One of the most fascinating things to me about remaking Persona 3 is the problems that fundamentally can't be fixed in a normal way because of how not-normal the original game was. Referring of course to the way the game handles friendships with men vs. romances with girls
You can romance all your female party members but you can't befriend any of them, and same goes for all female school friends. On the flipside, you can't spend your free time with your male party members at all. This is because the game was made by a guy who has openly said that he doesn't believe men and women can be friends. So all the social link arcana that could've been your party members were distributed to male classmates and club members and such
P3R apparently tries to fix this by making romance optional (thank god) and giving the male party members special events of some kind (idk in what way, haven't seen them yet) but that's still weird. What's the alternative though? Adding a social link for each one? That'll completely throw off the player's ability to max out everyone. Delete all the conflicting characters to make space? That also sucks!
In the end I think they did the best they could but it really just confirms what I've always felt: the original game was pretty busted. This is why it felt like such a miracle when I dropped P3P and moved on to P4 and saw that the investigation team all becoming such close friends. That's the secret sauce, to me
