Persona 3 Reload (PS5)
Played: Feb 03 - Apr 13 2024
I don't fully remember lead me to learning about Persona 3 close to 14 years ago, but I was definitely in a phase where I was looking for undub games I could burn and play on my chipped PS2. Not knowing a thing about SMT or Persona, I loaded up P3 FES and have been engrossed in the series since.
I've watched a lot of other people play forms of Persona 3 since then but haven't replayed it myself, and look forwarded to doing so with this remake of it. Visually and stylistically, the game looked great with the characters and menus animating well.
I had a lot of fun going through the story again, and while there's still a good amount of angst, this felt like the smoothest blending individual character plots and the overall plot.
It was of course disappointing they couldn't incorporate the female MC into the game, and wonder if they could have scaled back a bit of the new systems they added to include her.
That being said, the new additions they added to the game were the highlights of my playthrough. The extra opportunities to learn about your crew and really explore their characters was very enjoyable, especially the pseudo social links they added to spend time with the male members. The new scenes of gardening, cooking or watching TV were well written to fit these classic characters and helped give them new life.
By contrast, a lot of the old social links really feel shallow and some flat out suck (Kenji, Odagiri, and Suemitsu especially). It's unfortunate they couldn't have been changed up a bit.
The battle system and TARTARUS were also greatly reworked, taking heavy inspiration from the Persona 5 games. The new Theurgy system felt fun to use, almost too good at points, but it really excelled at playing to each characters' strengths and was a great way to inflict debuffs and statuses to play with.
I played on Hard and found it to be decent experience, sometimes with a light challenge, but I perhaps could have played on Merciless without issue. Most of the enemies, it didn't take too much to guess at weaknesses with knowledge picked up from previous games, but still felt rewarding to get right. They also added Monad doors to add extra challenge, but a lot of them felt a little too on-rails to really be more than just extra chores.
In the end, it was great to re-experience the game and it truly felt like "We made Persona 3 but with our current experience" for better or worse.
I haven't touched the Answer DLC still but it might be a several years cool down before that happens.