When comparing Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 FES vs NieR: Automata, the Slant community recommends NieR: Automata for most people. In the question“What are the best story rich games on PC?” NieR: Automata is ranked 38th while Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 FES is ranked 56th. The most important reason people chose NieR: Automata is:
The combat in NieR: Automata is fantastic. It has a hack-and-slash feel to it, with an emphasis on agility and showy acrobatics. With the fluid and responsive controls, you can switch seamlessly from using swift attacks with your weapon to devastatingly strong attacks as you combo them together. You also use customizable ranged missile attacks from your personal robot pod, such as powerful laser beams or a giant hammer attack. It can be difficult to win battles sometimes, especially on the harder gameplay settings, but it's worthwhile to keep at it and watch yourself progress and improve.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Well-written dark and mature story about finding hope in impossible situations
The story here deals with a lot of death, darkness, and suffering, but there's always a light at the end of the tunnel if you're willing to look for it. You start off as a regular high school student who transfers to a new school in the city, assigned to live in a dorm with a group of other students. There's a supernatural phenomenon that happens at midnight known as the Dark Hour where Shadows turn up on the streets and cause all kinds of trouble in the city. You and the group of students in the dorm are among the few who are lucid during the Dark Hour, so it's up to you to stop the Shadows every night at midnight and the full moon.
Things can get quite dark with the way the plot explores human sin and how our own vices can corrupt us. Some of the symbolism of what the Shadows represent can be pretty grim. But the main protagonist always has his group of friends to fall back on -- a theme that shines through the hopelessness and despair without getting heavy-handed or cheesy. It's a full, well-written story from start to finish that stays with you for a long time.
Pro You get to collect and control many types of demons and angels as your Personas to fight in battle
Your Personas are demons and angels that you summon to use their spells and special abilities in battle. Fusing different Personas together lets you create stronger ones with better abilities. You can switch your Personas in and out of battle as needed to exploit enemy weaknesses you come across. And there are hundreds of different types of demons and angels with their own fitting designs and relevant mythological lore, ranging from familiar names like Shiva, Lilith, Valkyrie, Phoenix, Raphael, and many many more.
Pro Challenging yet rewarding turn-based combat
The battles in Persona 3 are tough, yet once you get the hang of the system, it's quite engaging. You fight with your Personas and your party members, who have their set Personas of their own, aiming to pinpoint your enemy's elemental weaknesses and exploit them. Once you find the weakness, you and your team are rewarded with an extra turn; if you keep landing the right attacks, then the game lets you chain a finite number of turns one after another. If you don't look up a guide, then finding weaknesses is a matter of trial and error.
But this also applies to your enemies -- if they exploit your weaknesses, then they get extra turns instead. The bosses are pretty hard since they hit for a ton of damage, so you absolutely need to take advantage of gaining extra turns. And as you get farther along in the game, you get access to buffs to your party's attack, defense, evasion, and more, as well as debuffs to debilitate your foes. As you get better with the combat and earn some tough victories, the sense of satisfaction you get helps you to keep pushing forward.
Pro Building friendships with characters through Social Links gives you an edge in battle
There are all sorts of characters to get to know and befriend through the Social Link system. You can make friends with your classmates, your party members, and a few other characters in the community of the city you live in. Spending time with them gives you a contained, and often touching story where you get to know them more and help them solve a personal struggle. After reaching the end of their Social Link, you're able to fuse special and powerful Personas that can help you tackle some of the game's hardest challenges. It's a neat system that gives you a gameplay incentive for building relationships.
Pro Memorable final boss that fits the game thematically
Without spoiling anything, Persona 3's last boss is one to remember. It's a grueling fight with an incredible accompanying music track. The challenge surrounding the boss fits right with the theme's of tackling impossible situations when all hope seems lost. It's a standout fight among JRPGs, period.
Pro Cool and modern sense of style with the visuals and soundtrack
Everything in Persona 3 is stylistically on-point. The recurring cool blue in the eye-catching menus and UI, text boxes, and even the protagonist's hair gives the game a distinct aesthetic. The character designs are also really cool, with slender forms and a modern yet laid-back sense of fashion. And the trip-hop/hip-hop soundtrack blends classical, rock, pop, and synthwave sounds together in such a unique way that no other game really comes close to. Despite all the different ideas, it all comes together as a cool and cohesive look.
Pro The FES version of Persona 3 offers plenty of bonus content
Persona 3 FES comes with additional story content that wasn't in the original game. It contains The Answer, an expansion that offers challenging battles and a deeper explanation of what happened during the ending of the base game. There are also a few other bonuses like additional scenes and music throughout the regular story. This is considered the definitive version of Persona 3.
Pro Fast-paced, action-packed combat
The combat in NieR: Automata is fantastic. It has a hack-and-slash feel to it, with an emphasis on agility and showy acrobatics. With the fluid and responsive controls, you can switch seamlessly from using swift attacks with your weapon to devastatingly strong attacks as you combo them together. You also use customizable ranged missile attacks from your personal robot pod, such as powerful laser beams or a giant hammer attack. It can be difficult to win battles sometimes, especially on the harder gameplay settings, but it's worthwhile to keep at it and watch yourself progress and improve.
Pro Unique storytelling with a real emotional impact
NieR: Automata's outlook on storytelling is incredibly special. To get the full experience, you have to run multiple playthroughs of the game, each of which offers a new experience and perspective. Your world view of the story events and characters expands drastically as you complete each playthrough, playing on your expectations to help you develop a deeper emotional bond with the protagonists and become invested in their plight.
Things take a real turn on your third playthrough, putting you on an emotional roller coaster all the way to the true ending. The plot twists and knocks on the fourth wall elevate the story to a truly unique place. Getting all the way to the very end can be a religious experience from how much heart and meaning you discover in the symbolism.
Pro It's got a hauntingly beautiful environment
NieR: Automata is set in a post-apocalyptic landscape after Earth has been overrun by hostile machines, and the artists really nailed what that would feel like. Abandoned and overgrown cities litter the landscape along with old refineries, graveyards, and eerie forests. When you add the beautiful soundtrack to the experience, it fills you with a bittersweet mix of loneliness and hope.
Pro Varied genre-spanning gameplay elements
NieR: Automata has different types of gameplay to keep things interesting. From the very start, you're on an on-rails bullet hell section, and then you switch over to the more traditional action RPG style of fast-paced combat. Things change up again not long after with some side-scrolling platforming from a 2D view. Later on in the story, there's a hacking mini-game where you navigate a tiny ship through a short puzzle, with the music changing to a charming retro sound to fit the theme and mood. This is a game that doesn't stay boxed in a single genre.
Pro An incredible amount of content
Outside of the main story, there's plenty of optional content to dive into. The side quests are the best way to get to know the characters and lore of the world, with some of them giving clever and subtle foreshadowing of the game's most critical events. There are also weapons to collect and upgrade, each of which offer nice little tidbits of lore after you get them to max level. And after reaching a certain point in the story, you get access to Chapter Select that lets you go back and replay whatever you want. You can easily spend 60+ hours exploring the world and still have much more to do.
Pro Gorgeous, ethereal soundtrack with amazing vocals
NieR: Automata's music is out of this world. It's so stunning and elegant in a way that nothing else can really live up to. The soundtrack manages to emotionalize the game through music, from the action-packed tracks with hard-hitting wind instruments and percussion, to the softer, somber songs that encapsulate the hauntingly beautiful environments and story moments you encounter. Vocals in the lore's indescribable language makes the music even more memorable, adding to the ethereal quality of the sound. This soundtrack is definitely one that you can go back to again and again without getting sick of it.
Cons
Con The main dungeon, Tartarus, is an insanely repetitive grind
Tartarus is an impossibly high tower that only shows up during the Dark Hour, filled with Shadows and strong bosses. Outside of story sequences during the full moon, Tartarus is the only place you get to go for dungeon crawling. The randomly-generated rooms mostly look the same from floor to floor, save for some color swaps after you beat a boss and unlock the next section of the tower.
All you do is look for the next set of stairs up in between fighting against Shadows over and over and over again for the entire game. It's really, really repetitive, and unless you adore this kind of grinding, you will have to push yourself through this somehow to continue on with the story.
Con Fatigue system forces you to leave Tartarus early
There's a terrible Fatigue system that artificially gates your progress. Basically, you explore Tartarus for a time, and as you go on, your party members start to complain of feeling too tired to continue. You can either listen to them and go back to the dorms, or you can keep going for a while. Eventually, your tired party members will bail on you no matter what, forcing you to call it a night.
If you keep pushing them too hard, they will flat-out refuse to go to Tartarus with you for a few nights and choose to go to sleep instead. And this can happen to your main character as well, locking you out of nighttime activities altogether so that he can stay in his room and rest. It's such a pointless and frustrating system that makes you spend more time to get stronger in battle.
Con The combat is hard -- especially boss battles
Persona 3 is a challenging game with tough difficulty spikes during boss fights. Once you get a hang of the elemental weaknesses and earning extra turns, there's still the issue with bosses overwhelming you with tons of damage and/or boosted defenses. Grinding for levels is an option, but you want to always prioritize fusing better Personas with stronger and more useful abilities such as buffs and debuffs. As long as you do that, you should be fine.
Con Long stretches of in-game days with no story progression
For a large chunk of the story, you're stuck waiting until the next full moon. This is when the most powerful Shadows show up in the form of a boss fight, letting you progress the story. But there are times when you have absolutely no other cutscenes during an entire moon cycle. Your party members just tell you to wait and hang in there until the next segment. All you can do is go to school or the mall or maybe hang out with any available Social Links, and it feels pretty monotonous when you're stuck waiting like this.
Con You can't max a girl's Social Link without romancing her
For some reason, the game doesn't let your male main character have platonic friendships with female Social Link characters. In every single story line, you must romance the girl in order to max her Social Link. If you turn her down, then the two of you can't just be friends, because she cuts off contact with you.
This is especially annoying when her story line is interesting, or when you want the added bonuses of a max level Social Link for fusing the most powerful Personas later on in the game. And you can't cheat by romancing several girls at once, because they will find out, and you will then have to spend several in-game days trying to deal with their broken trust. So choose carefully.
Con Can't directly control your party members in combat
Because you can only control your main character, and not your party members, battles can be a bit wonky at times. You can set a general command for everyone to follow, like focusing on healing, but they won't always do what you want. For example, say you're going up against a tough boss that's weak against ice. One of your party members, Mitsuru, has a Persona that uses ice attacks, so you decide to bring her along. Depending on your luck, there will be plenty of times where she casts a completely pointless spell instead of using her Persona's ice abilities. This is really frustrating and can unfortunately happen quite often.
Con Limited open world
Even though NieR: Automata is technically an open world game, it doesn't always feel like it. It's more that there's a big open space in the center of the ruined city you explore, with branches that lead off to vastly different environments, like a desert, a village, and a few other places. These locations aren't that spacious, either, and it's a bit of a stretch to even imagine all of these places being so close together in the first place. It's not too much of an issue as long as you find the story and combat engaging enough.
Con Second playthrough can get repetitive
Once you get to Route B, your second playthrough, you may find that too much is the same. There are some big differences, such as the new way you get to see things play out, but a lot of it rehashes Route A, your first playthrough. There's a ton of hacking you have to do as well, which gets pretty boring after repeating it over and over again. But if you stick with it, Route C and onward are absolutely worth the time spent getting to that point.
Con Some boring fetch quests
The pacing gets messed up when you're forced to run certain fetch quests near the start of the game. This is somewhat forgivable after the fun and action-packed introductory level, but the quests themselves are still a drag to play through. Some of the side quests can also boil down to the same thing. Even though these quests give a lot of useful information about the world, they're not all that fulfilling, and you may dread having to repeat them when playing through the game again.
Con Buggy on PC
Some players complain about the game crashing, freezing, their save files mysteriously disappearing, and more. As of June 2018, over a year after the game's initial release, there is still no patch to fix these problems. Not everyone on PC will have these bugs, but it's still quite prevalent. If you continually run into issues, your best bet is to find a mod or play the console versions instead of waiting on an official patch that may never happen.