“Persona 3 Reload” is an amazing modern remake of a RPG classic. It has all the vibes and story of the original but with heavily updated exploration and combat systems.
This game plays almost exactly like 2016’s “Persona 5” and that is definitely for the better. For better or worse the original 2003 game has heavily dated gameplay and this remake makes it much more user friendly and forgiving if you need it to be. With this addition of mistake forgiveness the huge difficulty spikes of the original are gone for the most part.
The new visuals of the game were built from the ground up and make the game look a lot more in line with modern Atlus releases like “Persona 5”, Shin Megami Tensei V”, and the upcoming “Metaphor: ReFantazio”. The new 2D character stills for cutscenes and non voiced text are also redone and look great.
There are no returning cast members from the main cast, yet all of the new ones are great. They all portray the characters amazingly, with some even fitting the characters better than the original. The writing has also seen a pretty big upgrade with a new translation and some minor changes to remove some of the more badly aged parts of the game.
The exploration of Tartarus has much of the same feel as the original with the randomly generated floors sticking around. The exploration of them feels pretty different though once again being much more in line with “Persona 5”. The gameplay inside Tartarus is also quite different with some minor things being removed, like in-combat knock downs, to make gameplay a little more fair.
All of the music has been redone with new orchestrations of the classic songs and some new additions to go along with them. The opening cinematic that is characteristic of every Persona game is back and honestly is one of the best in the whole series. Most of the returning songs are also better compared to the original game like “Mass Destruction”.
Overall “Persona 3 Reload” is an incredibly long and incredibly good gaming experience that can be recommended to anyone whether you’ve played the “Persona” series before or not.
Publisher: Atlus, Sega
Developer: Atlus, Studio P
Platform: Playstation 5, Playstation 4, Xbox Cloud Gaming, Microsoft Windows, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S
ESRB Rating: M
Price: $69.99
My Rating: ★★★★★
