If you have been following this blog, you knew this review was coming. As this is the game I was anticipating the most this year, I didn’t want to rush it and guarantee that I had my sweet time with it. The result of that was a sense of closure after 90 hours of gameplay spread around 4 months. But what is so special about Persona 3 Reload to make me go to such lengths? You see, Persona 4 Golden and Persona 5 Royal were two of my top 3 games from last year. Their unique formula of dungeon crawling mixed with social simulation elements had its inception precisely with 2006’s Persona 3. While its story and concept remained very interesting, every other element of it was naturally outclassed by its successors. That’s why when a remake of it was announced last year, it felt like a match made in heaven for us Persona fans: one of the most interesting narratives in the series combined with all the best gameplay features from P4 and P5 (mostly P5).
Be aware that since I didn’t play the original game (or any of its re-editions), this will be as much as a review for this particular remake as for Persona 3 itself. All the knowledge I have of the original versions came from research.
The darkest hour
The story of Persona 3 starts with the game’s protagonist arriving at a school dormitory in Tatsumi Port Island, the place where he will live for the next year along some other students. Initially, we don’t know much about this school or the island itself, but soon we realise that something fishy is going on, because right on the first night, as the clock hits the midnight, we enter in a somber reality where the sky becomes green and everyone except a few individuals transform into coffins (yes, you read it right). This reality is known as the Dark Hour and our protagonist, as all the dormitory residents, are some of the lucky ones that are fully awaken during it. To make things worse, during the Dark Hour, the school is transformed into a gigantic tower by the name of Tartarus.
As the story quickly reveals, those students didn’t end up in the same dormitory by accident. They were gathered purposely to bond as a team and defeat the evil shadows who roams around the 264 floors of Tartarus, as to uncover its origin and purpose. Being awake during the Dark Hour comes with the perk of being able to summon a Persona, a creature that is the materialization of the inner self and it possesses great powers. As such, these students are better equipped for the job than anyone.
During all the other hours of the day, we experience our protagonist and all the other student’s daily life, while going to school, meeting with people, doing part-time jobs and more. The usual gist of this series. More the characters we meet during the day, better the perks we have in the Dark Hour.
New moon
A remake of Persona 3 was something that was highly requested by the fans after the unprecedented success of Persona 5, in 2016. Many of them wondered what it would be of that game with all the graphical improvements and quality of life features of the latest iteration. This year Atlus finally attended the request with great success, I may say.
Persona 3 Reload is a complete graphical overhaul of the original. All the scenarios, character art, menus and everything you can think of were vastly improved and highly stylized. Everything in this game just looks cool. The already amazing soundtrack was also improved, with all the original themes being remade and with the addition of a few new ones, such as a new battle theme.
From a gameplay perspective, apart the expected improvements, this remake is very faithful to the source material, for better or worse. All the key events and game calendar are untouched, as all its social links.
The social links, also known as “confidants” in Persona 5, are an essential element of this series formula, arguably its most iconic even. They consist in friendship ranking systems for each character we meet during the game, with interaction episodes that can level them up. It happens that Persona 3 was the first game to introduce this mechanic, and as with any first iteration of anything, it isn’t perfect. Some of the stories told during those interactions are painfully boring or just dumb, and not even in a funny way. The most aggravating example for me was this classmate we meet that really wants to date his teacher. To advance his social link, his endeavor needs to be encouraged. Obviously while doing that I was going deeply against my intuition. But probably that’s the message the game wants to convey, that sometimes we need to put on a mask to make some friends, who knows. Thankfully Reload introduces a few (much more interesting) extra episodes with some characters that didn’t have social links on the original game. I just wished they touched up the existent social links to make them as good as this new episodes, but I understand why they didn’t.
Other less positive aspect I noticed during my playthrough was some lack of balance in the gameplay activities. The days in a Persona game are divided into time slots, with the majority of them having two of those slots free for any activity of our choice, being them the afternoon and evening. If we want to visit the Dark Hour, which is fundamental for the game progress, the clock automatically skips the evening slot of the current day. Because of that the original game didn’t have a lot of activities allocated for that slot, to give the players enough time to explore the Dark Hour without missing anything. However, Reload is considerably easier than the original game, requiring less time to reach the goals during the Dark Hour. That made the lack of nighttime activities very evident, specially in the last months of the calendar.
While this last paragraphs sounded too negative, my lasting impressions of Persona 3 Reload are very positive. The only problem was my incredibly high expectations, set by my experience with Persona 4 and 5. I believe I would be more reasonable if P3R was my first Persona game, but because I already know where the series can go in terms of gameplay and storytelling, I ended up being a tiny bit underwhelmed.
Pros
- Arguably the darkest story in the series
- Unapologetically stylish
- Incredible soundtrack, as usual for Atlus
- Superb voice acting for all characters
Cons
- Many social links stories aren’t great
- Not much gameplay variety in the latter part of the game
Great✦✦✦✦✧
Persona 3 Reload is undoubtedly a great remake, improving many outdated aspects of the original game, while keeping the dark and tragic narrative intact. However, by being faithful to the source material, some lackluster elements of it made it to this new reincarnation.
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