Junpei vs. Yosukie vs. Ryuji

[Skyblade]

He does buy the girls swimsuits and guilts them into wearing them.
He also signs them up for a swimsuit pageant w/o their consent.
He's the one who suggests that they charge the girl's room as some sort of "retribution" for the bathhouse schedule mishap.
He asks Teddie for the girl's measurements, again, w/o their consent.

Like, Yosuke might not be a straight-up women hater, but he makes it clear that he doesn't seem to respect them. From what a friend told me, Junpei stops flirting with the FeMC and acts more as a bro than he ever did to the MC. Again, that's word-of-mouth, still haven't played P3 all the way.

This is mostly because he (along with the rest of the male SEES members) actually gets a Social Link in Minako's route, and so he does get to be a far better friend than he ever was with Minato.

[Scotty_ffgamer]

It’s not just the guys of P3, but I feel the girls who you do have social links with have noticeable development throughout the main story as well. If nothing else, I’d like to see more of that in the series. Either way, it’s something that I wish was better integrated into the games, having social links impact character interactions outside of them. It’s weird ending up in romantic relationships and having no one acknowledge it or anything.

You have different dynamics in the games though, and there is nothing wrong with preferring the friendships of P4. They are the group of friends where everyone just clicks and everyone has good times. P3 are a group born of necessity. They need everyone with personas to combat the shadows and figure out the dark hour. They grow into friendship through shared hard times and by living and working together. I feel like it’s like school or work where you aren’t going to mesh with everyone likely, but being stuck together for long periods of time can have you gain an understanding of each other and grow past your issues with each other.

I’m at the hospital at the moment so I’m going to have to end my thoughts. Hopefully they made sense as I can’t look back over them at the moment.

[Formalhaut]

I know this is technically not the purvue of this thread but I also do not understand the dislike of Yukari either. Actually, thinking about the party members in 3 and 4, there's not a single one I actively dislike. Hell, I even found Ken enjoyable.

I don't know if this was deliberate, but I feel either Junpei or Yukari could fulfill the role of 'best buddies', in much the same way that I feel Yosuke/Chie do also. I know Junpei/Yosuke are the obvious 'best bros' but I'd find it refreshing if this official/unofficial role title was given to a woman. It doesn't really matter, because I connected with Yukari more than Junpei in my first playthrough of the game with the FeMC, but who knows.

[Pumpkin]

Ryuji feels the most brolatable to me. I thought I would hate him at first but he quickly grew on me. Even the fact that he kept some of his bad habits throughout (please stop shouting about the Phantom Thieves in public) just made him more relatable. Not everyone wraps up their character flaws in a neat little character building arc. He imporves in some ways and in others he's still a moron.

Also I don't know why this sticks out to me but there's a scene when Ryuji, MC, and Ann are all at the gym or something and Ann makes a comment about how desirable she is towards Ryuji or whatever and he just goes "No" because at that point they're just friends, you know, and it was one of the most natural conversations and reactions I'd seen in the game so I really like that scene.

[Forsaken Lover]

@ Fynn

Nobody ever said the P4 cast were flawless. Yosuke's treatment of Kanji is indefensible. Rise's constant flirtation was most unwelcome. It's just that they also do good most of the time. You can overlook occasional flaws in favor of the positives.

It's ironic that Kanji gets the most universal love of the P4 crew on forums like this when he is precisely the least flawed person in the group. He has the shallowest pretense of a thug imaginable and is all around nice to absolutely everyone. Yet no one is complaining about him.

But Yukari and Junpei, if we had some sort of BioWare Freind-o-meter, start at zero and go into the negatives pretty quickly. As I said, Mitsuru was my favorite from the word Go and Yukari's constant tapdancing around just calling Mitsuru an evil, manipulating bitch sank our friendship before it even had a chance. Mitsuru has problems, too. She's not perfect. Does she ever take it out on you or the others? Nope.

[Pumpkin]

that feels when everyone is arguing how likable Yukari, Mitsuru, Junpei, and Yosuke are and you don't particularly like any of them

[Scotty_ffgamer]

I do like Ryuji quite a bit too. Junpei is the more interesting character to me in how he develops throughout the story, but I could see myself enjoying hanging out with Ryuji more in real life.

I think it’s interesting that despite similar themes and set ups in these games how different the character dynamics end up being.

I feel like P3 has more of a work-type relationship that just develops into stronger bonds due to the shares crazy experiences. The P4 group all already feel like good friends even if the personas and murder mystery weren’t apart of it. They are just a group that clicks and want to be together for fun, not from necessity. The P5 group feels kind of similar to P4, except you are an outcast instead of this popular guy. Being an outcast, you attract other outcasts, and everyone clicks in a similar way to P4 cast. I feel like that’s similar to real life too.

I like P4 quite a bit, and I enjoy the cast. I just think the other two games had a more interesting dynamic. I find Junpei and the rest of the P3 crew more interesting from a story telling perspective because I like those kind of character arcs in my fiction a lot of the time. I find the P5 crew super relatable though as that has probably been more my experience in developing friendships over the years as i would tend to feel more like an outsider. That’s not to say I thought all my problems were because of corrupt adults (although, I feel like that’s relatively relatable for teenagers who are the target audience of these games I’d think).

[Wolf Kanno]

Way too much stuff to respond to individually so I'll just make a few general opinions.

I can also get behind the idea that Yuakri gets too much hate from the fandom, she is kind of tied with Mitsuru as my favorite of the P3 girls, of anything, I think Aigis gets too much love. She's just a very complex character, and it's actually fun and rewarding to chip away her emotional armor and see the real her. One of the most heartbreaking moments for me in P3 was when you get far enough into her social link to date her, and in addition to being one of the most intimate and affectionate romance options, you get this scene (it might be the Christmas date) where she wants to see her mother and introduce you to her, and that scene is heartbreaking when you realize the game's ending. In fact, I've always been a bit thrown off by some of the romance options in the series because Yukari's is the only one where you seem to actually try to plan out a future, with which for me, is a big part of a relationship. Still, I kind of feel like more than anyone in the series, her relationship with the MC felt the most like a real relationship where you're trying to discover boundaries and work towards that intimacy. She's a very complex person and getting to know her is one of the more rewarding aspects of her story arc and SL.

While I do like the story that Junes brings to P4, it feels more like commentary on the nature of a large business coming to a town and basically consuming it's entire economy. My GF is from a small town and the one next over has a Wal-Mart and little else because of it. So it was a pretty cool element of Yosuke's story, though one that winds up being beyond the scope of the main story.

As for Inaba being more likable... I'm going to disagree once again. Another factor of why I don't care for the party having Social Links is because they make the setting feel smaller. It wasn't such a bad concept in P4 because the setting was meant to be a remote place, but when P3 copied it for the FeMC, I couldn't help but feel like the city was such a smaller place because the FeMC never expanded the world beyond the party. One of the factors I liked about the SL in P3 was that they made the setting of the city feel like a bigger place and made it more important to me that I wanted to protect it. Not just because the party lived there, but also several friends I had made across town, which is something I didn't really feel like I got in P4. I feel it's a better world-building tool to move the scope of your caring potential beyond just the people closes to you.

Being the cynical ass that I am, I can't rely on first impressions of people to judge whether I like them or not because I would have very few friends if that were the case. Oddly I'm more leery of people who are overly friendly with me than standoffish ones surprisingly enough, because I can at least understand where those types might be coming from. This may largely play into why I prefer P3's cast over P4s because the party dynamics work better with my relationship philosophy whereas the overly idealistic nature of the P4 cast never felt right to me. In some ways I almost feel like P4's cast is a result of fan feedback whining about the P3 cast being too moody and hostile towards each other, and then P5's party was based on fan feedback that the P4 cast was way too friendly. Personally I feel P5 hit a nice balance of the group being pretty cozy with each other but still maintaining a sense of professionalism due to only banding together because of a common goal. Granted, there are still some hiccups here and there with them but that's what P6 will be for.

As harsh as I may be sounding with P4, it's not like I hate it or anything. Comparing the Persona game casts for me is like comparing desserts: P3 is a strawberry shortcake, P5 is apple pie with ice cream, and P4 are chocolate chip cookies with macadamia nuts. I like all three, especially when compared to other choices, but when put in order of fave to least, cookies are not my top choice compared to the other two and the Pumpkin Pie that is P2. At worst, I simply feel indifferent to P4 in some ways. I don't hate Yosuke, but he wasn't even my favorite character in P4, whereas Junpei is. Ryuji himself is also towards the bottom of the P5 cast for me, but I also found him to be more memorable even if some of his memorable traits are not exactly flattering, and that's something that's required for a character to be likable for me. Yosuke simply never stood out to me and it didn't take long for me to relegate him to 'token best friend" and simply ignored him while I focused on the characters I did find interesting. I mean Kanji stands out because his story is interesting. Again, I would point out that Yosuke's SL was very forgettable for me largely cause it didn't have any real memorable arc to it. It felt more like hanging out with a needy friend than actually a story. This is why Kanji is more well liked, because his story was actually memorable and his SL had a clear focus that built to a pretty satisfying conclusion. To be fair to Yosuke, he's not the only character I felt had a weak SL, I feel Chie's was also very underwhelming as well as Fuuka, and Ann's took forever to actually get interesting. The one thing I liked about P5's SLs was that all of them had an actual focus to them.