The original ‘Persona 3’ launched on the PlayStation 2, and if you ask me, is one of the console’s star titles in its vast library of fantastic games. A mixture of social sim and monster collecting turn-based role-playing game with a fairly dark narrative backdrop, Persona 3 combined with a successful ‘Persona 4’ would make the series become one of developer ATLUS’ most popular titles. To the point of shedding its parent series title ‘Shin Megami Tensei’ from future iterations and entries. ‘Persona 5’ in particular found an even bigger audience and spawned itself a franchise that still gets content even today.
So it’s a bit of a shame that, despite being the one that started off the series’ popularity, Persona 3 in its full glory cannot be played outside of the PlayStation 2. Persona 4 got the much beloved ‘Golden’ release on the PlayStation Vita and later on modern consoles and Persona 5 never had that problem to begin with. Persona 3 Portable arrived onto current generation systems a year or so back, but unlike Golden, Portable is a heavily stripped down version of the original title and on a big screen, not my favourite way to play a classic.
But at long last, and outta the blue, ATLUS and publisher SEGA surprised us with ‘Persona 3 Reload’—a full remake from the ground up, launching into Xbox Game Pass as well. While it’s tempting to compare it to the original PS2 release, the more important note is just how well it stands on its own: Persona 3 Reload is fantastic and this entry is still is my favourite in the series.
I’ve Been Waiting for This
In Persona 3 Reload, you take on the role of a transfer student at Iwatodai’s Gekkoukan High School, a well-off school stationed uniquely on an island off the coast of the city. Walking off the train stop, you end up finding yourself right in the middle of the Dark Hour, a hour hidden from the world except for special bodies—and not one you want to find yourself as every living thing around you is shuffled into a coffin, blood is everywhere, and a green sky backdrops the city. Somehow, you make your way to your dorm unscathed, end up signing a contract, and meet one of the dorm members holding a gun…
Persona 3 Reload keeps the original story beat-for-beat intact, but instead this time adds upon the original game with additional cutscenes and more interactable objects and environments. Featuring a more accessible camera and a dash button, you’ll run across school hallways, strip malls, and even the dorm itself like never before. Heck, Reload is easily one of ATLUS’ best-looking game yet, offering dynamic lighting, detailed reflections, and more actors across maps making the world of Persona 3 actually feel alive and active. Character portraits have been refreshed and animations are far more animated than before in Reload.
During these busy daylight hours, you’re going to be handling relationships that will benefit you during the game’s combat sections, increase your social stats to open more opportunities to meet others and open more dialogue events, ace your exams, and more. Increasing your bonds with these confidants is key to your battle ability and you’ll need to balance who to hang out with and when. Though don’t worry too much about maxing these out as it’s entirely possible to complete everyone’s storylines in a playthrough. And part of what makes this game so beloved to me are the personal story’s of these characters as they deal with self-esteem and confidence, family, bullying, and health-related problems as the game’s story unfolds.
Once your day is done and dusted, you’ll come up once again to the Dark Hour. But this time as a combatant: see, your meeting with the girl with the gun at the beginning, Yukari Takeba, wasn’t coincidental. It turns out you have the power to use Personas, monsters that come from within, and that’s what you’ll need to take on the freaky Shadows that come out to play. Even better, you have the ability to use multiple Personas unlike others. Together with the S.E.E.S., your job is to explore Tartarus, a giant labyrinth that houses these Shadows and other freakshows to figure out what the Dark Hour is, what these giant Shadows that come to attack during a full moon, and why Tartarus spawns right where your school is.
This time around, Reload changes up Tartarus quite a bit. Floors remain randomly generated, though only between days—revisiting floors on the same day will give you the same map. Contents within it do change, such as finding rare items and Shadows that give lots of experience points. But more importantly, the pacing of Tartarus has changed up. In the original, Tartarus was an oppressive place and staying too long would tire out your party and even make you sick, along with a very scary AFK check. Illnesses are gone now and even though you could get tired, it’s more likely you’ll run out of resources to keep going before that happens. Fuuka’s Oracle ability will keep you even longer in the game.
Another change to the game’s pacing is through Shuffle Time. As you fight Shadows, you’ll get the chance to select cards that grant monies, Personas, experience points, and more. Gone are the shuffling of cards or having to time on a spinning wheel, as now you can simply pick the cards available to you. The best ones are the Arcana cards, offering you boosts to experience, power, and more until you leave Tartarus for the day as well as permanent boosts to equipped Personas and the like. Getting to the point, Persona 3 Reload is more than happy to let you grind for items and experience within Tartarus this time around and the balancing has more or less changed to accommodate. There’s more dialogue in here, but unfortunately opening the menu or performing an action cuts it off (and that will happen often).
I like this change, even if it does make Tartarus less creepy as a whole, but it does help curb the repetition of climbing all those floors. Dashing into foes and completing areas quickly definitely helps, until an enemy one-shots you at the start of a battle. Mind, Reload isn’t all that difficult as long as you keep levelling up and fuse new Personas when possible and enforce status buffs/debuffs. But even if it does get a bit too tight you can always set the difficulty lower all the way to “Peaceful”. Content doesn’t change and you can always bump it up if you need a challenge save for the game’s more difficult mode “Merciless/Lunatic” (whether that or “Hard” is more difficult is up for debate).
Theurgia also makes an appearance in Reload. Based on a character’s personality and how you use them (Mitsuru’s status ailment inflictions, Ken’s enmity style), you’ll build up your Theurgia meter that allows you to pull off moves that do great damage at no cost to HP or SP. This is a great way to encourage character usage based on how well they support the party in addition to giving players a new tool in their arsenal to take out annoying enemies or heal when handy. Hanging out with your party members at the dorm will yield new Theurgia attacks, so consider spending time with the party—especially if you want to get to know them more.
But what makes this game far more bearable is the fact that you can control party members now! Which means no more support skills for you, Mitsuru.
I Plus You
Exploiting weaknesses is one thing, but sometimes a baddy might not have anything to exploit and thus leaving you hoping for a critical on your part to knock them down, allowing the S.E.E.S. to go for the gorgeously animated All-out-Attack. But sometimes to pull this off you need to make a Persona that can tank whatever the Shadow throws at you and make it easier for you to sweep them off their feet. Outside of Tartarus, you’ll have access to the Velvet Room, a room only you can see with two permanent residents who are there to help you on your journey. Here you can register and fuse Personas, a necessary objective if you want to survive some of the game’s harder enemies and floor bosses. Fused Personas can inherit skills of prior combinations, allowing you to craft an incredibly strong Persona if you plan it out.
You can hold a number of Personas during gameplay, but you can go into the Velvet Room to create new ones and siphon off specific skills from fused Personas and therefore, making the ultimate card. These cards will also benefit from those aforementioned bonds you’ve made during school and your off days. You are as strong as your Persona is and that goes for your team—hitting a baddy’s weakness will give you an extra turn that you can exploit by shifting (read Baton Passing) to another party member to fire off another weakness without burning the SP of one party member. Enemies can take advantage of this too, however, and if they get a critical or weakness hit they too, will kick your butt.
Besides returning Personas, there are new ones for you to discover as you fuse two-ways or multiple. You’ll have to mix ‘n match or use fusion searching to find who is missing if you plan on filling out the compendium. Leveling yourself to be able to fuse higher Personas is key, so always try to balance Tartarus bonuses between experience gain and monies. Now accidents are no longer possible, throwing out an element of randomness that games prior had. I’m a bit mixed on this, but considering how expensive fusing Personas can be this time around I can do without a bit of RNG.
Going back to visuals a bit, Reload brings a fresh look to Tartarus and combat. Animations are top-notch and flow effortlessly between gameplay and the game’s gorgeous menu and user interface. Dashing into enemies and catching Shadows off guard triggers an awesome new surprise attack theme—one that has prevented me from finishing fights as I let it loop a couple times. Music as a whole has been rearranged and features a new female vocal lead, adding new beats and lyrics to classic Persona 3 songs in combat and when you’re out ‘n about, like the dorms and Gekkoukan’s themes.
But what I love the most about Reload is playing what was an already fantastic game with a fresh coat of paint and new quality-of-life options. You’ll see improvements made in Persona 4 and 5 in Reload, such as Network Options (take that, exams), being able to teleport from location to location, gardening, rollback, and more. More importantly, Persona 3’s early to mid-2000s story stays intact, getting a few additional scenes and giving everyone a new set of S.E.E.S. outfits that I can only describe as “wicked”. The struggles of the cast mean a lot to me and the heavy hitting moments are as good as I remember them. Watching Yukari pick on Junpei, Akihiko’s head-on attitude, Ken’s personal struggles, I enjoy seeing this cast interact just as well as I did playing the original many years back.
The game also cross-saves between PC and Xbox effortlessly and the PC version holds up generally well. On an Xbox Series X, the game runs at a full-fat 60 frames per second with what I can assume to be near 4K resolution and the game shines. On PC your graphic options are limited and scene demands vary: many areas don’t even turn on the fans of either my GTX 1070, RTX 3060 and 3070, and other times I’ll watch the framerate tank due to the reflection settings being enabled. Stutters are infrequent but otherwise the game was perfectly playable—even keyboard controls turned out better than I expected, I thought developers forgot about IJKL for camera control.
But what I think Persona 3 Reload does best is that it brings one of my favourite Persona games to a new audience and excels at it. The visuals are gorgeous, the pacing isn’t overtly stretched out, the combat is fun and fluid, and the story is still great. Anyone can get in on this game’s excellent blend of school life and role-playing genres and I can wholeheartedly recommend this game, not just because Persona 3 is a classic for me, but because Persona 3 Reload is genuinely fantastic.
Persona 3 Reload
Played on
Windows 11 PC / Xbox Series X
PROS
- Fantastic music bundled with ATLUS' best visuals and animation work.
- School life, monster collecting, and role-playing genres blend well.
- Story is dark and highlights the best of people even at the worst of times.
- New content fits in right, reworks to mechanics make the game more accessible.
- Plenty of quality of life features.
CONS
- Tartarus isn't quite as dangerous as it used to be and can still get a bit repetitive.
Great review. I never played the original, but am really looking forward to experiencing reload this weekend.
Music to my ears. Can’t wait to play this.
This is very assuring to hear. Can’t wait.
Has anybody found any reviews with Xbox One X comparing to current gen? I have come up empty so far.
I have my One X in my basement workout room and I played large chunks of P5 and P4 while exercising. They are kind of perfect for it. Can just have a few hours slide right on by.