Persona 3 Reload Review – Striking a Balance Between Enhancements and Nostalgia

Persona 3 FES and Persona 3 Portable have become classics for fans of the Shin Megami Tensei spin-off series. Plenty of people would agree that they are two completely different games, with the latter adding more features to the original and changing the gameplay style. Now, more than fifteen years after its initial release, a complete remake taking after the iconic style developer Atlus has become known for is out. Persona 3 Reload takes the original game and reimagines the explorable areas of Tatsumi Port Island and Tartarus with added perspective.

In this Persona 3 remake, you play as a silent protagonist who starts at Gekkoukan High School in Tatsumi Port Island. Here, you meet other members of the school who have formed a group called SEES. Each member of SEES can use what’s called a Persona, a spiritual manifestation of their inner selves activated by a gun-like device called an Evoker. They are tasked with investigating a nightly phenomenon called the “dark hour” that manifests a large tower over their school called Tartarus. Much of the game focuses on this plot while allowing you to do other activities, such as joining school clubs, hanging out with friends, and studying for finals.

Persona 3 Reload Successfully Modernizes a Classic Game

Now that we have Persona 4 and its rerelease in Persona 4 Golden, along with Persona 5 and Persona 5 Royal, we came into Persona 3 Reload with high expectations. We knew that the game would physically look like the most recent installment, but did that mean that it would be as fun and stylish? Persona 3 Reload offers all of the same features, characters, and places you remember from the originals and still manages to add a ton more. Locations are much more three-dimensional and explorable, with added quality-of-life aspects, gameplay, and story features.

The biggest difference, in our opinion, is Tartarus as a whole. When we dove into Persona 3 Portable when it relaunched for modern consoles in early 2023, we knew that Tartarus needed an upgrade as the game’s central dungeon. In comparison to Mementos or the different Palaces in Persona 5, Tartarus was bland and didn’t encourage us to explore at all. This changes altogether in Tartarus with added treasure chests, breakable items, and even a feature called Twilight Fragments. You can collect these fragments to do things like heal your party, power them up, and open rare, locked chests. Being able to dress up your party members with different and whacky outfits you unlock is an added bonus. We definitely recommend immediately equipping the Tuxedo if you can.

New Features Succeed In Breathing New Life

Tons of new features have been added, including the ability to rewind your day and perform special moves while fighting in Tartarus. These special moves are called Theurgy and are essentially signature abilities that each character can learn by doing dorm activities. Dorm activities are another new feature that was added that gives more meaning to staying indoors than just sleeping or studying. There are other additions to the dorm, like gardening on the roof, using a shared computer to use CDs and look things up, and studying with the others during midterms and finals week.

Tartarus also encourages you to do more exploring than before with the aforementioned Twilight Fragments and locked chests. You can experience newly added Monad Doors, Monad Passages, and lost civilians who have wandered into Tartarus. Elizabeth will occasionally ask you different requests requiring you to go into Tartarus to search for things. We’ve never seen a reason to backtrack through Tartarus in previous additions, but Persona 3 Reload made it enjoyable to find new objectives in previously visited areas.

The Moon Reached For The Stars

While almost everything about Persona 3 Reload renders it an incredible remake, we can’t help but feel like it still could have been better. Many of the features that made Persona 3 Portable and Persona 3 FES so great simply weren’t added. While being able to play as a female protagonist or adding The Answer epilogue might not have made the game significantly better, it does improve the overall experience. Her dialogue options also gave a different perspective on how each character in-game perceived the events happening before them.

Of course, we can’t judge the game by what it didn’t include because what it did is nothing short of amazing. Persona 3 Reload is perfect for newcomers and veteran fans alike and is sure to get fans of turn-based JRPGs into the rest of the Persona series.