Despite jumping on this remake fairly soon after its release, I don't have nearly the history with this series that many others interested in it will. I played Persona 3 Portable on the PSP for a few hours close to when it came out, but while I liked it well-enough, I wasn't too gripped with the opening of the game and generally struggle to play especially long games on handheld so I didn't get further than that. I've also played the first 3-5 hours of Persona 5 a few years ago, but didn't get too into its opening either. Otherwise, I just have not-insignificant knowledge-by-osmosis of the series from a few close friends who are very into these games. So all that to say, while I didn't nearly go into this game without any prior knowledge, I will mostly be reviewing this game based on my thoughts on Persona 3 rather than how Reload compares to previous versions, only noting the remake status in a few places where appropriate.
It's like she doesn't realize what day it is and that Junpei and I obviously have plans.
Persona 3 is undoubtedly one of the most anime games I've ever played (if not #1). I used to watch a good deal of anime when I was much younger, but the last decade or so, I can just never get into it. I guess I'd say I "grew out of it," though I don't mean the usual condescension that phrase often implies. It's true some anime tropes just hit me in the cringe a little hard these days, but I mostly just feel like my interests have changed and I struggled to hold more than a passing interest in the few shows I've occasionally tried out over the last ten years or so. That said, I find this general aversion doesn't really translate to games and I still enjoy a good number of games with a highly-anime style, even if it's not a go-to genre for me. Even still, this was a serious reservation I had about playing a game so emphatically dedicated to the anime High School slice-of-life concept. That said, while I think the characters, sub-plots, and premise probably would've landed with me a bit more in my younger days, I still enjoyed the game and style quite well and managed to only have a few wince moments throughout its length.
I realize this is partially a dating sim and these are High Schoolers, but damn are there a lot of horny and/or creepy-ass people in this game.
One of the most striking features of the game is the Social Link system which finds your character interacting with, befriending, and shaping the lives of several people. This ends up being the core of a lot of the game outside of dungeon-crawling and combat as while some of your companions eventually become Social Links, much of your time is spent managing your day-to-day schedule with a variety of NPCs. The bulk of these Social Links are related to your school life (which is unsurprising, given your 6-day school week), but there are several involving adults and people outside of school too. These Social Links follow a series of hangouts where you'll answer questions that will improve your relationship with the social link to varying degrees, which not only has mechanical implications I won't get into, but also progress their individualized sub-plot. While I consider this a core part of the game and is most of the aspect I personally enjoyed, the Social Links themselves vary a lot in quality. Several of them are genuinely moving and enjoyable and provide solid side-story content to complement the game's main plot. But among other people you hang out with are some frankly unpleasant people and you are incentivized to indulge their proclivities and encourage their delusions to progress the Social Link. I enjoyed those particular sub-plots more when I viewed it more as my character being somewhat sadistically invested in watching them fall. Caveats aside though, the schedule-management simulator is shockingly quite engaging and addicting and lining up your schedule with your various Social Links' availability is a large part of that fun.
Relatedly, there's a social stats system measuring our protagonist's developing Courage, Charm, and Academics. This was a pretty fun minor mechanic in which your actions are rewarded with stat boosts that will occasionally come in handy when interacting with Social Links. For instance, choosing to spend your time studying will improve your academics, whereas working at the cafe will improve your Charm and Courage (as well as get you paid). Certain Social Links won't activate or progress beyond a certain point if you don't have a high enough stat in a certain category so you will spend much of your non-Social Link waking hours (usually at night) upping these stats. I found this weirdly pretty fun early on and it reminded me a lot of my days as a kid addicted to Monster Rancher. My only real complaints are that these stats honestly are relevant to very little considering how much work goes into maxing them and further, given the length of the game, you're likely to max them no later than 2/3 through, leaving a lot of your night time weirdly empty beyond that.
But wait a second, is this just a dating-sim visual novel or a JRPG? That's a very good question actually. However, yes, there is a significant turn-based JRPG gameplay element to the game and in my eyes it is very hit-or-miss. On the positive side, I think the combat system itself is pretty good. There's a lot of depth and breadth to it with numerous damage types that enemies will have strengths and weaknesses to. You have to do some trial-and-error to find these, but once you get a well-rounded few personas (personae?) and party, you can trigger satisfying combos that allow you to mop the floor with the enemies before they can even act. While turn-based combat is somewhat out of fashion in this day and age, I found the mechanics of this system to feel pretty fluid and engaging most of the time, likely helped with the faster-pace of this being a more recent remake. Further, our protagonist is not limited to just one persona and there's a very large but straight-forward encyclopedia of entities you can control to give you many many options. Admittedly, the variety of these personae's abilities gets repetitive once you've gotten halfway through the game, but there's still a good deal of variety and depth to this system you can explore.
The downside to this more "gameplay" side of Persona 3 is that the singular major dungeon, Tartarus, is frankly unambivalently fucking awful. It is just a giant tower comprising 250+ floors procedurally-generated using dull combinations of the same handful of room layouts, no real puzzles or story elements beyond occasional repetitive stock dialogue, and the same few encounters over and over and over and over. I didn't mind the first stretch of Tartarus, especially as I was just getting accustomed to the combat system and still learning. The next few were okay, especially as you start to get new party members to try out, adding some variety. But by the last 4 or 5 trips to Tartarus (which I typically tried to get through in one block per story segment all at once), I actively dreaded it and started just watching TV or listening to audiobooks while I ground through it. I was thoroughly disturbed when I heard that Reload actually improves several things about Tartarus and it was somehow worse in previous versions. I was going to add a caveat or plus side but I realize I don't really have one. Even enjoying the combat system as I mentioned didn't help much considering how terribly repetitive the encounters are. This is basically entirely the reason this isn't a 5-star game to me and it says a lot about the rest of the game that I still give it 4 as the Tartarus dungeon itself tempts a 1-star rating in a vacuum. I just hate it and think the game would be significantly better if you had a mod that skips Tartarus and levels you accordingly to handle the story's combat sections.
Okay, I guess that's a caveat: there are a few mini-dungeon segments that break up the different months of the game with some exploration and combat, generally taking place outside Tartarus. Those parts I generally liked pretty well and were a great change-up from Tartarus, especially with the more interesting puzzle-like boss fights. The above paragraph doesn't otherwise apply to those segments.
The main story of the game is as well kind of hit or miss, but mostly a hit. My only reservations are that the very beginning (3-5 hours) is pretty slow and unengaging and that the middle third of the game felt full of filler. I know the series' reputation is often all about boasting how large and long the games are, but I feel like, in classic anime fashion, this is only accomplished by including enough filler to make Naruto weep (okay, maybe not that bad). That said, the rest of the main plot I really enjoyed. I think it does all the things that a good anime premise should quite well. It has a good focus on theme with an intriguing problem the main cast is specially equipped to face and turns your understanding of the world on its head multiple times. The characters are generally good. Most of the time they can be a little one-dimensional, but with a story this long, they inevitably open up to be more interesting and serve multiple story-telling purposes. While I enjoyed most of the parts aside from those I mentioned at the start of this paragraph, the final act of the game (the last 2 or 3 months I think) were pretty outstanding and felt like a huge payoff when the slog of the big middle and the seemingly endless Tartarus runs had me considering putting the game down. While I wish the downsides earlier on weren't there, I do feel like the concluding arc was really satisfying and made it all worth it. It's definitely one of those stories that feels like a massive investment that probably took more of your time than it should've, but leaves you feeling bittersweet when you finally have to roll the credits and say goodbye to this story and characters you've spent so much time with (unless I suppose you're up for a NG+ run...).
I mainly picked this up because one of those aforementioned Persona-obsessed friends was playing it on Game Pass and I thought I'd try it with a Game Pass trial. While playing such a long game with a 2-week time limit is something I'd normally not recommend, I think it helped me to push through those early hours of the game that really didn't hook me and also kept me going so I actually finished it out. In fact, I didn't play it much the first 5 days of that 2 weeks so it was mostly during a little over a week I finished this 60-hour game (I'm certainly no expert on comparing the versions, but this one seems significantly shorter than previous versions, likely because the load times are non-existent and with the number of screen transitions in this game, I imagine that has a massive impact on overall playtime). At the end of the day, I'm glad I did finish it. As I ranted about, I found the dungeon-exploration frankly pretty awful and that left some sour taste in my mouth for the game; but on the whole I was pretty happy with it. I'm definitely going to give it some time, maybe even a lot of time given my Tartarus-fatigue (though I've heard the dungeons improve considerably with the following games), but I do expect I'll try 4 and 5 some time, in whatever version is out by then. Side note: do they really need so many damn versions of these games?!
