Quote Originally Posted by Mirage View Post

I didn't think I would ever see someone defending "talk to character to change gear", but here we are. Developers can use AI to make me feel like the characters are real people when I can talk to these "real persons" and plan an elaborate strategy with them. Until then, screw that tit.
I felt it was a neat idea, and as I pointed out, you could still manually go in a set it up as you want, so as far as I'm concerned, no harm, no foul. As for planning strategies with the A.I. you do basically do that since they often are reacting to your decisions, whether it's shouting out commands, or reacting to enemy scans, or even reacting to your last action. So while they don't out right plan with you, I feel the A.I. reacts pretty well to your decisions, and paying attention to your characters actions will allow you to easily predict how the A.I. will react, it really becomes a game of building strategy around manipulation. It's a far cry better than the A.I. of FFXIII.

If the AI was so good, why did they change it to manual control in Portable and P4?
Mostly because people like you bitched and moaned that they wanted to play as everyone despite how limited you're supporting party is. Luckily for these people, the Persona team listens to their fans, but I would like to point out that the A.I. is still in both P4 (It's the default setting actually) and in P3P, so it's not like they abandoned the system either. They just made it accessible for the A.I.-phobic fans.

As for best AI, I don't think it's really on the level of the AI used in Tales of Symphonia (using that game because that's the most recent tales of game I have played), and the battles in that game requires more complex control than P3 as well. That's a game where I could actually rely fully on an AI healer during a boss battle, and it would only very rarely perform actions that were less optimal than what I would have done myself.
I can't really say much on this because I've never played Tales of Symphonia, the Tales franchise has never really impressed me and I found the earlier installments were way too easy. Though it sounds to me like the A.I. falls into "takes care of itself" territory which is what I don't really care for in thew A.I. companion debate. To clarify, I feel the A.I. in P3 is the best because I never felt it hindered me, nor did I feel like I could just hit X and go make a sandwich because the A.I. would do all the rest. So for me, it hits that sweet-spot of being just useful enough to be reliable but not something that undermines my own usefulness in battle. This is mostly due to the Pokemon style design of your party members, so for me, it's a well designed game and they handled the A.I. rather well imho.
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Between P3 and FFIX, I would say get both, but if you had to choose one, I would actually say P3.