link. The FEMC playthrough makes more sense in terms of social links, as you will get to know each individual character that is important to the story. The male protagonist playthrough is more of a Persona 3 purist run/waifu collector.

Visuals
For both playthroughs, I played at 4K@120fps. If there is anyone qualified to speak on the visuals as a normal player, it is me. The AI image upscaling is lazy and actually kind of a joke. On the first day when you are making your way to the dormitory and it pans up to the green moon, you can see the tear lines combining the three images where the AI didn't know what to do with, and that's just one of many examples. The Persona icon in combat is completely screwed. The background environments are not good. Simply not good. UI and character art are very clean though. Hopefully mods can fix some of these visuals, but atleast you can play at 120fps natively now.

Audio
Mostly the same as visuals, lazily done. There are audio comparisons of the PSP original to this port for the main character's Persona awakening scene and somehow the PSP audio is WAY clearer. Not sure what happened for the battle audio to be literally worse than the original but there is already a mod that fixes battle audio. Again, mods should fix this element of the game.

Gameplay
Obviously, the biggest change between FES and Portable are the ways in which the gameplay is presented, regardless of which MC you pick. Dungeons remain mostly unchanged besides a few graphical downgrades from FES to Portable. The city has gone from an explorable 3D map design to visual novel PNGs, which I thought would actually bother me more than it did. The visual novel style ended up growing on me and I didn't mind it. After finishing this game and going back to Persona 5 Royal, it was actually kind of jarring having the characters talking with dialogue at the bottom and stuff happening on screen as well. The addition of skill cards is nice, again, this is just standard from FES to Portable, not a port exclusive or anything. A new port exclusive feature however, is Quick Save. An option that allows you to save the game at any pause-able moment and exit to the main menu to pick back up later. These quick saves disappear after you load back into the game, but can be exploited in Tartarus floors to keep randomising the floor. Only glitch during both my playthroughs was Yukari getting two turns at two random points in the game, not even One More's. And ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, I had to keep doing triangle fusions at the end of my SECOND PLAYTHROUGH for 2 HOURS STRAIGHT before getting a fusion accident, I made the entire compendium already and never experienced one. Bad luck, I guess.

Now for my biggest complaint for this port. Why are there no story cutscenes? They do such a better job at conveying what's happening during MAJOR plot points rather than a background fading or moving and a character DESCRIBING what's happening. It would have been so easy to implement this, but my theory behind this is either pure laziness that is further reflected in other aspects of this port, or that they did think of it, but didn't know how to implement it for the FEMC too, as all the original cutscenes are only for the male protagonist. Also, why keep the Ken romance? What the ♥♥♥♥.

Overall
I actually ended up finishing my first run of Portable the same real life day as the day Nyx comes down, January 31st, which was pure coincidence and I thought was pretty cool as I was looking back on my achievements. Despite all the ♥♥♥♥ that I just talked on the port, the game itself overall holds up as one of my favourite games of all time. I will forever have memories of trying to force my Thanatos to inherit certain skills, pressing circle, circle, cross, up, cross for an hour straight. The FES way. The characters and gameplay, regardless of how grindy it might be, truly grab and stand out to me. I love this game. Hope the rumoured remake is great. I hit the word limit.