Hana, Local Trans Pat Witch🏳️‍⚧️

FWLIW, I'm an inveterate give-upper when it comes to JRPGs—despite liking them, moment to moment—and Persona 3 Portable's one of the very few JRPGs I've finished. Something about its tone just sat right with me.

re: Atelier games: I played Ryza with no knowledge of the other games and absolutely loved it. Would def recommend starting there

I've played a few of the older ones since then, and they're mechanically interesting but somewhat dry. Ryza isn't deeply narrative-focused, but the setting and core cast are fun enough to make a pretty big difference imo

I have never played an Atelier but https://docs.google.com/document/d/18TMbTwoeAsOXadzSHsqzFp20-UbXIDq28-xbqoLg0Zc/edit is maybe helpful for picking a game? It has a section titled "Can I use this to help me figure out where to start playing the series?", which sounds promising

I really really think P3R is now as close as we can get to a "definitive" method to play the game, partially due to Atlus' batshit insane remaster/remake/rerelease methodology. but the gameplay improvements that are introduced in P3R to bring it up to "close to" parity with P5R are really impressive.

as a story, it's a lot more barebones. I agree with you that P5 is actually a much better "plotted out story" insofar as that makes sense, and it takes much better advantage of the mechanical structure of Persona games. I played them in "reverse order" a few years back -- after becoming obsessed with P5, I played P4 and then P3 in that order.

P4 is... in my mind... just grotesquely offensive. I'm not going to pretend that P5 is a paragon of social justice (although it certainly pretends to be), but P4 is just... mean. it's a mean game! Weirdly mean! Didn't like it at all. Not sure it's worth recommending tbh even in a completionist sense. I guess some of the music tracks are bangers. Can't argue with that.

P3R is really great though! P3P had the advantage of playing As A Girl, which is neat for #Representation reasons. Nearly everything else about it kinda sucked though. That's the Atlus trick... for each improvement... an equal feature removal...