Persona 3, only smaller...but actually bigger.

Ever heard of Persona? Apparently it's quite popular among JRPG fans. Well one of the latter entries in the series is making it's way to the PSP with a new remix. Notice I said "latter" entry, not the latest one, since the game we're dealing with here is the 2+ year old (released August 2007) Persona 3, not the 1+ year old (released December 2008) Persona 4.
I'm not sure whether you should be scratching your head that they didn't go with the latest title, or smiling because this means Atlus will probably port P4 to the PSP sometime next year, giving you two portable Personas instead of one. Questions of age aside, let's get into the details of what make this new edition a worthwhile port.
The new portable version (dubbed...wait for it: Persona 3 Portable) keeps everything from the original intact, the day/night cycle of dungeon crawling combat and high-school sim aspects like homework and dating (Japanese RPG, remember) but also adds a whole new way to play through the reportedly 100+ hour game, as a girl (seen in the boxart above, next to the "standard" male protagonist). Apparently this new aspect of the game opens up new events and relationship possibilities, obviously, in addition to making it a potentially 200+ hour game. The Playstation Blog also claims this will add a "fresh new perspective," which to me says everyone refers to you as "her" and "she" instead of "he" and "him" but I guess I should give Atlus some credit towards making some genuinely worthwhile changes.
The move to portable has also brought some changes to the controls and gameplay like one-button shortcuts in the menus, faster load times and "streamlined" equipment changes for your team. The difficulty options have also increased in number form 2 to 5. Although how much this actually affects the difficulty -- i.e. is it actually harder/easier or are there just more degrees added to the current difficulty -- remains to be seen. Most significant of all, however, is that you can now control each member of your team directly in the faux suicide-centric combat rather than leaving it up to the game's AI. This last aspect seems like the largest reason to purchase Persona 3 again, (first-timers don't really have an excuse not to) even more so than the aforementioned ability to play as a girl.
And for all you PSPGo owner's, yes it will be available as a download from the Playstation Store when the game releases July 6th of this year.