Persona 3 Reload

Persona 3 is an important title in the history of role-playing games, but it lacks the gameplay and presentation improvements found in Persona 4 and Persona 5. So developer Atlus is giving P3 the remake treatment with Persona 3 Reload ($69.99) for PlayStation, Steam, and Xbox. It’s a comprehensive overhaul of the original release, with drastically improved graphics and sound, plus some needed gameplay fixes. It’s the best way to play Persona 3 and experience a massive stepping stone in the RPG genre. However, it has some fundamentally frustrating aspects built around its dungeon crawling, even after a 2024 makeover.

(Credit: Atlus)

When Midnight Strikes

Persona 3 is not the first Persona game, but it's the first one that captured the attention of a Western audience. Persona and Persona 2 were little more than obscure late-1990s oddities that were almost completely overlooked thanks to Final Fantasy VII and other big RPGs. 2006's Persona 3 featured drastically improved presentation and mechanics, along with revolutionary-at-the-time social interactions. It caught the eyes of RPG fans across the world, and paved the way for widespread series recognition and enthusiasm.

In Persona 3, you play as a second-year transfer student at Gekkoukan High School. Running late for your move into the new student dorm, you find yourself in the Dark Hour. Hidden in the moment between 11:59 p.m. and midnight is a mysterious time when the sky turns an odd green, a strange tower appears in the distance, and most people turn into still coffins, unaware of what’s happening. Those who don’t can fall prey to Shadow monsters unless they have the potential to summon a persona, a psychic manifestation of will.

You have the potential, which is why you were transferred to the dorm. It’s the home of S.E.E.S., the Special Extracurricular Execution Squad, persona-wielding students fighting the Shadows while investigating why the Dark Hour suddenly appeared. The game begins with you joining S.E.E.S. and starting your year at Gekkoukan.

Half Shadow Fighting, Half Schoolwork

Persona 3 Reload is one part dungeon crawler, one part dating simulator. Half of the game is built around turn-based RPG combat where you and your S.E.E.S. teammates climb Tartarus to learn more about the Dark Hour, with major events both in and out of the tower occurring every few weeks. The other half is built around student life where you attend Gekkoukan High during the day, using limited blocks of time to study, have fun, and make friends.

(Credit: Atlus)

This balancing act is a Persona staple, and the biggest distinction between it and the Shin Megami Tensei series it comes from (that, and an emphasis on Jungian psychology over dichotomous mythical eschatology). Standard RPG elements, such as character stats and combat skills, are locked in the events that happen in the Dark Hour, but they can be heavily influenced by the personal growth you experience and the connections you make when you aren’t fighting Shadows.

Your character is unique among persona users in that, instead of being locked to a single persona, you can summon many different ones. You can still only have one persona equipped at a time, which dictates your skills, elemental strengths and weaknesses, and most stats, but you can keep a Pokemon-like party of other personas with you and switch between them on the fly.

You collect new personas by recruiting them as tarot cards that appear randomly when you win battles, or make more powerful ones by fusing two or more in a strange space called the Velvet Room. Your high school antics heavily influence how well those fusions happen, as well as the tools and abilities you bring into Tartarus.

(Credit: Atlus)

Social Links and Side Stories

Characters outside of S.E.E.S. that you can spend time with are known as Social Links, with each connected to a major arcana card. As you grow closer to a Social Link character, your relationship level increases. Each persona has an assigned arcana, and when you fuse a new one connected to a Social Link you’ve built up, it receives a potentially huge experience boost. Maxing out a Social Link provides an item that lets you fuse the ultimate persona of that arcana.

You can’t jump into every Social Link and rush to complete it, though. Only a few can be made near the game's start, while others unlock over the in-game year. Many have prerequisites, like building up one of your three social stats (Academics, Charm, and Confidence) high enough by studying, working, and playing during your free time. Some only become available when you build up other Social Links to a certain point, or once you find a specific item or piece of information. 

Every Social Link has its own story, usually a personal plot relating to the character’s goals and challenges. The Chariot is a high school sports teammate dealing with a knee injury that could end his athletic aspirations. The Hanged Man is a young girl who plays near a shrine, whose parents are getting divorced. They’re meant to be absorbed and enjoyed like in any video game primarily focused on character interaction, and are just as worth experiencing as the dungeon crawling.

After playing Persona 4 and Persona 5, though, the Persona 3 Social Links feel a bit flat. The characters’ arcs are generally shallower and much more direct than the stories you witness in the later games. The theme of grieving a loved one, for example, is explored in both the Hierophant Social Link in P3 and the Hanged Man in P4. The former is an elderly couple trying to save a tree at school that meant a lot to their late son. The latter is a high school student struggling to accept the death of his sister. Naoki’s (the Hanged Man) journey is much more complex, and ties directly into the main plot, while the Kitamuras' (the Hierophant) arc is sweet, but with little conflict or growth.

(Credit: Atlus)

Persona 3’s Social Links are hardly bad; they’re entertaining enough to play. Still, they make the playable characters feel less developed, because the party members lack Social Links to build, unlike the Persona sequels. Incorporating party members into the Social Links' major arcana list means the later games have fewer characters overall, but the ones present are far more complex and realistic.

Climbing Tartarus

Fighting Shadows in Tartarus and during full moon nights brings back classic turn-based Shin Megami Tensei-style action. Elemental weaknesses and status effects play heavily into combat, as is typical for the meta-series, and exploiting those weaknesses knocks down enemies and enables an extra turn. Knocking down every enemy opens them to a whole-party attack that causes massive damage. Of course, your party members can be hit in their weaknesses to give enemies extra moves, as well. You can use items or magic to heal your colleagues if they run out of hit points, but if your main character falls it’s game over.

Persona 3 Reload benefits from 18 years of improvements to make the game much smoother and more active to play. First, you can directly control every party member like in Persona 3 Portable (your party was entirely computer-controlled in the first release). When a party member flattens an enemy, you can switch to a different character for the extra turn like in Persona 5. The light and dark elements now have damage-dealing spells, instead of just unreliable instant-death spells. As a result, you can strategically use them just like the electricity, fire, ice, and wind elements.

There are now special, extra-powerful Theurgy moves that become available by filling up a meter through character-specific actions, like healing or inflicting status ailments. The persona-fusing action in the Velvet Room sees improvements, too, and you can select the skills new Personas inherent from the ones you combined.

Tartarus was one of the original Persona 3’s weakest points, since most dungeon crawling was performed through the tower’s repetitive, procedurally generated floors. Its 260-plus floors were spread across six blocks, each with their own color palette and aesthetic theme. Only a few, short adventuring sections take place outside of Tartarus, leaving the game feeling overly similar.

(Credit: Atlus)

A Tall Tower and a Long Year

Persona 3 Reload has a few updates that give Tartarus more variety, but they don’t address the game’s structural repetition. The good news is that each block feels much more distinct, with different room and corridor layouts. The Monad bonus dungeon at the end of the original Persona 3 has been remixed into Monad Doors and Monad Passages scattered across the entire tower, where you can fight extra-strong optional enemies for special rewards. You can also dash around Tartarus by holding the right trigger, which makes traversal a bit quicker.

The tower has the same number of blocks and the same number of floors, though, so you’re still running through dozens of floors, with only the occasional shake-up to the formula. Since exploring the tower is at least two-thirds of an 80-hour campaign across the school year, it gets tedious.

Persona 4 did away with the single dungeon in favor of Midnight Channel's multiple sections, and Persona 5 found an ideal synthesis of the two with its extremely detailed and unique Palaces. Returning to Tartarus after those two games reinforces the tower's dullness.

Although Persona 3 Reload has improvements found in later Persona titles, the additional content from Persona 3’s enhanced follow-ups is absent. Reload lacks Persona 3 FES' post-ending storyline, though this isn’t a huge loss because that adventure is almost universally hated by fans. Additionally, there’s no option to play a female version of the main character as you can with Persona 3 Portable, which leaves out the new interactions that came from it. To be fair, the enhanced versions of Persona 4 and Persona 5, Golden and Royal, also lack female versions of the protagonist.

(Credit: Atlus)

New Looks, New Sounds

Graphically, Persona 3 Reload is a huge leap over the original PlayStation 2 version. The textures and models are much more detailed, and the interface pops with personality. Likewise, the animated cutscenes look better (and sharper at up to 4K resolution).

The game has new music arrangements and tracks, with rapper Lotus Juice returning to provide backing vocals. The voice cast features new actors and lines. This doesn’t mean the original’s excellent voice cast is gone, though. Most of the now-older voice actors from Persona 3 return in more age-appropriate roles, like Tara Platt (Mitsuru in P3) as the Velvet Room attendant Elizabeth, and Wendee Lee (Fuuka in P3) as the teacher Mrs. Terauchi. It’s a fantastic soundtrack across the board.

A Welcome Remake, But Not for Persona Newcomers

Persona 3 Reload is a slick remake of a historically important game that improves upon the original's presentation and adds features from later series releases. If you want to see where the Persona series hit its stride and started catching the attention of American gamers, Persona 3 Reloaded is the most refined way to do it. That said, it doesn’t stray far enough to overcome the original’s most tedious aspects. Tartarus is so long and repetitive that it wears out its welcome, and the dungeon-crawling elements don’t offer anything besides, well, dungeon crawling. For newbies especially, Persona 4 and Persona 5 both have more engaging adventuring and better-developed character interactions.

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