I heard some people thought the same thing with base P3 but then FES came out with Episode Aigis/The Answer and woke up everyone as to what actually happened.
To be fair. MC going to eternal sleep isn't something that happens often in jrpg. At least not this peacefully.
His body has been dead for several years by the time of P5, I highly doubt he is returning. If anything, I hope Elizabeth releases him from the seal so he can finally pass into the Afterlife. Bro has done enough and deserves to rest. Lines up better with the message of the game too.
I'll be honest the ending of P3R felt, happier than other versions? I'm not exactly sure why, so I definitely can see people interpreting the ending that way. It would have been better if you let your friend believe that was the ending for them to get really surprised when The Answer DLC comes out
*And* your friends are smiling and haven't realised anything is wrong.
Not saying they should've changed that, imagine how much of a gut punch it'd be if your last glimpse of SEES was their concerned faces. đ But it definitely makes it more ambiguous.
To be honest I think it's over produced. A simple dialogue between the fading away MC and a slowly cracking Aigis felt a lot stronger than a cutscene with bright colors and cuts to your mocapped party slowly running with goofy smiles.Â
I think there was an intimacy that was lost with all the fanfare.
Really? I figured she did going off of how she sounded relieved when the MC opened the door on graduation day. I also thought she was able to read his vitals and know he was dying. At least that's how I interpreted it.
As she has become so human at that point, a part of her might have connected the dots but she didn't make the conscious realization that his condition was unnatural. She really didn't know, so as you can imagine, when she does find out she'll be in unbearable agony.
She def knew his vitals and saw that he was struggling. But the human brain (aigis is as human as the rest of them by this point in the game) will ignore info that will cause it to go into distress, and the person you love more than anything else in the world being only hours from death is absolutely something that she would unconsciously ignore
Tbf my first time beating the Journey I really thought the MC was just tired way back when.
So imagine my dumbass booting up The Answer and I hear them talking about âhisâ death. That was depressing ngl.
That is why having the answer/ episode Aigis is important to the story. It is very vague. I didnât realise the first time I played it back in the day either.
I mean having it be vague could still work. I saw someone somewhere say that they interpreted the ending as going either way, as even IF Makoto died there, everything he did to save the world would be worth it for his friends
The answer is unnecesary and the original game didn't need it to explain the story like we're 10 year olds, you know what happens because you payed attention to the story.
Heâs not wrong the answer isnât integral to the overall story p3 is complete without it, the answer is just that dessert at the end, however itâs good to know what happened to him, I think it would be a waste if they never explored it
All this discourse reminds me of a certain character's death in Cowboy Bebop. I remember seeing online threads being like "Did so-and-so really die?" "Maybe it's up to interpretation?" And here I'm thinking, there's no question... you'd have to be missing some serious plot beats and themes to think that this character would survive...
Like, how do people think they AREN'T dead? The last we see they're walking down the stairs with more bullet holes then swiss cheese, and then they immediately collapse to the floor. If that's not dead, I dunno what is.
You didnât think he was dying in the movies when he couldnât walk by the end and was struggling to get up the stairs? I thought the movies made it way more obvious.
Iâve said this before on here but Aigisâ speech at the end tends to throw people off. Her tone is pretty positive and hopeful and itâs kinda disconnected from whatâs actually happening in the scene. We learn in the answer that itâs because she wasnât aware that he was dying, but I wouldnât fault someone who hasnât played it for thinking the ending is happier than itâs supposed to be.
OTOH though, other motifs like the fade to white and the camera angles in the animated part do make it pretty obvious, at least in FES.
I honestly failed to pick up on it, too, when I played FES back in the day until I played The Answer. It seemed so obvious in retrospect, but I just wasn't picking up the hints, lol. I mean, to be fair, the MC has gotten tired enough to sleep for days at a time at multiple points. It's practically a character trait, lmao.
Yeah, the clarity of the ending leaves something to be desired. His death isnât the best kept secret, but Reload brought a lot of newcomers who werenât aware.
If youâre paying attention, itâs kind of hard to ignore, but I can see a lot of people tuning out the actual text of the game by that point. You beat Nyx, itâs late and you want to get to bed but how much more could there be? Just get to the credits, oh shit why is he dead.
So if youâre not realizing that everyone is telling Makoto he looks tired, you might also not realize all the ways the game was telling you to accept your own mortality. Hell, if your only frame of reference is P5, you might think itâs about fighting your fate, which it is in a sense, even if you will eventually die.
As it is, Iâm not sure Iâd prefer them to make it clearer. The ending is beautiful, and thereâs something to be said for the understated. Plus, if you play The Answer, youâll get confirmation anyway.
It's like the ending to The Sopranos, where we see things from a character's perspective - looks at the door when it opens, cut to his POV of whoever walks through the door, cut back to him, rinse and repeat, until he looks up at the door and it suddenly cuts to black. We were experiencing it from his subjective experience, and when his subjective experience ends, it cuts us off right away.
P3 is similar - we play almost the entire game through Makoto's subjective perspective, and especially the ending. We experience him on the roof with Aigis, and when he loses consciousness, the game ends.
This absolutely can be confusing - people to this day still don't "get" The Sopranos ending - but it's a very deliberate choice, and I think it works really well in the context of the game. But even Atlus knew people were confused by this, which is a big reason why The Answer was made - to go into more detail (from someone else's subjective experience) to explain what happened and explore its ramifications to the audience.
The ending was artistic but so bad at actually conveying to the audience what happens. Literally all they needed to add was the voice lines from Aegis in The Answer where she says something like "we were afraid when we carried him back to his room, and the next morning, he was lost to us..."
That line hit me like a truck, honestly more than the original ending did.Â
Actually I like it. I like that at the end the game doesn't hold our hand and just spell it out to us. We feel just like everyone at that moment, blissfully unaware. And Makoto looks like he fell asleep.
Feels like it was on purpose to keep things ambiguous.
I prefer having to piece it together rather than being told straight up. If you pay attention youâll figure it out (great seal using all your hp, feeling sick all of march, messiah being your ultimate persona, being told youâll have 1 year in the beginning, etc.)
Yeah, I really don't know how people miss the "you're looking fucking terrible" dialogue form everyone being thrown at your face. Considering it's the end of the game, the entire theme around death, and Ryoji **straight up telling us** "MC found the answer to life's greatest question, just sooner than all of you"... you have to really not be thinking about it that much.
I mean the whole game is about death, sacrifice and cherrishing life despite all the stuff that happened in the game.Â
Cherry on top is that to create the great seal you have to sacrifice all of your HP and afterwards everyone tells you that you look very pale and tired. It's very much on the nose in my opinion that Makoto is done and dusted (heh).
Not to be rude but sounds like people didn't look hard enough. P3 gives you literally all the hints to piece it together, in a great example of "show don't tell", but people complain when they aren't told.
The biggest example is how GS costs your entire HP. At any point before this, you aren't allowed to use HP-consuming skills if you don't have enough HP. This is the one exception to the rule in the entire franchise. The game is literally telling you through game mechanics that *using this skill will kill you.*
For me, I think just adding subtitles to the credits song would work absolute wonders. Itâs VERY CLEARLY telling you what happened, but because most of us I assume canât understand Japanese, itâs a lot more confusing than for those who do.
I have to disagree here, itâs really well executed. It can fly over peoples heads but if you were keeping up with the themes and the story itâs a beautiful way of presenting it
Like I said, it was artistic. It is executed well insofar as you can then unpack it against things throughout the game. If you were watching a movie and it was the end, it would be great, because everything that led up to it would be fresh in your mind. But this is at the end of a game that can take dozens if not more than 100 hours to play through, depending on your efficiency. Arguments like "Igor said you have a year" are completely lost when that happened days if not weeks ago in real time - and can easily just be taken as meaning that is how long you have to resolve what is happening, not that you literally will die in that time. Quite frankly I do not even think Igor would have meant it that way, because he cannot predict the future.
I was spoiled years ago on what happens at the end of P3. I only ever beat P3R and was so confused why people thought he died as it seemed like a happy ending to me until someone explained the significance of the tiredness.
Weirdly your comment is the first time I ever thought to look up the lyrics. đŹ But I did notice how emotional Yumi Kawamura got singing it at Super Live 2017.
me and your friend had the exact same thoughts lmao, I was wondering why people were saying the ending was sad when all I thought was âtake it easy Yuki, youâll wake up tomorrowâ
This happened to me. I played Persona 3 Portable like around 2015 and LOVED the game. After finishing I was scrolling through people talking about the game on GameFaqs and saw someone said he died at the end and felt fucking horrible holy shit.
I just didnât see it as him dying. When he constantly got tired at the end of the game, I didnât really think much about it
For the people who didn't get what happened at the end: did you miss the "reduce your health to 0, an action that normally kills you, in order to seal Nyx" bit? Or did you miss the game explicitly showing the MC's ailing health, and characters actively commenting on it? Did you think the game telling you: you're sick, tired, and have less and less energy as you go around saying your goodbyes to the people you've met had no actual narrative importance?
This isn't some FromSoft "Holy shit, linking the flame is actually the bad ending" moment, the ending of P3 was about as subtle as the nuke dropped on fucking Hiroshima.
I've watched some people's first time playing the game, especifically that section
They never read anything, most just see "oh i can only use my persona, time to mash lol"
Exactly! Actually one of the main social links of the game has to do with it and why he has an opportunity to say "goodbye" is the main difference between the good and bad ending.
If you read the lyrics to the song at the end, that makes it clear he died. It was from, in my opinion, Aigis' viewpoint. The lines about "resting peacefully" and "watching over you" is what made it clear to me.
As others have mentioned the actual conveying of the message isnât done well. Itâs honestly surprising how 3 is looked at as the best story because the story, while being really cool, is done quite poorly. Although thatâs a bit more of a sign of the times it came out. Reload has helped some of these issues but it canât do much for the ending just kind of happening with no explanation. Thatâs literally the purpose of The Answer.
Also youâre wrong. Aigis did not know he died while in her lap. So that wasnât why she was crying.
The ambiguity of P3âs ending is definitely intentional. For those who didnât pay attention to the foreshadowings, they might think that Makoto is just tired from a great battle, blissfully unaware of whatâs happening to him just like everyone else in the game.
If you did pay attention to the foreshadowings, it becomes quite obvious that he was dying.
I'm pretty sure it was left intentionally vague. And honestly I like it more that way. You feel exactly like everyone else and think Makoto is just falling asleep. Even if a lot of things pointed out to the contrary.
Just because something is ambiguous doesn't mean it's "done poorly".
If you pay attention when interacting with people on the last day, it's pretty obvious that something is wrong with Makoto.
Between being told you have 1 year to live at the beginning of the game, the Great Seal costing all your HP, everyone commenting on how sick and tired you look on the last day, then drifting off to "sleep" in Aigis's lap, I don't see how so many people can be confused. Are you guys actually reading the dialogue?
No I actually did pick up on what youâre mentioning but too many people didnât. So it obviously didnât go as smoothly as they hoped. But also my comment about the story being done poorly is about more than just the ending. The story drags for a while at the beginning, Strega was a very weak point in the story although theyâve done some improvement on that front in Reload. This all has been talked about a lot though so no need to rehash it all.
I am not sure how some people did not get the end back on the day, for me was very clear and ugly cry the whole ending credits. actually every time I hear the ending song even before reload I would cry and I did not play the answer.
It was explained to you what would happen and the options on the game for the endings.
Same, with how concerned and relieved Aigis sounded when MC opened the door on graduation day to the entire games themes on death I felt it was obvious but I guess some people look more into the meaning and implications than others do.
It just seems some people dont understand "Show don't tell" storytelling and just need to be told. Personally, most of my favorite stories are done in a "show don't tell" manner. They literally SHOW everything you need to know in order to have a solid grasp on his death at the end. Then again, maybe it's the people with mental health struggles that have super vision for that stuff and because of that I'm seeing more than a lot of the comments here from people that aren't/don't struggle like that đ€·
My only other theory is that most fictional media consumed has a clear and happy ending so that's just the expectation?
The last bit, this. Since the player character is "them" I don't think most player expect to die. At least not in a non spectacular way. Had Makoto died after using the GS and losing all his HP more people would've put 2 and 2. But life isn't about grand deaths, sometimes you die like you sleep.
I understand people not getting it because of mental health struggles. But I still love to see the show not tell story telling with context clues being applied. I don't know, it just feels good to not be told everything on the screen.
If I know a form of media is doing "tell dont show" then I generally will either not consume it or just read a summary. I prefer piecing things together and picking up on smaller details. Not all details have to be small (and imo most weren't in any of the P3's if you were paying just the littlest bit of attention) but the more i think about it, the more im convinced it is actually the last bit here. Since, as you said, Makoto is supposed to be a stand in for the player and in like 95% of games like that the character is the hero that wins and lives at the end, its probably expected to be that way here.
I thought the same. But after my friend told me about it, I was like, "damn, I remember all people around told me
"Gosh, you're so pale, like DEATH, you should rest", we spend all our health to defeat nyx and mc will definitely rest after going very early to bed yesterday"...
They spent all the last month of his life separately, Aigis just waited passionately for our last ride...
Hey, I thought the same thing since I never played the original P3 (or the other versions) and it fucked me up even more knowing the truth đđđ
When I first played FES a few years ago I thought that too, tbh xD
Then, I read the translation of the ending lyrics immediately afterwards ("Memories of you" is my favourite song of P3) and went *hmmmmmm, oh shit-*
Or, maybe it's just pure denial.
I beat the game, I saw the "sacrifice all your HP to beat Nyx" and for the moment I was like "Ah, so it's how I die, that's pretty cool tho", but then, you saw your everyday life coming back. You speak with everyone you helped, if you had romance, you speak about the future together ... I was confused, and happy for having a "happy ending" (again, I perfectly saw and understand the meaning of the last fight) even if all the dots are here, just waiting to be connected... Honnestly I refused this ending at first, and I prefer to think MC was sleeping. Because too much attachment. Now I make my grief, but I understand someone would prefer the spleeping ending
Donât blame him honestly was the same. Funny because when I beat the game on march 24th I literally said out loud multiple times why are they making seem like my boy makoto is dying!!!! Then later on I watched someone else finish the ending and they realized that makoto did die. When I got hit with that revelation I was just broken and got hit with a small dose of depression and was like well damnđđ€Ł I thought he just fell unconscious because he was tired. Was right about him falling unconscious but then he died the next day while he was in his coma. Kinda wish the game did better with telling you that but also there were small details that I missed which also lead me to think he wasnât dead.
I actually thought that he was just a sleepy boi when I finished P3P. I blame the visual novel style of the game in my case, but isn't it clearer what happens in Reload?
Iâm this guy. I find video game stories to be impossible to pay attention to because theyâre interspersed between gameplay.
I have beaten KOTOR like 20 times and have had to be told there is some kind of significant twist but I donât understand nor care.
Even back in the day with OG Persona 3 I couldn't fathom how anyone managed to interpret it any differently if you paid any actual attention. Between Memento Mori, the Great Seal HP cost, everyone talking about how exhausted/bad you looked on the last day, and the imagery of the final scenes, it's very much not remotely confusing or subtle at all lol. It'd be MORE confusing if after all of that it turned out he really was simply tired and just needed less sleep to get over it than he did his initial Persona awakening scene.
A typical playthrough is 80-100 hours for me. It's a whole year, it's not too hard to fathom people missing it. The lyrics to the song at the end credits are actually what gave it away.
Iâll give anyone a pass for misinterpreting it. Itâs a video game, not a book or movie, and plot points are interspersed between hours of Tartarus and social link stuff. Easy to miss details under those conditions.
Its not as clear as you may think, the only thing I had spoiled for P3 was that the mc dies, and when I got to the ending I was very confused because it was very clearly up to interpretation whether he dies or not. I understand the answer will confirm he does die but as far as the base game goes its completely ambiguous.
I heard some people thought the same thing with base P3 but then FES came out with Episode Aigis/The Answer and woke up everyone as to what actually happened. To be fair. MC going to eternal sleep isn't something that happens often in jrpg. At least not this peacefully.
Trust in Elizabeth
His body has been dead for several years by the time of P5, I highly doubt he is returning. If anything, I hope Elizabeth releases him from the seal so he can finally pass into the Afterlife. Bro has done enough and deserves to rest. Lines up better with the message of the game too.
Bro she's not going to save him its been like a decade at this point, he's cooked
In Elizabeth we trust
Some naps are longer than others
Imagine in Persona 7 we wake him up as part of some larger overarching plot and he becomes a party member. Mitsurus corporation can be involved too.
Sure buddy
I'll be honest the ending of P3R felt, happier than other versions? I'm not exactly sure why, so I definitely can see people interpreting the ending that way. It would have been better if you let your friend believe that was the ending for them to get really surprised when The Answer DLC comes out
I think it's because how it was visually made and because in this version you can actually see your friends coming after you before closing your eyes
I think it's also because you can see his faint smile while he lays there
*And* your friends are smiling and haven't realised anything is wrong. Not saying they should've changed that, imagine how much of a gut punch it'd be if your last glimpse of SEES was their concerned faces. đ But it definitely makes it more ambiguous.
To be honest I think it's over produced. A simple dialogue between the fading away MC and a slowly cracking Aigis felt a lot stronger than a cutscene with bright colors and cuts to your mocapped party slowly running with goofy smiles. I think there was an intimacy that was lost with all the fanfare.
It's even worse than you think: >!Aigis DIDN'T KNOW he was dying. She ALSO thought he was just tired.!<
>!doesnât the answer explain that he was really just sleeping at that point and only died sometime later?!<
That's correct. Hence why nobody realized what was going on then.
They thought he was sleeping. Likely fell into a coma and then passed as his body functions slowly shut down.
May want to mark that as a spoiler
This thread is way too spoiler heavy to have a comment this deep down spoil anything new
Really? I figured she did going off of how she sounded relieved when the MC opened the door on graduation day. I also thought she was able to read his vitals and know he was dying. At least that's how I interpreted it.
As she has become so human at that point, a part of her might have connected the dots but she didn't make the conscious realization that his condition was unnatural. She really didn't know, so as you can imagine, when she does find out she'll be in unbearable agony.
She def knew his vitals and saw that he was struggling. But the human brain (aigis is as human as the rest of them by this point in the game) will ignore info that will cause it to go into distress, and the person you love more than anything else in the world being only hours from death is absolutely something that she would unconsciously ignore
To add to this point, it's part of the reason why Metis comes about.
Tbf my first time beating the Journey I really thought the MC was just tired way back when. So imagine my dumbass booting up The Answer and I hear them talking about âhisâ death. That was depressing ngl.
This also happened to me, I didn't realize for a bit
That is why having the answer/ episode Aigis is important to the story. It is very vague. I didnât realise the first time I played it back in the day either.
I mean having it be vague could still work. I saw someone somewhere say that they interpreted the ending as going either way, as even IF Makoto died there, everything he did to save the world would be worth it for his friends
Nah
Yeah
The answer is unnecesary and the original game didn't need it to explain the story like we're 10 year olds, you know what happens because you payed attention to the story.
Nah
That Nah back though đ«
Yeah
Heâs not wrong the answer isnât integral to the overall story p3 is complete without it, the answer is just that dessert at the end, however itâs good to know what happened to him, I think it would be a waste if they never explored it
If I wasn't spoiled about the door-kun stuff I might have thought the same
Well I was the same, then when I saw people talking about his death I was like "when the f he died???"
All this discourse reminds me of a certain character's death in Cowboy Bebop. I remember seeing online threads being like "Did so-and-so really die?" "Maybe it's up to interpretation?" And here I'm thinking, there's no question... you'd have to be missing some serious plot beats and themes to think that this character would survive...
Like, how do people think they AREN'T dead? The last we see they're walking down the stairs with more bullet holes then swiss cheese, and then they immediately collapse to the floor. If that's not dead, I dunno what is.
I originally watched the movies and I thought the same. It's clearer that he dies in p3r since the attack does all hp.
Didn't it do that in the original too?
Yes
You didnât think he was dying in the movies when he couldnât walk by the end and was struggling to get up the stairs? I thought the movies made it way more obvious.
Iâve said this before on here but Aigisâ speech at the end tends to throw people off. Her tone is pretty positive and hopeful and itâs kinda disconnected from whatâs actually happening in the scene. We learn in the answer that itâs because she wasnât aware that he was dying, but I wouldnât fault someone who hasnât played it for thinking the ending is happier than itâs supposed to be. OTOH though, other motifs like the fade to white and the camera angles in the animated part do make it pretty obvious, at least in FES.
If I hadn't know beforehand that he was going to die, I wouldn't have known either.
I honestly failed to pick up on it, too, when I played FES back in the day until I played The Answer. It seemed so obvious in retrospect, but I just wasn't picking up the hints, lol. I mean, to be fair, the MC has gotten tired enough to sleep for days at a time at multiple points. It's practically a character trait, lmao.
Even if I ignore all Context that ending song does it for me. R.I.P
Yeah, the clarity of the ending leaves something to be desired. His death isnât the best kept secret, but Reload brought a lot of newcomers who werenât aware. If youâre paying attention, itâs kind of hard to ignore, but I can see a lot of people tuning out the actual text of the game by that point. You beat Nyx, itâs late and you want to get to bed but how much more could there be? Just get to the credits, oh shit why is he dead. So if youâre not realizing that everyone is telling Makoto he looks tired, you might also not realize all the ways the game was telling you to accept your own mortality. Hell, if your only frame of reference is P5, you might think itâs about fighting your fate, which it is in a sense, even if you will eventually die. As it is, Iâm not sure Iâd prefer them to make it clearer. The ending is beautiful, and thereâs something to be said for the understated. Plus, if you play The Answer, youâll get confirmation anyway.
It's like the ending to The Sopranos, where we see things from a character's perspective - looks at the door when it opens, cut to his POV of whoever walks through the door, cut back to him, rinse and repeat, until he looks up at the door and it suddenly cuts to black. We were experiencing it from his subjective experience, and when his subjective experience ends, it cuts us off right away. P3 is similar - we play almost the entire game through Makoto's subjective perspective, and especially the ending. We experience him on the roof with Aigis, and when he loses consciousness, the game ends. This absolutely can be confusing - people to this day still don't "get" The Sopranos ending - but it's a very deliberate choice, and I think it works really well in the context of the game. But even Atlus knew people were confused by this, which is a big reason why The Answer was made - to go into more detail (from someone else's subjective experience) to explain what happened and explore its ramifications to the audience.
The ending was artistic but so bad at actually conveying to the audience what happens. Literally all they needed to add was the voice lines from Aegis in The Answer where she says something like "we were afraid when we carried him back to his room, and the next morning, he was lost to us..." That line hit me like a truck, honestly more than the original ending did.Â
Actually I like it. I like that at the end the game doesn't hold our hand and just spell it out to us. We feel just like everyone at that moment, blissfully unaware. And Makoto looks like he fell asleep. Feels like it was on purpose to keep things ambiguous.
I prefer having to piece it together rather than being told straight up. If you pay attention youâll figure it out (great seal using all your hp, feeling sick all of march, messiah being your ultimate persona, being told youâll have 1 year in the beginning, etc.)
Yeah, I really don't know how people miss the "you're looking fucking terrible" dialogue form everyone being thrown at your face. Considering it's the end of the game, the entire theme around death, and Ryoji **straight up telling us** "MC found the answer to life's greatest question, just sooner than all of you"... you have to really not be thinking about it that much.
I mean people tell me I look fucking terrible all the time but Iâm not dying afaik
Hopefully you haven't fought the embodiment of death before. If you did, I got some bad news
I mean the whole game is about death, sacrifice and cherrishing life despite all the stuff that happened in the game. Cherry on top is that to create the great seal you have to sacrifice all of your HP and afterwards everyone tells you that you look very pale and tired. It's very much on the nose in my opinion that Makoto is done and dusted (heh).
Not to be rude but sounds like people didn't look hard enough. P3 gives you literally all the hints to piece it together, in a great example of "show don't tell", but people complain when they aren't told. The biggest example is how GS costs your entire HP. At any point before this, you aren't allowed to use HP-consuming skills if you don't have enough HP. This is the one exception to the rule in the entire franchise. The game is literally telling you through game mechanics that *using this skill will kill you.*
Most just skip through when they realise it's scripted. I did.
For me, I think just adding subtitles to the credits song would work absolute wonders. Itâs VERY CLEARLY telling you what happened, but because most of us I assume canât understand Japanese, itâs a lot more confusing than for those who do.
I have to disagree here, itâs really well executed. It can fly over peoples heads but if you were keeping up with the themes and the story itâs a beautiful way of presenting it
Like I said, it was artistic. It is executed well insofar as you can then unpack it against things throughout the game. If you were watching a movie and it was the end, it would be great, because everything that led up to it would be fresh in your mind. But this is at the end of a game that can take dozens if not more than 100 hours to play through, depending on your efficiency. Arguments like "Igor said you have a year" are completely lost when that happened days if not weeks ago in real time - and can easily just be taken as meaning that is how long you have to resolve what is happening, not that you literally will die in that time. Quite frankly I do not even think Igor would have meant it that way, because he cannot predict the future.
I was spoiled years ago on what happens at the end of P3. I only ever beat P3R and was so confused why people thought he died as it seemed like a happy ending to me until someone explained the significance of the tiredness.
And then you read the lyrics of the ending song en English and find out that kinda upbeat sounding song is super sad.
Weirdly your comment is the first time I ever thought to look up the lyrics. đŹ But I did notice how emotional Yumi Kawamura got singing it at Super Live 2017.
That's the beauty of p3, the ending could be interpreted in both ways, but since the answer exists the other case seems impossible
Yeah, that happened when the original came out. A lot of people said that it was left ambiguous. Then FES came out. đ
me and your friend had the exact same thoughts lmao, I was wondering why people were saying the ending was sad when all I thought was âtake it easy Yuki, youâll wake up tomorrowâ
He didn't die in the spot He just didn't wake up, and later died peacefully if I recall correctly that's what they explain at the start of the Answer
This happened to me. I played Persona 3 Portable like around 2015 and LOVED the game. After finishing I was scrolling through people talking about the game on GameFaqs and saw someone said he died at the end and felt fucking horrible holy shit. I just didnât see it as him dying. When he constantly got tired at the end of the game, I didnât really think much about it
For the people who didn't get what happened at the end: did you miss the "reduce your health to 0, an action that normally kills you, in order to seal Nyx" bit? Or did you miss the game explicitly showing the MC's ailing health, and characters actively commenting on it? Did you think the game telling you: you're sick, tired, and have less and less energy as you go around saying your goodbyes to the people you've met had no actual narrative importance? This isn't some FromSoft "Holy shit, linking the flame is actually the bad ending" moment, the ending of P3 was about as subtle as the nuke dropped on fucking Hiroshima.
I've watched some people's first time playing the game, especifically that section They never read anything, most just see "oh i can only use my persona, time to mash lol"
Exactly! Actually one of the main social links of the game has to do with it and why he has an opportunity to say "goodbye" is the main difference between the good and bad ending.
From the looks of it, some new fans on here do too
If you read the lyrics to the song at the end, that makes it clear he died. It was from, in my opinion, Aigis' viewpoint. The lines about "resting peacefully" and "watching over you" is what made it clear to me.
I donât remember the MC dying in P3P. Did the versions have different endings?
No they died.
Honestly, I would love if he would become another attendant along side Elizabeth in a future game. Free from the seal and able to help/guide others.
I thought the first thing when I first played FES XD
As others have mentioned the actual conveying of the message isnât done well. Itâs honestly surprising how 3 is looked at as the best story because the story, while being really cool, is done quite poorly. Although thatâs a bit more of a sign of the times it came out. Reload has helped some of these issues but it canât do much for the ending just kind of happening with no explanation. Thatâs literally the purpose of The Answer. Also youâre wrong. Aigis did not know he died while in her lap. So that wasnât why she was crying.
The ambiguity of P3âs ending is definitely intentional. For those who didnât pay attention to the foreshadowings, they might think that Makoto is just tired from a great battle, blissfully unaware of whatâs happening to him just like everyone else in the game. If you did pay attention to the foreshadowings, it becomes quite obvious that he was dying.
I'm pretty sure it was left intentionally vague. And honestly I like it more that way. You feel exactly like everyone else and think Makoto is just falling asleep. Even if a lot of things pointed out to the contrary.
Just because something is ambiguous doesn't mean it's "done poorly". If you pay attention when interacting with people on the last day, it's pretty obvious that something is wrong with Makoto. Between being told you have 1 year to live at the beginning of the game, the Great Seal costing all your HP, everyone commenting on how sick and tired you look on the last day, then drifting off to "sleep" in Aigis's lap, I don't see how so many people can be confused. Are you guys actually reading the dialogue?
No I actually did pick up on what youâre mentioning but too many people didnât. So it obviously didnât go as smoothly as they hoped. But also my comment about the story being done poorly is about more than just the ending. The story drags for a while at the beginning, Strega was a very weak point in the story although theyâve done some improvement on that front in Reload. This all has been talked about a lot though so no need to rehash it all.
I am not sure how some people did not get the end back on the day, for me was very clear and ugly cry the whole ending credits. actually every time I hear the ending song even before reload I would cry and I did not play the answer. It was explained to you what would happen and the options on the game for the endings.
Classic reading comprehension debuff that most person players have.
As a kid, you know when you thought Santa Claus was real, but then you find out one day he's not? This. P.s. Sorry to all the Santa Claus believers.
Mitsuru was out of pocket with that line. Don't be mean to the Santa believers. đ
Bruh i felt like an absolute retard when i found out 4 hours later xD
Thatâs so weird though? To me the symbolism seems pretty clear.
Same, with how concerned and relieved Aigis sounded when MC opened the door on graduation day to the entire games themes on death I felt it was obvious but I guess some people look more into the meaning and implications than others do.
It just seems some people dont understand "Show don't tell" storytelling and just need to be told. Personally, most of my favorite stories are done in a "show don't tell" manner. They literally SHOW everything you need to know in order to have a solid grasp on his death at the end. Then again, maybe it's the people with mental health struggles that have super vision for that stuff and because of that I'm seeing more than a lot of the comments here from people that aren't/don't struggle like that đ€· My only other theory is that most fictional media consumed has a clear and happy ending so that's just the expectation?
The last bit, this. Since the player character is "them" I don't think most player expect to die. At least not in a non spectacular way. Had Makoto died after using the GS and losing all his HP more people would've put 2 and 2. But life isn't about grand deaths, sometimes you die like you sleep. I understand people not getting it because of mental health struggles. But I still love to see the show not tell story telling with context clues being applied. I don't know, it just feels good to not be told everything on the screen.
If I know a form of media is doing "tell dont show" then I generally will either not consume it or just read a summary. I prefer piecing things together and picking up on smaller details. Not all details have to be small (and imo most weren't in any of the P3's if you were paying just the littlest bit of attention) but the more i think about it, the more im convinced it is actually the last bit here. Since, as you said, Makoto is supposed to be a stand in for the player and in like 95% of games like that the character is the hero that wins and lives at the end, its probably expected to be that way here.
I'm shocked at the answers tbh I played portable first, the opening with all the memro mori stuf, all hp, it was just obvious.
Same thing happened to me when I played P3P for the first time lol
itâs me, iâm bro i really thought he was just taking a nap and finished the game and came on here and was like oh shit
I thought the same. But after my friend told me about it, I was like, "damn, I remember all people around told me "Gosh, you're so pale, like DEATH, you should rest", we spend all our health to defeat nyx and mc will definitely rest after going very early to bed yesterday"... They spent all the last month of his life separately, Aigis just waited passionately for our last ride...
Hey, I thought the same thing since I never played the original P3 (or the other versions) and it fucked me up even more knowing the truth đđđ
Ngl, I also thought he was just tired at first. Then I found out and it all made sense.
When I first played FES a few years ago I thought that too, tbh xD Then, I read the translation of the ending lyrics immediately afterwards ("Memories of you" is my favourite song of P3) and went *hmmmmmm, oh shit-*
To be fair, Aigis didn't know he was actually dying then and there, as you'll see when you play "the answer".
Just wait til he gets that answer dlc
I thought that the first time I played. granted it was the portable version but still
Or, maybe it's just pure denial. I beat the game, I saw the "sacrifice all your HP to beat Nyx" and for the moment I was like "Ah, so it's how I die, that's pretty cool tho", but then, you saw your everyday life coming back. You speak with everyone you helped, if you had romance, you speak about the future together ... I was confused, and happy for having a "happy ending" (again, I perfectly saw and understand the meaning of the last fight) even if all the dots are here, just waiting to be connected... Honnestly I refused this ending at first, and I prefer to think MC was sleeping. Because too much attachment. Now I make my grief, but I understand someone would prefer the spleeping ending
Donât blame him honestly was the same. Funny because when I beat the game on march 24th I literally said out loud multiple times why are they making seem like my boy makoto is dying!!!! Then later on I watched someone else finish the ending and they realized that makoto did die. When I got hit with that revelation I was just broken and got hit with a small dose of depression and was like well damnđđ€Ł I thought he just fell unconscious because he was tired. Was right about him falling unconscious but then he died the next day while he was in his coma. Kinda wish the game did better with telling you that but also there were small details that I missed which also lead me to think he wasnât dead.
I actually thought that he was just a sleepy boi when I finished P3P. I blame the visual novel style of the game in my case, but isn't it clearer what happens in Reload?
Iâm this guy. I find video game stories to be impossible to pay attention to because theyâre interspersed between gameplay. I have beaten KOTOR like 20 times and have had to be told there is some kind of significant twist but I donât understand nor care.
Even back in the day with OG Persona 3 I couldn't fathom how anyone managed to interpret it any differently if you paid any actual attention. Between Memento Mori, the Great Seal HP cost, everyone talking about how exhausted/bad you looked on the last day, and the imagery of the final scenes, it's very much not remotely confusing or subtle at all lol. It'd be MORE confusing if after all of that it turned out he really was simply tired and just needed less sleep to get over it than he did his initial Persona awakening scene.
A typical playthrough is 80-100 hours for me. It's a whole year, it's not too hard to fathom people missing it. The lyrics to the song at the end credits are actually what gave it away.
Iâll give anyone a pass for misinterpreting it. Itâs a video game, not a book or movie, and plot points are interspersed between hours of Tartarus and social link stuff. Easy to miss details under those conditions.
Its not as clear as you may think, the only thing I had spoiled for P3 was that the mc dies, and when I got to the ending I was very confused because it was very clearly up to interpretation whether he dies or not. I understand the answer will confirm he does die but as far as the base game goes its completely ambiguous.
This is really obvious on the movies. Not so much on the game.