>>715312767
I played P3 last (well after P4 and P5, I played P1 and P2 after 3) and I feel like that made me appreciate it more. Playing P4 and P5 together made the fact that they share a formula and structure really apparent, like the calendar is divided up into arcs which each have their own character focused dungeon, which in itself follows the same formula where you have the start dungeon which establishes the concept (rescuing victims/changing hearts of bad guys), two more dungeons which continue the concept, one dungeon which inverts it (pursuing a murderer/changing the heart of a good person), one dungeon which goes back to the initial concept, the next dungeon ramps up the stakes and adds some vocal music, the dungeon after that finally deals with the main human villain and then the god behind it all is revealed and there's one more dungeon to fight them. Like if you look past the graphics and qol differences then P4 and P5 are very similar games, so when I was going into P3 I kind of expected more of the same but the way the story and calendar intersect are quite different.
Rather than having distinct and divided character arcs where you meet a character, they have their awakening moment and then they stay pretty static for the rest of the game they instead have the characters join in an undeveloped state but we see their character arcs span over months so we can see them grow. It's not to everyone's preference but I preferred it to how P4/5 handle characters, and maybe it's because I played it after I was kind of tired of P4/5's way of doing things.
