Topic: Persona 3 Reload (Switch 2) Review

[Shaymin]

If the fifth game in the series invented jazz, I guess the third invented funeral dirges.

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/72536/persona-3-reload-switch-2-review

I would have written a content warning normally but the game's puts it better than I ever could.

Of all of the Atlus RPGs that are accessible on Switch 2, I would have to say that regardless of selected difficulty at the start, the most difficult game is any variation of Persona 3. Not due to anything about the battle system or social systems, but I’ve tried to play versions of Persona 3 across five different systems and have always struggled with the game’s themes. As someone who has probably suffered from clinical depression for most of my adult life and has been on anti-depressants non-stop for the entire 2020s, this game makes Nocturne feel like an average Pokemon playthrough by comparison. And if you’re coming into Reload looking for a good RPG instead of the definitive version of the game that it’s needed since 2010, the Switch 2 is definitely the place to play it.

As this is now the fourth different version of Persona 3, the story should be well known. Your self-named protagonist arrives on a Japanese island called Tatsumi Port Island late at night one night and runs into a phenomenon called the “Dark Hour”, in which everyone around turns into a coffin at midnight and those that don’t run the risk of being eaten by “Shadows”, rogue demons that have appeared on the island. A few days later, the main character discovers his talent for using the power of Persona to fight the Shadows, and is press-ganged into leading a high school’s Special Extracurricular Extermination Squad (SEES) against the Shadows, including climbing an obnoxiously large tower that takes over the high school every Dark Hour. The squad expands to include more students, a robot, a dog, and a twelve year old boy as they take down “Full Moon Shadows” every lunar month to try and stop the Dark Hour from happening any more.

Persona 3 was the first of the “modern trilogy” of Persona games, so it was the first to really use the concept of “social links” (later renamed “confidants” in 5) and there are some oddities. The core concepts remain the same: you meet up with people in the school and broader community who with the right dialogue options can provide enhancements to battle capabilities, including the ability to summon more powerful Personas as the link grows. The social links in 3 are the only ones in the modern trilogy that if not played properly can “reverse”, or essentially be broken–meaning you lose all of the benefits. Thankfully, one of the new options added for Reload is a rewind function to jump back without the need of reloading a prior save (though there’s plenty of slots for those, too). A lot of the major challenge regardless of which of the game’s five difficulty options you pick is sorting out the schedule of building the social links to maximize your growth. Although most days have two times for interaction, the options for social links are extremely limited at night due to most of the social links being students, so night sessions will usually be devoted to working jobs for extra cash or building your character’s social status since some links have checks against those stats. Thankfully, there’s only three stats to worry about versus five in the other games (“Charm”, “Courage”, and “Academics”) since some social links require one of them to be maxed. Previous renditions of Persona 3 have basically required you to confess love to every female Social Link in your age range: thankfully, Reload brought back the function from the later games for platonic relationships with the female social links so you can play a chaste hero if you choose. Although some of the male party members do not have social links with the main character, they do have new event options that provide exposition on them and battle boosts.

Fuuka would go on to have opinions about Roki Sasaki.

The battle system is turn-based and uses the speed (“Agility”) stat for turn order, so battles will have a predictable order. Player characters and enemies can have weaknesses to three varieties of physical attack (“Bash”, “Strike”, “Pierce”), and then the classic Shin Megami Tensei elements of fire/ice/thunder/wind/light/dark: hitting one of these weaknesses gives the attacker a “1 More” follow-up attack after knocking the opponent down. If the player party knocks down every opponent on the screen, they can activate the “All-Out Attack” to massively damage everything on screen if not outright win the battle. Reload adds on a new function called “Theurgy”, which unlocks after a couple of months of in-game time and gives each character access to a super move for mass damage, full party buffs / healing, or some other effect. Each party member builds the Theurgy meter differently, so although on paper it seems like a super move, the closest comparable is the various “Overdrive” modes Final Fantasy X had. It’s a simple system once you adjust to it, since it’s driven off things the characters are doing anyway. Apart from Theurgy, the other change compared to prior Persona 3 versions is that the characters have had skill set adjustments to make them more focused on primary roles, and light / dark elements now have basic damaging moves instead of being “one-hit kill or nothing” as they were previously.

Since the main character is capable of wielding every Persona in existence while his teammates are confined to a single one, it will be necessary to perform “fusions” of Personas for more powerful ones as the game proceeds. The “don’t call it a Pokedex” Demon Compendium can be partially built with post-battle rewards, but the most powerful Personas will require some time in the menus. The option to automatically see everything that can be fused is present in Reload, though mostly only with the Personas currently in your character’s stock, which might be a weird bunch since the most efficient way to build Social Links is to have a Persona of a tarot arcana that matches the arcana of the social link to maximize points. One pain point for me as a completionist in collecting games is that the money situation, especially early on, makes it hard to build a good stock of fusion material for later due to lack of funds. Even on the easiest difficulty, enemies do not drop money directly; the only way to get funds is to pick it as a post-battle reward in the “Shuffle Time” mechanic (randomly generates cards with items, money, healing, Personas) or by selling things picked up in the environment outside of battle.

A lot of the depressing parts of Persona 3 stem from the main dungeon being both dreary and overly long. The “Full Moon” dungeons are short and more of a boss rush, meaning that 95% of the battles in the game are in the slog known as Tartarus. Even with forced breaks in the climb every month, it’s still the same environment and randomly generated floors the whole way up with only the odd treasure or randomly fleeing enemy to break up the monotony. And of course, every battle in the game where you have to use a special move immediately plays an animation of someone pulling out a gun (excuse me, an “Evoker”) and shooting themselves in the head. Is it any wonder why it’s taken me nearly a decade and a half to beat Persona 3 in some form?

Somehow I doubt that shooting myself in the head with trauma would produce a Wind spell.

There’s a major elephant in the room with Reload as well: the lack of the female playable character option from the Portable version (as seen on the Switch). I fully understand why this is the case: it would be like creating an entirely different game given the female protagonist has largely different social links and it would be necessary to create new linked events for the female party members who wouldn’t be a social link in her story. If they included a female option in the launching game, we wouldn’t have seen Reload anywhere until 2026 or later. At least the Switch 2 version would’ve been day and date with the Xbox Series version? Still, there’s one major thing that a potential female Reload would have to account for: one of the female protag’s social links in Portable was a seemingly romantic link with the previously mentioned 12 year old boy. Sure, Reload cut out a flagrantly transphobic scene involving the male MC, but there’s still at least one questionable social link involving teacher / student relations of the “inappropriate” variety.

Reload is certainly the best we’ve ever seen Persona 3 look on a Nintendo system, though given the previous contender was an upscaled PSP game that’s not a high bar. Still, the demons stand out even more now, and little flourishes on the characters even in the background are adapted well to the Switch 2. The game runs smoothly as well, I didn’t notice any slowdown in either docked or handheld when playing. The soundtrack is the usual Persona series banger, but there was a controversial move when the voice actors for the main playable characters were all recast for Reload (with the voice actors who didn’t shoot their career in both feet appearing in cameos). Thankfully, the new voice actors did a great job, and I have to give special thanks to the new voice for Junpei who managed to do what their predecessor couldn’t and play Junpei in a way that I actually wanted to use him in my party and socialize with him.

If it wasn’t for the flood of RPGs I still have to play this year, I think this would be “teh urn” for Persona 3. As it sits, I do want to see this one through to graduation, knowing full well what awaits me there, and the 45 minute / 13 stage final boss fight I have to go through to do it. There’s still some structural issues with Persona 3, but it’s probably the most underappreciated member of its trilogy.