Persona 3: Reload review: A re-energized revival of a grim gaming classic

When grappling with a video game remake—in this case, Persona 3: Reload, which is, by our count, at least the fourth separately sold version of Atlus’ classic RPG to hit store shelves since the game first smashed its way into the genre back in 2006—you have to start by asking which kind of remake you’re actually dealing with. Cynical cash grab? A complete re-invention? Or the strange middleground—an effort to resurrect something singular, maybe a bit lost to the mists of past console generations, while tweaking the existing structure just enough to make it palatable to modern eyes?

Buy Persona 3 Reload: Amazon | Best Buy | Target | Humble Bundle

That last approach works best with games that are inherently timeless—which describes Persona 3 pretty well, for all that it’s a game all about the inexorable, crushing passage of time. Spending 30 hours (a mere fraction of its full length, admittedly) with Reload over the last few weeks, it repeatedly struck us how fresh, even daring, this two decade-old game felt, in both halves of its iconic Jekyll and Hyde act: The slow-paced, well-written high school dating sim playing out for half of its running time, and the brutal, mechanically rigorous role-playing game lurking beneath the surface. Its genius remains in the way each of these two games stands perfectly well on its own, while also finding points of intersection that deepen and emphasize its message about the bonds we forge through spending our precious time on the people around us. The Reload version adds in various quality of life features meant to smooth parts of the journey out—but never at the expense of that structure, which, whether you’re fighting for your life in a mysterious dungeon, or debating the choice of which of your high school friends to kill an afternoon shooting the shit with, never lets you forget that your life is constantly on the verge of slipping away.

But first, a synopsis for the uninitiated: Persona 3: Reload drops you into the fashionable shoes of a young Japanese high school student (male only; sorry, Persona 3 Portable fans) who transfers to a new school, only to find himself swept up into the actions of SEES, a student club whose remits involves staying up way past the bedtime of the world in order to fight bizarre goo monsters formed from the collective unconscious. Battle is performed by summoning the titular Personas, gods and demons representing aspects of humanity that can only be brought out—in imagery that hasn’t gotten any less nu-metal angsty now that the game is old enough to vote—by pointing a magical gun at your own head and pulling the trigger. The story follows this crew of extra-curricular monster hunters though most of a full calendar year, slowly unraveling the mystery behind the ominous Dark Hour, while also juggling school work, part-time jobs, and, if you can get your Charm stat high enough, maybe even a few dates.

In returning to the world of Gekkoukan High in 2024, Reload has eased up some of the more obnoxious pressures of this double life. For instance, you no longer need to worry about your protagonist getting sick because he spent too long adventuring the night before in Tarturus, the game’s massive central dungeon; he can get frozen, burnt, charmed, and worse to your heart’s content, and still be fresh and ready for class the following day. On a similar note, the game’s initially stingy approach to items that replenish your magic power—a critical point of deprivation in P3’s combat system, which puts a huge emphasis on MP-hungry elemental special attacks and spells—has been loosened a bit by a new resource that can be spent for a full party heal, a huge boon in a game where every night spent hunting monsters is another night where you’re not working your coffee shop gig or studying trig. Other new systems add convenience, or depth: Your heroes each have a new super move gauge that allows you to unleash devastating attacks on your opponents (a welcome addition to a combat system that often sees you fight the same enemies over and over again); the game will now let you default to controlling each of your other party members (as opposed to the sometimes frustrating auto-pilot of the original release); and you can even assign a button to instantly queue up an attack targeting an enemy’s weakness (provided you’ve already figured it out).

These tweaks—and similar ones in the game’s daytime half, like regular text messages that let you know which of your friends is up for hanging out on any given afternoon—work because they largely obviate those parts of Persona 3’s gameplay that are less interesting, in favor of making it easier to focus on those choices that really matter. (Like whether I’m going to spend my day off of school flirting with my MMORPG buddy, or buffing up my relationship with my overzealous track team rival. Important, fate-of-the-world stuff.) You could argue that removing the penalties for spending too long in the dungeon runs somewhat counter to this ethos—the idea that mismanaging your time and energy during your nocturnal adventures can have lingering effects on your day-to-day life dovetails perfectly with the game’s overall themes—but it’s the kind of sacrifice of a thematic victory in favor of an experiential one that’s hard to fault.

What Atlus has done here, then, is a loving act of recreation and reinvigoration, applying a lovely coat of polish to one of the best, most thoughtfully designed RPGs of the 21st century, in such a way as to not bury the original’s beautiful flaws beneath the gloss. Persona 3 remains a game willing to idly kill time with multiple scenes of mundane high school life, the supernatural only rarely intruding into the daily grind of annoying teachers, mean classmates, and the ever-present threat of mid-terms. It also remains a game willing to give you a big-ass dungeon made up of about 5 different room types, all arrayed in different patterns a hundred different times—counting on its beefy, never-mindless combat, and the steady dwindling of the player’s resources in each expedition, to keep this kind of grinding feeling fresh. And it especially remains happy to kill you if you mis-manage either of these systems. (A word of warning to new players: The game is not screwing around when it starts warning you something big and terrible is coming some night soon; prepare yourself to thrive or die.)

The fact of the matter is that Persona 3 was a masterpiece in 2006, and remains a masterpiece in 2024. (For all that we wish Atlus had chosen to include the new content from either the Portable edition, or updated re-release Persona 3: FES, in this fancy new version; alas.) Those who missed the first game once upon a time, but who fell in love with Persona 4 or 5, will find themselves in for a dark, sometimes somber treat: Wonderfully written, craftily designed, and featuring a soundtrack that remains somewhere close to best-in-class, it makes you feel every flip of the calendar page, every cruel tick of the running clock. You only have so much time, it asserts, again and again, from a dozen different angles; how will you choose to spend it? There are much worse ways we can think of than revisiting an old friend like this.

Buy Persona 3 Reload: Amazon | Best Buy | Target | Humble Bundle

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