If you’re familiar enough with the Persona series to know what Persona 3 is and be interested in this review, you’re probably aware that this isn’t the first time that creator Atlus and publisher Sega have remastered or updated Persona 3. The original game was released in North America in 2007 for the PS2. A year later we got an updated version called Persona 3 FES that added an epilogue. The game was fairly successful and Atlus put out a port on the PSP called Persona 3 Portable in 2009 which featured an additional female protagonist. That’s three releases. Fast forward to last year and Atlus and Sega re-released Persona 3 Portable in HD on current consoles with both digital and limited physical releases. Whew.
After four releases with different specifics, you’d think Atlus would be done telling the same story, but you’d be very wrong because here we are eighteen years later with the newly enhanced Persona 3 Reload for PS4/5, Xbox, and PC! With so many versions of the game to choose from, it’s important to know what’s included and what isn’t however, so let’s briefly go over that before we look at the game. The biggest feature in P3R is that you can finally control your party members directly (thought this could be done in P3P). Previous versions of the game left all party members besides the protagonist automatically attacking and not always effectively, but now everything is sensibly under your control. Sadly, the Answer epilogue from FES is not included in the game, though data miners seem to have found evidence that it may be offered as DLC later. The other major difference here is that the female protagonist from P3P was entirely cut from Reload. It’s likely there was a lot of extra work involved in the route but it seems a strange choice to make in this day and age.
Moving on to the game itself, you play a high school student at Gekkoukan High School. Your parents have passed away and you’re on your own, moving to a dorm. Strange things start happening to you and pretty soon you find out you have the power to summon Personas, aspects of your own personality, and use them in combat during the Dark Hour, a hidden hour between midnight and 12:01 every night. There are strange creatures moving about the world during the Dark Hour and they’ll attack anyone who is awake. Unfortunately, they’re also exerting their powers on the real world, causing a strange illness, but luckily, there’s an elite team called S.E.E.S. that’s fighting the Shadows in what seems to be their home base, an elaborate ever-changing labyrinth called Tartarus.
The plot of Persona 3 Reload is a slow burn, so don’t expect all your questions to be answered, even after hours of gameplay. This is a 50+ hour game that will drip feed you plot right up until the end. It’s also important to be aware that Persona 3 is a particularly dark game and the further you play, the darker it gets. There’s a trigger warning when you start gameplay too and those who are sensitive should be aware that there are regular graphic depictions of suicide-like behaviors in gameplay throughout the entirety of the game. Don’t expect things to stay light and fluffy even though there are plenty of lighthearted moments in every aspect of the game.
Persona 3 Reload consists of two major gameplay sections, social links and Tartarus. Social Links are personal connections you make with the NPCs in the game through spending time with them and conversational choices. There are a total of 22 social links to complete which means over 200 social interactions and side story segments with various characters. The game takes place on a day by day basis and you can only complete one social link activity per day and one per evening (if they’re available then). Each character you interact with has a Persona archetype attached to the interactions and as you get to know them, the strength of that type of Persona will grow. Having a Persona of the same type in your inventory accelerates the process and eventually you can summon the most powerful Personas in the game through social interaction and get some interesting stories along the way.
One of the biggest complaints about Persona 3 Portable was that being able to walk around the city was removed but that’s back in Reload. In addition to pursuing social links you can visit a variety of shops and locations all over town, running errands, taking odd jobs, playing games, and even having meals. Some locations are only available at certain times of the day or week but provide bonuses to character traits such as Courage, Charm, and Academics which will help you make social links more effectively. The entire experience is quite organic and there are a number of options available to you at any given time, leaving players feeling like they simply can’t do everything they want. It’s an interesting way to experience a game that works in many aspects but not all. It can be incredibly frustrating to burn your time with someone in order to raise your friendship but not have your social link advance, or to have to spend days upping specific traits so that you feel comfortable enough to order food, talk to someone, or enter a building.
There are romantic paths in Persona 3 as well, but they take a long time to get moving and work through social links as well. Be on the lookout for ways to interact with various people in the area and you’ll stumble across them eventually. P3R will give you a hard time if you try to go after multiple romantic pathways as well, so be prepared for negative consequences if you try to spread yourself around. There’s a lot of sexual imagery in Reload and the women in the game are often clad in rather erotic attire as well, certainly a bit of a questionable choice but not a surprising one given the visual history of the series. Once you go down a romantic path there is physical intimacy and even implied sex (no, they don’t show it you pervs). If that’s not your thing, you can choose to reject the characters when you reach that point in their social links however. There’s enough variety for everyone here unless you wanted to play a female protagonist or have a same-gender romance.
Now let’s look at the other half of the game, the combat. In the evening, you can choose to go to Tartarus. This is a massive dungeon with hundreds of floors that rises up into the air during the Dark Hour. Every night the floor plan changes and the entire dungeon is filled with Shadows, forcing you to fight your way to the top. Why? Who can say. You’ll have to find out. Levels in Tartarus are fairly short most of the time with each only having a few enemies. Every so often there are ‘border floors’ which set a return point. Once you have cleared the boss on a border floor, you can return to that floor from the main floor rather than playing all the way up from level 1 again. This allows you to slowly make meaningful progress within Tartarus. Bosses stay dead too, so you won’t have to fight those harder battles again. After a certain number of floors, you’ll hit dead ends where you cannot progress until certain story aspects are resolved. Once you clear those areas, the next section of Tartarus will look different with new map designs and textures to be randomized.
Combat is fairly straightforward in Persona 3 Reload. Shadows are visible in the dungeon and like many other RPGs, you can sneak up behind them and hit them for a combat advantage. This is particularly useful in P3R because if you have the initiative, you can attack with your Personas. Almost every enemy has a weakness to the affinities of one of the Personas. Each Persona has magic powers keyed to things like ice, electricity, fire, light, darkness, and so on. Hit a Shadow with an attack it’s weak against and it’s stunned. Stun every enemy in the battle and you get to perform an All-Out Attack and pummel them mercilessly. Typically, this results in their rapid demise. Finding out weaknesses can be a bit of a struggle sometimes but once you have, you can hit the LB button on the Xbox while the enemy is highlighted and it will show you how that enemy reacts to every affinity you have hit it with. Once you get the system down, the main thrust of combat is using the right attacks on the right enemies and wiping them out rapidly.
Beating an enemy with an All-Out Attack usually nets you Shuffle Time, a bonus where you get to select from added XP, Gold, Health, or new Personas which are added to your library. Be careful though because you can only hold so many! Personas level up along with your character though typically only the active ones level up. They’ll gain additional abilities as they do as well, making for much more powerful attacks as you progress. Eventually you’ll also unlock Theurgy which is new to Persona 3 Reload and basically consists of special moves that build up with your characters’ emotional states until they can release a spectacular attack. Theurgy attacks are quite powerful and fun to watch as well. There are some other changes to combat here too including the new Monad Doors which harbor ultra-difficult challenges, the ability to dash in dungeons, and a UI that will definitely look familiar to Persona 5 players.
Count on spending about half your time on Persona 3 Reload in Tartarus and half in Social Link activities. The balance here is pretty good and as the game progresses, the two halves become more integrated with things happening in one world affecting the other and so on. Obviously there is plenty more that you’ll find out that it’s simply impossible to cover in a review. It’s also surprising how repetitive Tartarus gets. Once you master the gameplay look it’s honestly a chore to run through the same dungeon levels over and over again. There’s an air of tedium about Persona 3 Reload that you don’t feel in other Persona games such as Persona 5. Limiting the entirety of combat gameplay to a single massive dungeon, even if it shifts textures every so many floors, is an odd choice. It would have felt nicer to explore more varied places rather than procedurally generated levels that suffer from a bit too much similarity. While it is fun and slowly starts to become quite compelling, don’t expect P3R to be the perfect game.
Finally, there’s the Velvet Room. Persona veterans are already familiar with this extradimensional space where you can fuse personas together to make new, stronger ones. Fusing personas has always been a part of the series but Reload takes a page from Persona 5 here and revamps the original fusion menu to a more modern one with multiple approaches for different types of players. Fusing the wrong Persona can leave you without certain attacks so it always pays to understand what you’re losing and how your social links affect the fusion. Likewise, ignoring the fusion aspects of the game will cripple you from a gameplay standpoint, leaving you painfully weak as you reach the higher levels of Tartarus so you’ll definitely have to spend some time here. Be prepared for a lot of indecision and menu choices because it’s surprising how attached you can get to your Personas once you’ve used them for a while.
The upgraded graphics in Persona 3 Reload are an absolute masterpiece. The visuals have been fully updated from previous versions of the game to match those of Persona 5. Menus are flashy and dynamic, the characters are crisp and interesting, and the detail levels in various areas are high. The polish on the UI is absolutely insane and it’s incredibly entertaining to even use the menu system which is as much a work of art as it is functional and intuitive. From combat to conversation, P3R is flashy and beautiful. This is the absolute epitome of AAA design work and it’s something the franchise has become known for over the years. Expect to be constantly dazzled everywhere you go in the game and you won’t be disappointed!
Sound is equally enhanced from previous releases of the game with all new remixes of the soundtrack and some new tracks as well. There are all new voice actors for Persona 3 Reload and there is a ludicrous amount of voice acting within the game. It’s all top tier stuff too. The music is hip and dynamic with a lot of jazzy undertones and the voice acting is steady and well-done, not overacted or ridiculous. The casting is top notch here and you’ll probably end up listening to more than a few tracks from the soundtrack on Spotify.
There are some issues with Persona 3 Reload though. As mentioned earlier, Tartarus can be incredibly repetitive and it’s the only dungeon in the game. Sinking your combat by making it a chore is never a good thing and Persona 3 has suffered from this issue since the original release. Sure it’s flashier but it’s still the same grind after a while and that definitely gets old, even with Theurgy and direct character control. The voiceovers are another issue. Yes, the voice acting is amazing, but in the dungeon, the support characters don’t stop talking. Mitsuru is the worst for this and she just won’t stop talking even in minor combat battles where there’s no need for it. It got to the point where turning off voices entirely was preferable to hearing the constant jabber in dungeons and once it’s off, it’s easy to forget to turn them back on.
The soundtrack, while awesome and expertly remixed, also has the same problem that voiceovers have, namely too much of a good thing. Many of the tracks have lyrics attached, which is great initially. But after 10 or 20 hours, you’ve heard those songs so often that the lyrics start to get on your nerve. Default settings for the music are incredibly loud as well, so you’re constantly getting the same stanzas blasted at you every time you enter the same areas. With how upbeat the music is, sometimes it feels out of sync with the low key gameplay as well, creating even more of a dichotomy. After a while, gameplay seemed to feel preferable with voices off and music down to a low drone in the background.
Finally there’s combat itself. The GUI is amazing, the visuals are great, but the way that high speed combat modes and visual sequences are handled is weak at best. Unlike the Trails series, selecting a high speed mode in combat disables Personas in Persona 3 Reload, leaving your characters performing only physical attacks. With the amount of grinding you do, just speeding up the gameplay with this function would have been a better choice. The same can be said for combat sequences. There is no menu option to turn off battle animations, a standard in most modern RPGs. This leaves you watching the same All-Out Attack sequences and long enemy attacks no matter how many times they are repeated, prolonging the length of this already quite long game. Options for these issues would have significantly increased the level of satisfaction from combat in the game long term.
Persona 3 Reload is a spectacular reimagining of a classic game in the venerated series. The updated visuals and changes make for an immersive experience but the game itself is held back both by some technical choices and the age of the source material. The gameplay loop hasn’t aged as well as it could have and some exclusions and smaller design issues definitely aren’t perfect, but the overall experience is excellent. Unfortunately, it’s also a rather pricey game, coming in at a $69.99 price point plus tax. If you’re a hardcore Persona or SMT fan, it’s going to be worth it, but for the average player, this is definitely a bit of a financial decision as well. There are also $79.99 and $99.99 deluxe and premium editions available with a variety of DLC (but not The Answer DLC from FES). Regardless of which version you choose, you’re getting a highly polished game that will keep you busy for many hours with an outstanding cast and fascinating story as it slowly builds to a solid conclusion. Persona 3 Reload is definitely worth your time if you haven’t played any of the previous releases, so track down a copy today!
This review is based on a digital copy of Persona 3 Reload provided by the publisher. It was played on an Xbox Series X using a Sony 55” 1080p TV. Persona 3 Reload is also available for PS4/5 and PC on Steam.
Nate Van Lindt has been a gamer since the days of yore (aka Commodore 64), and has played a bit of virtually everything out there. He's also an avid comic book collector, both vintage and current, and reads a fair amount of sci-fi and fantasy. On top of that, he watches a fair number of movies and TV shows as well. Oh, and he has a family, a full-time job, and lives somewhere in the urban wilds of Southwestern Ontario, Canada, foraging for old video cables and forgotten game soundtracks.
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