Which Difficulty Should You Choose in Persona 3 Portable?

Persona 3 Portable can be a difficult game at times, especially for newcomers who have only played Persona 5. While the portable version ported to modern systems includes a ton of quality-of-life features taken from Persona 4, such as the ability to directly control your party members and make enemies dizzy, the core structure of the game gives it some tough difficulty spikes for unprepared players. Thankfully, there are multiple difficulty levels to accommodate players of all skill levels. You can even adjust the difficulty on the fly, so it’s basically impossible to get stuck.

All Difficulty Levels in Persona 3 Explained

There are five difficulty levels in Persona 3 Portable and each of them is listed below, beginning with the easiest and ending with the hardest.

• Beginner
• Easy
• Normal
• Hard
• Maniac

Normal is the default mode, but the difficulty of the game ranges from Beginner to Maniac. Those words couldn’t be more different from one another, and the same can be said for the level of difficulty that they offer.

Which Difficulty Should You Choose in Persona 3?

Most players should choose the standard Normal difficulty when playing Persona 3 Portable for the first time. Persona 3 is a bit more difficult than the games that came after it, particularly during boss battles throughout Tartarus. You’ll have to put in more thought than you would when battling the final boss in a palace in Persona 5, for example. If you’re a Persona veteran, however, then you can try out one of the higher difficulty levels.

No matter your experience level though, choosing an extremely high difficulty setting like Maniac is not recommended for a first-time playthrough. Tartarus is an extremely lengthy grind and can distract you from the real meat of the game — the story and social links — for hours at a time. Even if you’re a diehard Shin Megami Tensei fan, playing on Maniac should be saved for a second run so you can focus on the narrative the first time around.

Persona 3 Portable is available now on PC, PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch.