I love Persona. I put in 100 hours to beat Persona 5 the week it came out on, living on a diet of Domino’s 2 for $12 deals until my parents tried to put me in the psych ward. I wish they did, so I could explain to my court-ordered psychiatrist how Tartarus is a reflection of our collective consciousness in a Jungian sense.
So when I saw Persona 3 was getting a remake, I was pumped. Finally, I can pretend I have friends again. My warm feelings disappeared, however, when Producer Ryota Niitsuma clarified that Persona 3 Reload will not have any content from FES or Persona 3 Portable.
What even is the point of this remake, then? The original graphics are so stylized that age barely changes the experience. Look at this side by side. You can see the fresh coat of paint, but looks never held back the original Persona 3. Hell, all the drawn artwork like character portraits just look different, not improved. If you played this remake then waited a month, your mental image of what Persona 3 looks like then and now would be identical.
People were clamoring for P3R explicitly to unify the extra content from FES and female MCs from P3P. Fans never complained that the anime characters on the Playstation 2 didn’t look close enough to real life anime characters. Fans complained that they had to choose between playing as a woman or playing the 30 hour epilogue.
It’s ironic that Aegis leads off the Reload trailer when her social link and massive role in the epilogue from FES won’t even be in the game. The entire point of the Persona franchise is taking my waifus out for coffee so we can talk about trauma and surface level pop psychology! Even worse, you won’t be able to social link with the resident dog Koromaru. Koromaru only loves people who bought P3P.
As it stands, we have three competing versions of Persona 3: FES with the extra content and epilogue, P3P with the female MC, and P3R with the updated graphics. If you want to fully experience Persona 3 you need to play a 100 hour game three times, and that’s criminal.
So this reload is pointless. Atlus would be better off remaking Persona 1 or 2, which are great stories hidden by archaic systems that make you feel like you’re deciphering the Akashic Records. No, wait. Persona 2 is a duology with two versions, Innocent Sin and Eternal Punishment, and there’s no way Atlus gets that right.
As an Etrian Odyssey fan, I knew the inside scoop that P3 fans would be getting screwed. Atlus just released the remastered Etrian Odyssey collection, which somehow missed the fact that EVERY GAME IN THE COLLECTION has an Untold remake with full story modes on the DS. Atlus charges $40 dollars a pop for each of these incomplete, decade-old DS games. This shows us why they didn’t include the extra content for Etrian Odyssey or Persona: you’ll pay anyways, piggy.
For now, us deluded Persona fans can just pretend that Atlus might make the female MC content available as gay romance.
