Persona 3 Reload - Switch 2 Review
"A remake that respects the original."
Before we start this review, I’d like to preface it with a few statements. I am a longtime fan of the Persona franchise that believes that Persona 3 (and Persona 4 for that matter) is perfectly fine on its own and does not need a remake, especially now that Persona 3 Portable has been made widely available on all platforms just months before this game was originally announced and other games in the franchise desperately need it more. I say this to let you know beforehand that this review for Persona 3 Reload is going to be HEAVILY biassed and will sound very annoying to the average person. With that out of the way, let's get this review going. Hey, did you know this game is about the inevitability of death? Crazy, right?
The Good
Persona 3 Reload does a lot of things right when it comes to spicing up an admittedly older game (oh my God, I’m only just now realising the original game was made nearly twenty years ago; I’m so old) while also sanding off some of its rougher edges. A lot of the quality-of-life features that have slowly been sprinkled into the Persona franchise since the original Persona 3’s release have made their way to Persona 3 Reload, including some new ones. Two of the biggest ones are the ability to rewind your save file by small increments on the fly. Let's say you accidentally wanted to explore Tartarus but forgot to buy healing items or new equipment; well, now you can just rewind back to before you entered and no longer have a wasted day in your calendar. The other being the Theurgy attacks, every member in your party now has a bar that slowly fills up during combat, which, when filled, can unleash a powerful super move on the enemy. This isn’t new to the RPG genre but it's really surprising that it's taken this long for the Persona series to add it to their games. There are many small additions to the game, from getting messages from people when they want to hang out to an improved fast travel system that really helps streamline a lot of the gameplay.
As a small-time voice actor myself, I have personally wanted this addition for nearly twenty years; all Social Links are now fully voice acted. There is only so much a person can intuit about a character from written text so having everyone fully voice acted adds so much to these characters that were previously pretty forgettable. I’ve known these characters but I never felt like I’ve truly known them until I heard them. Getting to hear the sombre tenderness from the old couple that run the bookstore and the denial and desperation from Kazushi after his injury and who could forget the fat kid…most people really but I dislike him significantly less than before. This is a change I hope the Persona franchise keeps going forward.
TL;DR
- Streamlined gameplay
- Fully voiced Social Links
The Bad
I think the biggest disappointment to me as a longtimefan of the franchise is that Persona 3 Reload is not a definitive version of Persona 3. For those out of the know, there were three separate releases of Persona 3: you have the base game of Persona 3, Persona 3 FES, which added a bunch of extra stuff, including a bonus post-credits story and lastly there's Persona 3 Portable, which was a PSP port of the original game but with an option to play as a female protagonist with a whole new set of Social Links, new cutscenes and dialogue. Persona 3 Reload is just a remake of the original game and the post-credits story from Persona 3 FES as DLC, meaning there is still no way to experience everything Persona 3 has to offer in a single game.
As for the actual gameplay, though, it really does feel like there wasn’t any consideration with balancing when it comes to retrofitting all the quality of life features from other games in the franchise into Persona 3’s combat system. Before going in I heard a lot about how pathetically easy Persona 3 Reload is so I did this review on the hardest difficulty and other than the beginning of the game where your options are more limited, yeah, people were right, this game is quite the joke in the difficulty department. A part of me wants to say it's because I’ve been playing these games for around two decades now but another part of me looks at Ken and his already versatile kit of electricity, light and healing abilities being given a new skill that fully revives the party, heals everyone to full health and then casts Tetrakan & Makarakan on everyone. Sometimes there can be too much of a good thing.
The rest of these are more personal nitpicks but this is my review and I’m an obnoxious, obsessive fan so I’ll do what I want. I’ll start off with the most subjective of these and that's the music. For the most part the music in Persona 3 Reload is really well done and could be an improvement on the original depending on who you ask but a lot of the songs with vocals are noticeably worse than their originals. A good example is Persona 3’s original battle theme, Mass Destruction, a song that has been living in my head rent-free since I was in high school. Not only does the song start a semitone off key but the chorus is sung as a solo now instead of a group harmony and it makes the song sound so flaccid. On top of this, I swear they’re actively trying to make “Burn My Dread” sound more like the “Burn My Bread” meme with this new mix. Yeah, the original song had some weird mispronunciations but it wasn’t this bad. I actively cannot hear that first D in the word “Dread” in the new mix.
I feel like I’m the only person to say this but I feel like the modern UI design of Atlus games is getting really annoying. Persona 5’s UI design was immaculate, yes but it was designed that way because of the game’s themes. Now it just feels like every game Atlus has made since then needs to one-up the previous one because of how successful Persona 5 was and how much its UI was praised. UI design in the Persona franchise has always been stylish but it is also clean and minimalistic. Persona 3 Reload’s UI is gorgeous, don’t get me wrong but it's really getting distracting and this whole thing is making Persona 5 stand out less in comparison.
Guys, I love the Persona series as much as the next guy but some of these extra scenes added to Persona 3 Reload are getting to be a bit much; we’re starting to get into flanderisation territory here. There are scenes that reference the Persona 5 pancakes meme and some nods to the now legendary Hiimdaisy Persona 4 comic, which was cute the first time they did it a decade ago in Persona 4 Golden but now it's just getting obnoxious, more jokes about Akihiko’s obsession with protein, and for the love of God, Mitsuru only threatened to execute someone once in the original game but that's just become her catchphrase at this point.
TL;DR
- Still no definitive version of Persona 3
- Difficulty is toned down significantly
- New mixes of old songs aren’t as good
- The flashy presentation and UI is getting old
- Some new scenes get too self-referential.
Final Score: 8/10
Persona 3 Reload is a remake that respects the original. While I personally prefer the original Persona 3, you are totally valid if you prefer this one. It wasn’t until I started writing this review that I realised I’m probably not the right person to review this game because I’m too close to the franchise to look at it objectively for its own merits but at the end of the day, it's still Persona 3, one of the greatest RPGs in the genre; you don’t need me to tell you it's good.
Thank you for checking out our Persona 3 Reload Switch review, thank you to Sega (via Five Star Games) for providing the review code and thank you to our Patreon Backers for their ongoing support:
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