Persona 3 Reload Review: Style, Substance, and Synergy
Persona 3 Reload represents conflicting values of a remake. On one hand, P3R brings the excellent quality-of-life enhancements introduced by Persona 5 and other modern Atlus titles. However, P3R, as fun and polished as it is, never feels essential to experience in favor of the original PlayStation 2 title. Persona 3 Reload is a delight, but it lacks some of the bite that made the original Persona 3 stand out so much 18 years earlier. // Image: Atlus, SEGA
Persona 3 is an exceptionally meaningful game for me in many ways. When I first encountered the game in the early 2010s, I was a completely different person. Still in high school, I was just discovering my personal taste in games. Being a youngest sibling, my first decade or so of playing video games was drastically informed by what my older siblings liked to play. While I enjoyed the privilege of being exposed to classics like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Final Fantasy X, and Sonic Adventure 2 at a young age, there was always a part of me that lamented my inability to discover what games I liked on my own.
As we get older and gradually gain more freedom and independence, in us grows a drive to develop our own taste in media. Our adolescence serves as a pivotal setting for us to curate our own preferences and aspects that we value in our media diet. What genres and subgenres do I prefer? Do I want to look up trailers and reviews for a game or do I just want to go in with no expectations? These are the types of fundamental questions I found myself asking when trying to develop my own unique taste in games I enjoyed playing. By the early 2010s, I had a firmly-rooted love for JRPGs - Japanese Role Playing Games. Having grown up with various Final Fantasy and Pokémon titles, I knew that I wanted to experience more of what the genre had to offer. Given that JRPGs tend to have exceptionally long runtimes, I had my work cut out for me. Games like Arc Rise Fantasia and Xenoblade Chronicles played groundbreaking roles in teaching me what I liked about games - they got me more interested in understanding game design, narrative structure, writing, music, and how these and other elements mix together to create a cohesive role. I wanted to learn more about games - after all, I was a teenager with no responsibilities and a lofty, vague dream of being a game developer one day. Now was as good a time as any to play more games and further refine my own taste in games.
This is the state of mind I was in when Persona 3 FES entered my life. After being convinced to buy the game after watching the first few hours of the game in a Let’s Play on YouTube - a groundbreaking new way for people to discover games as the platform picked up momentum in the late 2000s and early 2010s - I began playing through Persona 3 FES and was enamored by the game’s dark tone, hard-as-nails (and sometimes blatantly unfair) combat encounters, and an addicting structure that balances dungeon crawling and navigating a day-to-day school life with social simulation elements. A re-release of the original game with added content, Persona 3 FES was far from the best-looking game on its platform. Character models have a weird doll-like look to them and doing Persona fusions requires re-inputting fusion combinations until you get the exact combination of carry-over skills on your fusion result (a process that can and often does take many minutes to do, which adds up a lot of playtime and tedium). But Persona 3 FES’ oddities and imperfections only end up highlighting the game’s impressive ambition, style, and immersion. Put simply, I had never played anything like Persona 3 FES before and was grateful that I had found a new franchise of games to fall in love with.
Persona 3 FES was my introduction to Atlus’ broader Shin Megami Tensei franchise - an umbrella franchise that includes various spin-off series including Persona, Devil Summoner, Devil Survivor, and more. After being introduced to Atlus’ particular flavor of crafting RPGs, I perused many of their other titles, and become equally enamored with much of their portfolio of games. Once I played the likes of Persona 4, Shin Megami Tensei IV, Etrian Odyssey Untold: The Millennium Girl, and Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne, I convincingly became a diehard Atlus fan. From high school to college to working full-time, Atlus RPGs have been a staple in my video game diet and will likely continue to be for years to come.
Fast forward to earlier this year, and everything comes full circle - Persona 3 returned in February of 2024 with Persona 3 Reload, a from-the-ground-up remake of the 2006 PlayStation 2 title, now available on PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, and PC via Steam. The mission of this remake was to bring Persona 3 up to parity with 2016’s quality-of-life feature-rich Persona 5 - the most recent numbered Persona title that exploded the series’ popularity unto new heights. Persona 3 Reload brings with it a unique mission: to justify its existence amid other releases of Persona 3. The PlayStation 2 saw the release of the original Persona 3 and its FES expansion that included some additions to the game including a new Social Link, expanding the protagonists’ repertoire of weapons, and additional features, with a major inclusion being “The Answer” - a 20-30 hour expansion that serves as an epilogue to the main game’s story. While FES was eventually made available as a downloadable title on PlayStation 3, these two versions have not been made available on other hardware. Persona 3 Portable, a PlayStation Portable version of Persona 3, removed 3D environments aside from dungeons, but also added the ability to directly control party members and the ability to play as a female protagonist - an addition that significantly expanded the game’s social simulation portion. This version of the game eventually became available on modern hardware in 2023. With a legacy version of the game available on modern hardware (albeit one that’s seldom considered the best version to play), Persona 3 Reload needed to justify its existence by finally granting Persona 3 with what it never had: a definitive version of the game that includes all the content included in previous versions of the game. Could P3R pull this off?
No.
Almost immediately after its announcement in June of 2023, Atlus confirmed that Persona 3 Reload would not feature the added content in the FES and Portable versions of Persona 3, instead deciding to build as strong of a version of the base of Persona 3 as possible. While this disappointed many fans of previous versions of Persona 3, this news didn’t mean that Reload would be without value. Even if it didn’t include all content from all previous versions, Atlus could still provide modern audiences with an experience on par with their more recent releases. After all, the Atlus of the mid-2000s and the Atlus of today are two very different companies. Since Persona 3’s original 2006 release, Atlus has been acquired by SEGA and thus have a lot more budget made available for their games. They’ve released multiple games that have improved quality-of-life features, making for better RPGs with far less frustration than the “SMT Moment”-riddled games from decades before. They’ve released Shin Megami Tensei V - the first Atlus-developed title built in Unreal Engine, thus bringing an unprecedented level of visual polish to Atlus’ games. All this is to say that Atlus has grown a lot as a developer between 2006 and 2024 - to toss aside the value of P3R as a remake because of the lack of content in previous versions of the game is short-sighted at best and a bad-faith excuse to hate on the game before it’s even released at worst.
As soon as it was announced (and even before, given that the project had leaked multiple times before Atlus officially revealed the game), Persona 3 Reload became one of my most anticipated titles of 2024. Thanks to a stacked February full of great releases (thanks, Granblue Fantasy: Relink and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth), I was unable to make my 75 hour journey through Persona 3 Reload until earlier this Autumn. I wanted to see with my own eyes if this remake lived up to the exceptional experience that FES gave to me over a decade ago. Having now completed the game and its DLC, I am confident that, while Atlus has certainly delivered a strong JRPG that’s worth playing for any fan RPGs (especially those that haven’t experienced Persona 3’s story before), there’s a je ne sais quoi factor that’s been ripped out of the game. What’s left is a game that’s exceptional to play, a DLC that runs out of steam quite quickly, and an overall experience that, as enjoyable as it is, sacrifices some of Persona 3’s distinct identity in order to cater to incoming fans migrating from Persona 5.
For a broader examination, let’s look at Persona 3 Reload, what it does right, where it stumbles, and how it stands as a remake of one of the most foundational gaming experiences of my adolescence.
Persona 3 Reload offers an exceptionally clean aesthetic, with slick-looking character models and stylish, industry-leading UI. The game recaptures the addictive spirit of the original - managing your social life during the day and navigating dungeons at night. // Image: Atlus, SEGA
For those unfamiliar with the Persona franchise, Reload is the latest entry in Atlus’ long-running franchise that’s a spin-off of the larger Shin Megami Tensei series of RPGs. While its parent series focuses more on collecting monsters and crawling through dungeons in a post-apocalyptic setting, Persona opts to combine RPG combat and dungeon exploration with a social simulation element. By day, your decisions include which friend you’ll hang out with for the day, whether you’ll get to know them a bit better, or whether you’ll work a part-time job or kill time doing something else that improves your social stats of Academics, Charm, and Courage. By night, your decisions include whether you’ll study, spend time bonding with your teammates, or go to Tartarus, the game’s primary dungeon that includes hundreds of randomly-generated floors to climb while battling Shadows, leveling up, and fusing Personas to steadily become more powerful and versatile in combat.
When Persona 3 originally launched in 2006, this marriage of game genres was as innovative as it was addicting. While the first two Persona entries take place in a high school setting, which in itself is different from the typical high-fantasy and science-fiction backgrounds typical of role-playing games of the PlayStation 1 era, they were ultimately no different from most dungeon-heavy RPGs on the market at the time in terms of structure. Like most other JRPGs, you watch cutscenes, talk to NPCs, buy supplies, then explore dungeons, fight enemies, fight a boss fight, and repeat the cycle as the story moves forward. Upon release, Persona 3 played an integral in giving the Persona series the identity it sees today. Make no mistake - Persona 3 is still very much a JRPG where you’ll spend the bulk of your time engaging in turn-based combat against countless enemies, but Persona 3 became something special for so many people because of its inclusion of social simulation elements that complement the JRPG portion of the game. These two elements synergize with each other so naturally and so consistently throughout the entire experience that it cemented the direction of the Persona series from this point on.
Social Links are the tie that binds the social sim and RPG halves of Persona 3 together into one cohesive whole. There are over 20 Social Links in the game, all of which serve a narrative and mechanical function. Narratively, these are smaller-scale stories where you get to befriend a classmate, acquaintance, party member, or mentor. Each time you progress a Social Link, you get to know more about that person and gradually become closer - mirroring how actual relationships can be nurtured and strengthened over time. By the end of a Social Link, you’ll see the character you’ve become close to grow over a particular struggle of theirs. Maybe that struggle is a complicated relationship with their parents, or wanting to keep a promise at the expense of their own health, or confronting the final days of a terminal illness and trying to find meaning in their final few days. Social Links consistently offer a satisfying collection of stories that all feel emotionally grounded and meaningful, while serving as a nice complement to the game’ s main narrative. Some Social Links are darker than others, and some Social Links are unfortunately kind of duds (the Moon and Devil Arcana Social Links are particularly the weakest of the bunch), but overall, Social Links serve as a compelling way to stay narratively engaged with Persona 3 during breaks in the main story where the player is encouraged to prioritize Social Links and dungeon exploration.
Mechanically, Social Links serve two functions. Firstly, they contextualize the existence of the social stats. At the beginning of the game, the protagonist is a plain, underachieving loser - your job as the player is to fix that over time. As you study more, drink coffee to become more charming (?), and grow more courageous after singing your heart out at a karaoke bar, you grow your stats. Once meeting certain thresholds, these social stats allow you to access more Social Links. While later Persona games also use social stats to determine other things, such as whether you can select certain dialogue choices, has mostly gone unused in Reload. This is modestly disappointing, but by no means makes the social sim a worse experience.
Secondly, Social Links serve the mechanical function of providing bonus experience points during fusion - a staple of any Megaten game, spin-off or not. Each Social Link has an associated Arcana with it. The many Personas that the protagonist can summon throughout the game are categorized by these same Arcana. When fusing two Personas together into one of a certain Arcana, the progress of your Social Link with that associated Arcana informs the amount of additional experience that is applied when creating that Persona - allowing you to make more powerful Personas that have more abilities available to them right off the bat. Unlike other Megaten games, Personas acquire experience quite slowly - making these Social Link accruals the most efficient way in quickly gaining levels for fused Personas. Not only are Social Links a fun gameplay mechanic to engage with just for the sake of seeing what stories they’ll tell, but the gameplay rewards for making progress in Social Links are substantial - making the Social Link mechanic an overall satisfying one on both a story and gameplay level.
This is one of Persona 3’s claims to fame and something that all Persona games adopt moving forward. Persona 3 Reload didn’t need to touch this mechanic much, if at all in order to preserve the inherent addictive and satisfying nature of the mechanic. Atlus deeply understood this, as the Social Links are mostly the same in the transition over to Reload. That said, there are a few key additions in Reload that actually help make the 2024 remake the definitive presentation of these smaller stories. The mechanical advantage that Social Links give to the player still function the same way, and the stories are preserved to be almost exactly the same, save for a few minor dialogue tweaks. How Persona 3 Reload improves upon the presentation of this mechanic is the simple but effective implementation of voice acting. The original Persona 3 did not feature voice acting for any of the Social Link stories. It would be until Persona 5 when Social Links (or Confidantes as they’re referred as in that game) featured character voices - and even then, they only contained voice acting for the first and final portions of the protagonist’s relationship with the game’s various characters. Reload offers a series-first - having all Social Links feature full voice acting throughout their entirety. This change makes a monumental difference in giving more life to each of the character’s we spend so much time with.
As is the standard for Atlus titles, the English and Japanese voice acting is phenomenally directed and performed. This easily extends to the Social Link cast. Yuko, the Strength Arcana Social Link, stands out as being the most improved Social Link in Reload purely for how strong Yuko’s English VA does at giving this character a more playful spirit. As stated earlier, the dialogue for Social Links is mostly unchanged from the PS2 original - as such, the actual content of Yuko’s Social Link is mostly the same. However, just getting to hear Yuko and her awkward but endearing and quick-witted nature spoken out loud makes the character much more enjoyable to spend time with. With the original’s text-only Social Link, I had a far harder time connecting with Yuko as a character. Her charm flew over my head a lot thanks to the lack of a voice performance, making Yuko a somewhat plain character in the original. The inclusion of voice acting for these segments in Reload improved my opinion of most Social Links in the game, including Yuko’s. If anything, Reload’s implementation of voice acting for more minor story moments is a testament to how much voice acting, particularly when paired with intentional, strong voice direction, can make a difference in making characters more likeable and well-rounded.
The only additional change to Social Links is an admittedly perceived one. Throughout the game’s many Social Links, you will get an opportunity to role-play and give certain responses to characters. How you respond to them gives you more points toward the Social Link, which are taken into account to determine if you level up your Social Link when you spend time again with that character. The point totals required for advancing Social Links appear to be reduced compared to the original - this makes maxing out every Social Link in the game an easier affair than it was in the original. I ended up appreciating this change. The stress of trying to optimize your daily schedule so that you can complete every Social Link in the game is part of the fun for modern Persona titles - the original Persona 3 made achieving social perfection a bit too tight for my liking. Reload loosens the Social Link system to give a bit more breathing room for players that don’t select absolutely every option that gives them the most points to proceed through Social Links as fast as possible.
Persona 3’s cast of characters stands as one of my favorites in all of JRPGs. Reload authentically recaptures the spirit of these characters with new voice actors that give a unique personality and flair to each of these characters. In conjunction with newly added scenes that give more depth to each of main cast, Persona 3 Reload does justice to its beloved characters and gives players more to learn about them. // Image: Atlus, SEGA
On the topic of voice acting, one of Reload’s biggest changes is that of how its main cast is presented. Up until Reload, Persona 3’s cast has been depicted by the same English voice cast since 2006 - including in the 2018 spinoff Persona 3: Dancing in Moonlight. Reload gives a brand-new voice direction for the cast, and it continues the series’ tradition of offering incredibly strong voice performances. Some characters speak differently, with Yukari and Fuuka sounding the most different from their 2006 counterparts, but all the new voice actors help breath new life into these characters.
Zeno Robinson as Junpei and Dawn M. Bennett as Aigis are the particular standouts of the voice cast this time around, but it can’t be understated how well each of the voice actors of the main cast bounce off of each other. An additional touch that I ended up appreciating as a fan of the original is the fact that almost all of the original game’s English voice actors cameo as minor characters throughout the game. This marries fan-service and honoring the legacy of the original game. I ended up having a lot of fun recognizing each of the game’s original voice actors and how they appeared. It’s perhaps an unnecessary detail, but choosing to include this as an Easter egg for older fans to notice is an attention-to-detail that I appreciate Atlus taking the time to put in.
As mentioned previously, Persona 3 Reload injects new scenes that give more opportunities to spend time with the game’s party members. Like with Social Links with party members in Persona 4 and 5, engaging with party members during free time at night can give them abilities that make them more proficient in combat. This allows Persona 3 Reload to give more depth to its characters in ways that the original couldn’t while also giving more opportunities to develop and strengthen the combat effectiveness of your party members - something that the original Persona 3 didn’t do much of. The result is a bevy of scenes, some ranging from cute interactions like watching a TV show about wolves with Koromaru, the canine party member that joins SEES’ cause about halfway through the story, to serious scenes that help add more emotional stakes to the conflict in the main story, such as the scenes where the protagonists gets to speak with Takaya, one of the main antagonists of the game. Indeed, Strega, the group of villains that the party fights throughout the latter half of the game, were a weak aspect of the original Persona 3. The three characters that make up Strega received mostly uneven character development that prevented them from being rivals that you could empathize with or love to hate. Reload resolves this through adding small but much-appreciated scenes that help give far more depth to the overall narrative. Getting more opportunities to cook, watch movies, and read books with your party members also does an effective job at deepening the player’s bond with characters, as each of these scenes helps teach players a bit more about characters’ personalities in ways not entirely established by the main story. It’s not nearly on the same level as, say, the Confidantes with Ryuji, Ann, Makoto, and the rest of the Phantom Thieves in Persona 5, but the development with Persona 3’s cast in these optional scenes help make these characters have more believably intimate relationships with one another.
Like with Social Links, much of the game’s writing for scenes in the original game has been preserved. There are a few instances of scenes having different dialogue and some different shot compositions, but for the most part, very little story content has been changed. Reload takes an approach that only seeks to add more context and weight to Persona 3’s story - it takes very little away, and when it does, it’s perfectly understandable. The original PS2 release has a beach scene that features an infamously transphobic exchange with an NPC that has been changed in Reload to be an interaction with a conspiracy theorist. Additionally, some scenes that were anime cutscenes in the original have been changed into in-game cutscenes and vice versa. Overall, though, that’s about as drastic as Reload goes in terms of removing and altering story content.
Reload’s decidedly tactful approach to only adding content on top of Persona 3’s original story is a well-founded one. Persona 3 has always found strength in the strong quality and theming of its story. Centered around a theme of prevailing through loss and becoming stronger through surviving tragedies, Persona 3 has always done a fantastic job in tackling heavy subject matter. This, in conjunction with balancing a high-stakes story with lighter, smaller-scale moments makes Persona 3 amass many memorable moments throughout its runtime. That said, one of the original Persona 3’s greatest weaknesses is that of its uneven pacing.
As its story progress, Persona 3 Reload makes it evident that major boss fights and/or setpieces happen every full moon throughout the game’s calendar - meaning that a major event that progresses the story happens once an in-game month. The time between full moons is reserved by some cutscenes, the occasional multi-day event such as characters going on a vacation, and facilitating the main gameplay - that of managing your schedule and deciding when you’ll invest in your Social Links and when you will explore the labyrinth, Tartarus. This structure gives the original Persona 3 a very stop-and-go pacing to it - there will be instances where a lot of story will happening over a few in-game days (or even a single one), followed by no story progression happening for in-game weeks. Especially compared to the pacing seen in 4 and 5, Persona 3’s pacing is sporadic by design thanks to the needs of its story. This is something that is partially remedied by Reload’s additional cutscenes and events.
To say that Reload resolves all of Persona 3’s pacing woes would be an overstatement, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention how the overall flow of the story felt snappier than in the original PS2 game. This goes hand-in-hand with the fact that fast travel (a feature first introduced to the series with Persona 4) allows you to quickly navigate across the game’s multiple areas, making the instances between cutscenes, stopping by stores, and initiating Social Link events much quicker by comparison. Pair this with the quicker loading courtesy of more powerful hardware, and everything in Persona 3 Reload generally just moves at a quicker pace. This gives Persona 3 Reload a lot more momentum in both its gameplay and narrative pacing than in the PS2 original.
Persona 3 Reload adds the “Shift” mechanic - essentially adopting Persona 5’s “Baton Pass” system, allowing characters to pass turns between one another, providing some buffs along the way. This and many other quality-of-life improvements from later games makes Persona 3 Reload more comfortable to play, but perhaps makes the game lose some of the original’s difficult edge. // Image: Atlus, SEGA
Beyond being an overall faster game in both a gameplay and narrative sense, Persona 3 Reload brings with it the obvious visual overhaul that an 18-year gap will naturally bring. Persona 3 Reload’s visual presentation is effectively on par with Persona 5 Royal. Characters are now more realistically proportioned and feel more representative of their 2D portraits, rather than the PS2-era Persona games that left us with doll-like character models. Environments are still a bit on the basic side, but the lighting made possible by Unreal Engine (something that Atlus is still relatively new to using) helps make what is here pop quite nicely.
Atlus’ titles have never been the most visually striking games on the market in terms of raw fidelity, but they compensate for this by creating games with immense visual flairs that make their games incredibly entertaining just to look at. Case in point, user interface continues to be Atlus’ specialty. Whether it’s through the way commands are highlighted when selecting a Persona skill to use during combat, the animation that plays when you increase the level of one of your social stats, or the stylish splash screens that appear whenever you finish a battle with an All-Out Attack, Reload’s brilliant interface is a bold reminder that no one in the industry is doing UI on a level even close to Atlus. While the original Persona 3’s UI and style hold up very well, Reload’s visual flourishes do a remarkable job at showing just how far Atlus have come in making games with strong visual identities in the 18 years between Persona 3 and its remake.
Another vital aspect of Persona 3’s visual identity is that of its art. As is seen in many other JRPGs, a lot of emphasis is placed on character portraits in order to portray a wider range of emotions than what can be expressed on a character model. Most games that choose to do this likely do so out of budgetary restraints, but there is an ostensible charm that comes from seeing character portraits so prominently portrayed to represent character emotions during dialogue. Funnily enough, using character portraits can actually make character emotions feel far more animated and understandable than animating the faces of the character models.
Persona 3’s original art style for its portraits, anime cutscenes, and Persona artwork has a clean simplicity to it that has aged quite gracefully. A limitation of the original’s portraits, however, was that each character only had a few poses that could be used throughout the entire game, making their emotional expression a bit repetitive and limited at points. Aside from having eyes blink, Persona 3’s character portraits were also static, which, while not uncommon among games especially during the mid-2000s, create a visual rigidity over time. Reload remakes the visual portraits of all characters with decidedly more detail and a wider array of emotions and poses. Given that you’ll be looking at these portraits during the game’s many Social Links, events, and cutscenes throughout the entire game, the way these portraits look matter quite a bit, and thankfully, they consistently look really good and animate just enough to make these portraits pop without ever looking uncanny.
Possibly one of Persona 3’s most iconic traits is its soundtrack, featuring music from Shoji Meguro that combines jazz, hip-hop, and J-pop in a way that sounds unlike anything else, both in and out of the Persona series. Reload opts to re-record the entire soundtrack with new arrangements and throwing in some new tracks as well. The result is a bit of a mixed bag. While none of the new music is bad by any means, some tracks have oddities that make songs sound worse than their original counterparts. The song that plays in the Iwatodai Dorm - a location that effectively serves as your party’s home base throughout the game - is one of the most striking examples of the different sounds of the original’s soundtrack and Reload’s soundtrack. The original song features trumpets that have a rounder sound, but vocals that are harder to understand. It gives a somewhat grimy but genuine nature to the song. Reload’s version of this song replaces the bizarre vocals with a rap from Lotus Juice, but features trumpets that have a more synthesized, cleaner sound that, by my ear, sound worse than the original song. Mass Destruction, the game’s battle theme, shares a similar fate - the trumpets featured in the original version sound less produced than the Reload version, making the overall sound more cohesive in the original. That said, the Reload version of Mass Destruction adds a second rap verse that prevents longer battles from sounding repetitive.
On the other end of the spectrum, Reload does a great job at making some songs sound punchier than the original. In the original Persona 3’s soundtrack, Unavoidable Battle is a grungy, guitar-focused song typical of Shoji Meguro’s typical style featured in SMT titles, but the Reload variant of this song has a far rounder sound to the guitars and overall mixing, making a song that feels far heavier and more powerful, befitting of a song used for certain boss battles. There aren’t too many songs that are brand new to Reload, but the few that are serve as fantastic complements to the game’s soundtrack and fit right in with the rest of the songs remade from the original. Color Your Night stands out as an incredible theme that plays while exploring the city at night and serves as a great, chill complement to When the Moon’s Reach Out Stars, the more upbeat, faster-paced theme that plays while exploring during the day.
All this is to say that Reload’s soundtrack stands alongside the original’s soundtrack with an overall similar level of quality. Some songs sound worse, others sound better, but the inclusion of brand new bangers help equalize the overall sound of this remake.
Persona 3 Reload brings combat up to standard with Atlus’ more modern titles like Persona 5 and Metaphor: ReFantazio. Allies are now playable and the snappier UI helps make switching Personas and selecting abilities much quicker. Quicker battles that feature more player control come at the cost of an overall easier difficulty, though. // Image: Atlus, SEGA
Persona 3 Reload retells the original’s story to a success. Thanks to the expansion of some characters and the willingness to give the antagonistic force more screentime throughout the game, Reload presents the story of Persona 3 in a way that I feel honors the original and preserves it well for new and returning audiences alike. The uneven pacing from the original game still exists thanks to the stop-and-go nature of the story’s progression being tied to the passage of in-game months, but consistent new scenes and some new activities to do make it hard to ever feel bored in Persona 3 Reload. As satisfying as it is to engage in Social Links and as entertaining as it is to see the characters overcome the many conflicts featured throughout the main story, the glue that makes all of these different aspects of Persona 3 Reload work as well as it does is the game’s combat and dungeon exploration.
As I mentioned at the top, Persona 3 FES was my introduction to the universe of Shin Megami Tensei. While I had cut my teeth with other turn-based RPGs over time, SMT and Persona deliver a unique-flavor to turn-based combat that’s unlike all other turn-based RPGs on the market. Even Pokémon, a series that Shin Megami Tensei is often compared to due to both series’ monster-collecting mechanics and use of exploiting enemy weaknesses, fails to have the tact and tension that defines many SMT titles, Persona 3 included. Most notably, what made Persona 3 FES such a joy to play through for me was the fact that the game encourages having a wide variety of skills available to you so that you can efficiently exploit enemy weaknesses, cover your own weaknesses, and knock down all enemies for All-Out Attacks to deal massive damage. While Persona 3 sticks to this formula for the hundreds of battles you’ll go through during its 70+ hour runtime, it somehow never gets old, and a large part of that is the sheer scope and variety of builds you can craft through Persona fusion.
Enter the Velvet Room - a staple of the Persona series. This is a place where you gather your Personas that you acquire during Shuffle Time events that appear after most battles. The Personas you gather during Shuffle Time may be weak compared to the enemies you’re fighting against, and they may not be able to cover any enemy weaknesses that you’re facing either. Through fusing these Personas together, you’re able to craft a stronger Persona that brings both higher stats for your character and more abilities that you can use to gain the upper hand in battle. One of the single greatest quality-of-life improvements that Reload does is bringing carrying over skills up to par with modern SMT titles.
In Persona 3, among other SMT games that were released before and after Persona 3, fusing Personas bring new skills that you can use in combat. Each Persona has unique skills inherent to it being fused, with additional skill slots being available for carrying over skills from the Personas you use for the fusion itself. In essence, this makes it so you can transfer skills from one Persona down to the fusion result. For example, if you are fusing a fire-using Persona, carrying over skills from the Personas you are fusing from may allow you to have access to not only fire skills, but ice, healing, and physical skills as well, and so on. Creating Personas that are versatile and serve multiple combat functions is essential to seeing success in combat. However, the bane of player’s existence in Persona 3, FES, and Portable is getting these very carry-over skills. The carry-over skills that populate in the open skill slots are randomly generated from a list of available skills. This means that, in order to get the skills that you want, you have to confirm the Personas for the fusion, check the new Persona’s skills to see if they include all the skills you want. If they don’t, you back out of the menu, reconfirm the Personas for the fusion, the repeat the process until you finally get the combination of skills you want. This massively elongates the original Persona 3’s runtime, as getting the exact skillset for a Persona often means going through a monotonous cycle of opening, closing, and re-opening menus for many minutes at a time. You could make the argument that this highlights the cost of getting precisely what you want instead of going with the flow of what the game randomly determines to give you for carry-over skills, but given how vital certain skills can play towards making certain Personas viable in combat, this inevitably becomes a staple in the gameplay for most players of Persona 3.
Starting with Persona 4 Golden in 2012, the series reevaluated this feature and opted to provide the option of simply allowing the player to select from a pool of abilities that can be transferred over from the Personas used for a fusion on the resulting Persona. It’s a small adjustment, but this single change likely shaves off over an hour of gameplay and exponentially enhances the user experience for the entire game, given how essential fusion is a mechanic in most SMT and Persona titles. This change introduced by Golden seeped its way into every other SMT and Persona title over time and for good reason - it significantly improves the flow of the game and ensures that players are empowered to strategize and create build compositions to their liking without having to go through busywork and monotony. Persona 3 Reload adopts this modern approach to the series’ fusion mechanic, and it makes a massive difference in keeping combat flowing and ensuring that players spend less time fiddling with menus and more time exercising strategic decision-making in the game’s fantastic combat system.
What helped make Persona 3 such a classic JRPG is the sheer polish and consistent challenge presented by its combat. Indeed, Reload retains this with flying colors. As mentioned earlier, Persona 3 Reload upholds the SMT tradition of having a rewarding focus on exploiting weaknesses. The game features three types of physical attacks and six types of magical attacks, all of which enemies and Personas alike can have affinities and weaknesses to. Landing an “Agi” - the game’s basic fire spell - against an enemy with a weakness to fire knocks the enemy down and gives the player an additional turn. So long as the player exploits the weakness or lands a critical hit against an enemy that isn’t already knocked down, they can perform more actions against the enemy. If all enemies are weak to fire, then this just means that you get to cast “Agi” on each enemy until all of then get knocked down. Once this happens, the player can trigger an All-Out Attack - a powerful attack that combines the strength of all party members as they beat down on all enemies on the field.
Most battles throughout Persona 3 Reload revolve around experimenting with different attack types until you land on each enemy’s weakness, then exploiting that weakness to trigger All-Out Attacks and reap the rewards of Shuffle Time - a post-battle event that can amplify your rewards. Unlike the original, Reload communicates how Shuffle Time gets activated after battles - you simply have to participate in the game’s battle system effectively. As you get more “1 more!” opportunities from exploiting weaknesses and landing critical hits, you increase your chances of getting a Shuffle Time after the battle. Finishing the battle with an All-Out Attack all but confirms a Shuffle Time upon your victory. Getting Shuffle Time consistently makes a meaningful difference, as it helps you choose between getting more experience points from fights to level up faster, get money to spend outside of dungeon crawling, or gaining a heal or buff to be applied for the next fight.
New to Reload is the inclusion of Major Arcana cards. As you complete more of the game’s Full Moon events (which essentially serve as the “main” boss fights of the game) and complete optional challenges within Tartarus, you gain more Major Arcana cards, which give you buffs, some of which substantially upgrade the experience of navigating Tartarus. Major Arcana cards can empower you through giving you more experience from fights across the board, getting to choose more options during Shuffle Time, getting increases to your stats, and more. As you get more Major Arcana cards, so too do you expand the amount of Major Arcana cards you can have during a single visit to Tartarus. If you max out the number of Major Arcana cards that you have slots for, you increase the effectiveness of the standard rewards of EXP, money, and healing offered by Shuffle Time. It clearly isn’t an essential addition, but giving more options to Shuffle Time and expanding the decisions that players can make throughout the game keeps navigating the 200+ floor dungeon a consistently fresh and engaging experience.
That said, the most essential reward from Shuffle Time continues to be Personas themselves. Your party members are limited to a single Persona and are therefore limited to a few roles within combat. Yukari, for example, serves as an excellent support character that also has access to the “Garu” family of wind spells throughout the game, while Junpei is more focused on physical attacks and fire magic. The protagonist, however, has far more capabilities in battle thanks to him having the “Wild Card” - an ability that allows him to command multiple Personas and switch them as needed. Through the Personas you get during Shuffle Time, you can fuse them to make stronger Personas.
Aside from increasing your maximum HP and MP pools, the protagonist’s level determines the maximum level Persona that you can fuse in the Velvet Room. With higher level Personas bring higher stats for strength, magic, endurance, agility, and luck, as well as stronger skills and passive abilities. Every level-up brings with it an excitement over the new Personas that you’ll be able to fuse with the higher level cap for Persona fusions. Thanks to the hundreds of Personas available for fusion, it won’t be until the mid-90s where you start running out of new Personas to fuse. This inevitably means that your lineup of Personas for the protagonist will be ever-shifting. Creating a team of Personas that allow you to synergize with the abilities of your party members, cover their weaknesses, and trigger All-Out Attacks with as much efficiency as possible creates an addicting and fun gameplay loop of combat.
What also helps combat so much is the flow of stretches of Tartarus you’ll be able to explore. Don’t let the 200+ floors within Tartarus intimidate you - you’ll only be able to explore a few dozen floors at a time, with more floors being unlocked after each full moon. Within these blocks of exploring Tartarus, you’ll encounter “Gatekeepers” - boss fights that you need to defeat in order to climb Tartarus further. For each block that becomes available every in-game month, you’ll only ever be climbing about 20-40 floors per month, with about 3-5 Gatekeepers each time around. This keeps the pace of dungeon exploring and boss fights reasonable. This, in coordination with a few updates in Reload, keeps Tartarus an enjoyable aspect of the game that never gets overly repetitive or overwhelming to navigate.
These new updates include quality-of-life upgrades and all-new challenges that have a chance of appearing on each floor. Firstly, Reload makes all party members playable instead of the protagonist. Persona 3 and FES necessitated you to use a “Tactics” menu to direct the AI for party members to make certain actions, but it seldom meant that party members would consistently do what you always wanted them to do. Persona 4 introduced the ability to directly control party members during combat - a feature that made its way into Persona 3 Portable and all Persona releases afterward, including Reload. It can’t be understated just how much of a difference this makes in terms of making the player feel in control at all times. Unlike in FES, I was able to fully direct coordinated attacks across all of my party members in combat to trigger All-Out Attacks in Reload. This gives a flow and degree of control to combat that removes almost all frustration in combat that was present in older versions of Persona 3. (If you’re a complete sicko, though, Reload still lets you set your party members to be controlled by AI.) Other additions that make Tartarus more interesting to explore in Reload is the inclusion of new challenges like Monad Doors, Greedy Shadows, and the previously mentioned optional minibosses that give you more Major Arcana cards. The sheer quantity and variety of challenges in Tartarus really do make the time you spend in the labyrinth - mind you, that’s a significant chunk of the 70+ hour runtime - much snappier, fun, and satisfying.
All-Out Attacks occur after knocking every enemy on the field down, either through exploiting enemy weaknesses or landing critical hits. You’re often rewarded with Shuffle Time after these attacks, but the animation for All-Out Attacks is a reward in itself thanks to some deliciously stylish animations. // Image: Atlus, SEGA
That said, there are a few aspects of Reload’s shiny new features that detract from some of Persona 3’s gameplay identity. There’s a case to be made that Reload injects some elements of Persona 5 that overtakes some of the original’s identity and challenging edge. For example, the “Shift” system is introduced in Reload - effectively serving the same role as Persona 5’s “Baton Pass” mechanic, where you can pass off your turn to another party member after landing a “1 More!” from hitting an enemy weakness or a critical hit. The feature is one that makes navigating certain combat situations in Persona 3 Reload a lot more comfortable, but the comfortability afforded here supersedes the distinct challenge of the original game.
To make my stance on the matter clear, I have distinct memories in Persona 3 FES where I died and lost hours of progress through little to no fault of my own. Those instances were insanely frustrating and I refuse to look at those moments with rose-tinted glasses and claim that those instances made the game better. That said, the increase in challenge and the fact that luck could suddenly land on the enemy’s side and force you back to your most recent save gave genuine stakes and tension to every combat encounter. I’m not saying that Reload would have been a better game if every combat encounter carried with it a chance that my save file would get corrupted, but Reload’s decisive decrease in stakes throughout combat dulls the edge of the overall gameplay experience and leads to less memorable moments in combat.
I have a vivid memory of the final boss of Persona 3 FES taking me nearly an hour to complete, only to be hit with status ailments that took away all control I could possibly have and it made me watch my party slowly get picked off while I couldn’t do anything about it. I lost an hour of battle progress and had to redo the entire fight. I was frustrated - frankly, pissed off -, but it’s a gameplay moment I’ll never forget. Reload never features any fights where there are large stakes to losing - even in instances where you get a game over, boss fights give you the option to retry fights without losing any progress. While game overs during regular encounters can set you back, a generous checkpoint system ensures you won’t be set back too far. Moreover, the overall challenge of encounters seems decreased from the original. Even when played on the Hard difficulty setting, Reload is a generally comfortable time, only bringing about arduous fights on occasion.
Another change to Reload regards the “tired” mechanic of the original. In prior versions of Persona 3, you would immediately get healed when returning to the first floor of Tartarus where you can change party members and visit the Velvet Room. The trade-off for this was that, the longer that you remained in Tartarus, the greater chance you had at becoming tired or sick - status ailments that would decrease your overall stats. When party members achieve either of these statuses, they leave Tartarus for the night, preventing you from putting them back into your party for the rest of that night. This puts an effective time limit on Tartarus visits and encourages players to come to Tartarus multiple nights every in-game month, instead of binging entire blocks of Tartarus. Reload does away with this mechanic, trading off the fact that you no longer heal when returning to the first floor of Tartarus. While this resolves some of the irritation that came with the “tired” mechanic of old, it ends up reinforcing why the “tired” mechanic existed in the first place.
To play through Reload optimally means that you want to manage your time as efficiently as possible. With how many events that Reload adds that are exclusively available at night, this incentivizes players to have as many free nights as possible to do everything available to them. This inevitably means that Tartarus visits turn into gauntlets where players explore all floors available to them in one fell swoop. Of course, this isn’t a required way to play the game, but for completionists or players that just want to see as much story-related content as possible, it’s a gameplay method that’s strongly encouraged by the game’s mechanics. What makes Tartarus gauntlets additionally enticing is the fact that healing items (particularly items that heal your SP, your resource for magic spells that are vital to determining the number of battles you can get through) are generously handed out in Reload, across all difficulty levels. The increase in healing capabilities only means that it’s easier to get through entire blocks of Tartarus at once.
All this is to say that the lack of guardrails on exploring through Tartarus isn’t necessarily a bad aspect of Reload, but it does mean that the game provides a different relationship between the player and Tartarus. Rather than something that the player has to design their schedule entirely around at night, deciding to go to Tartarus effectively turns into a commitment of whether you’re ready to engage with the RPG side of the game for hours, before returning to the social sim side of the game afterwards. To use an overused, half-meme term, this creates ludonarrative dissonance between the game’s narrative’s depiction of Tartarus being something that your party should be going to frequently to prepare for the many battles that await SEES, and the fact that the game effectively rewards players for visiting Tartarus as infrequently as possible.
What remains in Reload is the inevitable flow that you’ll find yourself in as you get into the rhythm of switching between RPG combat and engaging in social sim elements through Social Links or engaging in activities that improve your social stats, all while progressing the story that Persona 3 has to tell. Despite all the changes to game’s systems, character’s voices, and the inclusion of many new scenes, Reload retains the core of Persona 3’s story, which thankfully continues to hit just as phenomenally well now as it did 18 years ago.
Reload’s DLC, Episode Aigis -The Answer-, is an unfortunately tiring gauntlet of dungeon crawling with very little enticing story or side content to diversify its gameplay. While The Answer is a fair epilogue to the main story, it still serves as the weakest link of the overall Persona 3 experience, making the player’s time with the game end on a whimper. // Image: Atlus, SEGA
Persona 3 Reload’s story still stands as one of its greatest aspects. Reload depicts the story of SEES, a group of students that seek to end the existence of the Dark Hour - a secret hour where people are susceptible to being devoured by Shadows. Through using their Personas, the members of SEES uncover the mysteries of the Dark Hour and overcome tantalizing obstacles that seek to keep the Dark Hour in place. In the future, I will be writing an analysis on the narrative of Persona 3 and why its story is so meaningful to so many people. In the interest of dedicating my story analysis for that blog post and not being redundant here, my general thoughts on Persona 3 Reload’s execution of the original game’s story are quite fond of the overall presentation of the story.
The developers behind Reload clearly have a lot of respect for what the original game’s team accomplished in terms of telling a dark story centered around loss and how that affects people in the long term and balancing that with smaller and generally lighter character-driven stories. Atlus clearly navigated Reload with a “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach, particularly for its narrative content, and indeed, I think Reload sticks the landing with preserving Persona 3’s story.
There’s one final aspect of Persona 3 Reload that begets discussing and that is regarding the game’s DLC expansion, Episode Aigis -The Answer-. This epilogue of Persona 3’s story that focuses on Aigis and the rest of the party members as they come to terms with the aftermath of events that transpire at the end of the main game. The Answer already faced an uphill battle when it was announced, as The Answer is not actually new content. The Answer was content that was added in 2007’s FES re-release of Persona 3. Now, it is a part of Persona 3’s story that has been taken out and resold to players as DLC - or at least, that’s how a lot of Atlus’ fans view the situation. While it’s unfortunate that The Answer couldn’t be integrated into the main game, I also understand Atlus’ decision to make this epilogue into a DLC expansion. Truthfully, I’ve never been a fan of The Answer - it has always felt like an unnecessary add-on to the story and doesn’t offer meaningfully new gameplay that the base game doesn’t already cover. That said, I was willing to approach this interpretation of The Answer with an open mind to see if Atlus has been able to address any of these issues that I had with The Answer.
Unfortunately, Atlus applied the same “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality to The Answer, despite this epilogue having a lot that could have been improved from its original release. What makes The Answer particularly disappointing is that it’s effectively a gauntlet of dungeons, one after the other. Unlike, say, Persona 5, a game that features multiple dungeons with unique mechanics, puzzles, and navigational challenges, The Answer’s multiple dungeons stay with the Tartarus-like design, meaning that you’ll be navigating randomly-generated floors with the occasional inclusion of Monad Doors, Greedy Shadows, and so on to spice things up a little bit. This lack of diversity in dungeon crawling isn’t an issue in the base game because there’s far more to do than just the RPG side of the game. Throughout Reload’s base game, you’re likely only going to be in Tartarus for 2-4 hours at a time. Thus, the social sim elements and progression of the main story serve as a palette cleanser from the RPG side for a while. The dungeon design of Tartarus doesn’t need to be terribly complex because there’s various other content in Reload that keeps the gameplay fresh for the player. When this same dungeon design is applied to a 15-25 hour romp that is entirely dedicated to the RPG portion of the game, then the lack of variety in navigating dungeons begins to mar the overall experience.
Finishing Reload’s 70+ hour runtime only to be met with another 15-25 hours of bland dungeon navigation that doesn’t introduce any new mechanics or shake-ups to combat that you haven’t seen in the base game makes The Answer feel like a needless retread of the base game’s RPG side just for the sake of it. The story of The Answer doesn’t pick up the slack either - there are very few cutscenes and consistent story progression to feel like you’re making meaningful progress towards seeing a narrative unravel. If anything, The Answer provides some neat backstory for its characters, but it comes at the cost of wrapping a bow on a story that, quite frankly, didn’t need it. The Answer retains its identity in Reload - that being an unnecessary epilogue that bloats the gameplay of Persona 3 just for the sake of being more content for the game. As a DLC, it’s significantly disappointing, and as someone that wasn’t a fan of the original version of this content, it’s additionally disappointing to see that Atlus opted to not add much new to this version of The Answer. As a dedicated expansion, this could have been remixed to be a lot more meaningful addition to Persona 3’s story. As is, it’s a weak DLC that honestly drags down the entire experience.
We’re currently living through an unprecedented era of remakes. There’s a lot of reasons that explain why remakes have become so popular among video games, but there’s a genuine argument to be made that advances in technology allow game developers to fully realize visions that may have needed to be compromised in prior console generations. To be candid, I’ve never viewed Persona 3 as one of these games. Sure, its graphics were far from the best of what the PS2 had to offer and has some needless restrictions such as the inability to directly control party members, but the original version of Persona 3 still feels like it fully accomplishes its mission.
As a remake, Persona 3 Reload doesn’t need to exist, but I’m glad that it does. While it doesn’t realize a vision that originally failed to be fully achieved, Reload is a resounding success in terms of polishing and presenting Persona 3 to be the best it can be. This remake is a case of refinement over reinvention - aside from a fresh coat of paint and a couple additions here and there, Reload is ultimately concerned with presenting Persona 3 in a way that’s on par with Atlus’ more recent titles. In that context, Reload is as great of an execution of this mission as you can get.
Reload isn’t without its mild blunders. The DLC on offer here is underwhelming and it can be argued that many of the new additions, including the Theurgy system that allows characters to perform super attacks during combat, make the overall experience a decisively easier journey to overcome. An easier and more accessible game isn’t inherently a worse game, but part of me isn’t convinced that Atlus achieved the best possible balance for difficulty across the game’s various settings. Ultimately, though, Reload is a reminder of the power of strong synergy. Indeed, the balance between RPG and social sim shines brightly here. Paired with a great story and a fantastic presentation, and it’s hard to complain about what Persona 3 Reload offers. This is a fantastic way to experience a modern classic.
Is it the definitive version of Persona 3? Despite some of its shortcomings and the lack of Portable’s content, I think it is. I’m not convinced that it’s an essential experience that overrides any reason to play previous versions of the game and there are certainly compromises that one makes when choosing to play Reload over any other version of the game, but when considering accessibility, quality-of-life features, and the polish of modern Atlus, it’s hard to argue that Reload isn’t the overall best way to play Persona 3 as of writing. It’s clear to see that Atlus deeply understands what makes their legacy games so great and how to present them in a way to be appreciated by a wider modern audience. If Reload is the blueprint Atlus takes for remaking more of their legacy content, then I think it’s safe to say that I trust Atlus has what it takes to recapture the magic of their other titles as they’ve proven with Persona 3. Hand in hand with Atlus’ continued excellence of creating strong, brand-new content with Metaphor: ReFantazio, I feel confident in claiming that the future for Atlus is bright.
Despite multiple versions, a remake, and the cruel passage of time, Persona 3 has remained as an exceptionally meaningful game to me. Not only am I happy to have a remake that faithfully honors what made Persona 3 so great to begin with, but I am grateful that Reload makes this game more accessible than ever before. Like the shards of glass that scatter out of the protagonist’s head when he uses his Evoker to summon a Persona, Reload’s quality cascades and shines in various ways. That shine is enough to lighten any night and any soul that wishes to embark on a meaningful, tension-filled, and deeply satisfying journey.
Final Grade: A-
Thank you very much for reading! What are your thoughts on Persona 3 Reload? How do you think it compares to the original Persona 3? As always, join the conversation and let me know what you think in the comments, on Bluesky @DerekExMachina, or on Twitter/X @DerekExMachina.
