I bought Persona 3 FES back when it first came out but, for some reason or another, I never got around to actually playing it much. I had already sunk about 80 hours into the original P3, and while it was a great game I guess I didn’t feel particularly motivated at the time to play through it again. A few days ago I hit a gaming lull, having just beaten a couple mediocre old FPSes I had never gotten around to beating, and figured it was finally time to dig out FES and give it a try. Maybe I’d try out this Hard mode thing. I mean, it’s a JRPG. How hard can it be?

See the title for the answer to that one. When Atlus says “Hard” they aren’t fucking around (ask anyone who has played Nocturne on Hard and brace yourself for ranting.)  Enemies now do something like 4-5x their original damage and you can be killed by random mooks in three or four hits. Bosses and strong normal enemies can one-shot characters easily with critical hit, or sometimes even with a special attack that hits normally. Dumb or unlucky moves are almost inevitably disastrous, and your party members no longer get automatically revived after a battle.

Funnily enough all of this doesn’t make for a radical change in your playstyle.  P3 was always primarily about exploiting your enemies’ weaknesses while doing your best to safeguard your own, and Hard mode simply reinforces that by not letting you get lazy and tank hits if you don’t feel like playing strategically. I’ve always enjoyed how combat was generally a fast-paced, high stakes affair in SMT games, with both you and the enemies doing large amounts of damage to each other rather than grinding away. Since Hard mode just heightens that feeling, I’m going to press on with it.