I disagree.
Persona 3 will begin with an amazing FMV, a lot of tension and the promise of a great mistery for the player to unravel. Now, before you actually get to the game in this teen-drama cutscene-crazed PS2 title, you will require at least an hour of patience and, to be truthful, it's a great story so you won't mind much.
The game then suddenly reveals itself to have in place an Azure Dreams kind of system, cool, you go up this huge tower and kill some bad guys, the floor plans are always random and your real strenght resides in your pet/companion/summon/pokemon. The combat is semi-rewarding with a weakness system that makes your enemy lose their turn if you use the right elemental skill, you're still waiting to see what the rage was all about. The controls are ok, the camera is ok, the character models look pretty cool and the voices are ok. Also, the presentation is most satisfactory, truly you will be hard-pressed to find any kind of technical fault with the game.
Now, after 10 minutes of actual gameplay your party will become fatigued, making them about 30% less effective in combat. Time to get the hell out and come back another time, a-ok, not bad for a first run. some levels and some moneys are already in the bag. But because this magical tower only pops up at midnight, it's time for some character development, exploring the proverbial town, find out more about your allies and play some mini-games.
Think again, mate. You will have to suffer, and I do mean suffer, literally, through school drama crap and make "social connections" in order for your spirit power to grow stronger, enabling your summon to become stronger as well. So this is really the key to the whole game, making friends, joining clubs and practicing sports in order to get those "social connections".
That would be ok if there wasn't a time limit and you weren't constrained to 2 actions a day, much like those lame internet dating sims. You only have 1 school year to save the world (or bag the girl, really, the similarities to those games are just stupifying) and make friends and each day you can only choose to do 2 things. So you can get a burger (+1 courage!) and go to the tower again... or you can study (+1 academics!) and eat that burger (+1 courage!). You'll be feeling like an ass at this point and going "what?"
Then hey, you remember that the battles were actually cool, so you decide to skip this school crap and focus on sweet sweet XP points but, alas, your party is still tired, so you have to go at it alone... do you want to do that? No, right? Just eat another burger or go make some friends.
The absolute most frustrating thing about this game is that if your main character dies (in fact, in other games your main character dies a lot, he's no stronger than the other characters) it's game over, even with the rest of your party still alive. And with that, you (by you, I mean "I") give the finger to the ps2.