Persona 3 ReLoad is the story of seven teens (one of whom being an android), one tween, and one Shiba Inu of indeterminate age and their battle against a bad kind of death. Not the end of individual life, but the end of all life. The premature conclusion to humanity, brought about by the schemes of one long-dead nihilist, one egomaniac who has half an idea of what he’s doing, and three young people whom the previous two chuckleheads hurt so badly they cannot see any good or meaning in living.
The kids and the dog are the Special Extracurricular Execution Squad (S.E.E.S.). Their mission? At the start, it’s to scale Tartarus, an eldritch tower that replaces their school during the hidden 25th hour of the day, and discover the secrets of both it and the Shadows—monsters bound to the collective unconscious—who roam its shifting halls. As Persona 3 ReLoad progresses, S.E.E.S.’s mission evolves—from brawling through Tartarus to hunting twelve unusually powerful Shadows who play at mass destruction (sorry) on nights when the moon is full to putting the pieces together and figuring out what’s really going on and what there is to be done about it.
And living. Always living. One-time baseball player Junpei Iori searches for who he is and who he wants to be. Archery club lead Yukari Takeba grapples with her parents’ legacies, both of which are fraught. Mitsuru Kirijo works to do right, both as S.E.E.S.’s leader and as a friend to her fellow third years. Akihiko Sanada tries to break through to his best friend Shinjiro Aragaki, who’s trying to make amends for a disaster he holds himself responsible for. Fuuka Yamagishi tries to reach out to a world she’s kept back from. Ken Amada wants revenge. Koromaru, the Shiba Inu, cares for his human friends. Android Aigis wants to be close to the player character as she tries to figure out what it means to be alive. And the initially gloomy, hiding-in-his-headphones player character? Well, that’s up to you.
He’s got a year. The time is his/yours to use. Work at the multiplex, join the track team, become the sounding board for a terminally ill young author, befriend an old couple who’ve spent a long time grieving their son. Get into rooftop gardening and communal cooking. Be the Vincent Hanna to an evil Jesus-looking assassin-turned-cult-leader’s Neil McCauley. Fall in love. Fight the end of the future (Or, if you prefer, rage against the dying of the light).
Since Persona 3, which ReLoad is a from-the-ground-up-remake of, introduced the modern formula for Persona games in 2006, developer Atlus has maintained that formula’s core while continually refining it. Persona 3 ReLoad is thus both the most current iteration of that formula and a look back to where the series was in 2006. The game is split into two modes. Mode one: dungeon crawling in Tartarus, with turn-based combat pitting S.E.E.S. against various Shadows. Mode two: a high school social simulation where you navigate academia, friendship, and rapidly oncoming adulthood. While distinct in terms of gameplay, narratively, the two modes intersect repeatedly—whether that’s S.E.E.S. unlocking new abilities by hanging out and growing together or the major boss battles that swing around every full moon.
As intense as Persona 3 ReLoad’s bosses can be and as dramatic as the stories of its cast can get, the overall challenge is time. To thrive in ReLoad, you must balance challenging Tartarus with getting out in the world. If you’re going to fight for humanity, you need to care about humanity. The action can’t be your only juice. And to get out into the world, you need to better yourself—build up your courage and charm by braving angry customers at a coffee shop, studying for tests, and delving into the strange corners of the internet circa ReLoad’s fantastical 2009 setting to sharpen your smarts.
It’s a balancing act and a satisfying one. Getting stronger in Reload feels good—whether that means reaching the level necessary to fuse a powerful new Persona or watching your friendships pay off for your party in the form of new abilities and modifiers. And that strength is necessary. Persona 3 Reload is not a punishingly difficult game on its normal difficulty, but it will consistently challenge you to keep an eye on your party and your foe’s vulnerabilities, use your health and SP (which fuel physical and magical abilities, respectively) with care, and do the work to level up. Meet ReLoad on its terms, and you’ll keep up. Assume you can breeze through doing the minimum, and you’ll quickly find yourself stomped silly by horrible monsters based on tarot’s major arcana.
Narratively, Persona 3 ReLoad keeps close to the original story while working to flesh out its players. S.E.E.S’ male members, whose development was strictly confined to the main story in the first iteration of Persona 3, get lengthy side stories, as do some of the ensemble’s key supporting players.
ReLoad’s storytelling is, when at its best, tremendously moving. Death is a constant companion to its cast, whether in their past or present. Most of S.E.E.S. have lost loved ones. A writer you can befriend is grappling with the last stages of a terminal illness. In other cases, it’s more metaphorical. A young girl’s parents are divorcing acrimoniously. A rising track star must set aside his passion to join the workforce and provide for his family. ReLoad is often bleak, and at times, it’s wrenchingly sad. But it’s neither monotone nor monotonous. After all, everyone meets death someday, but until then, there is time. Time to wake up to a passion, time to get over yourself, time to make peace with the past.
Persona 3 ReLoad’s look matches its feel. The Dark Hour (the hidden 25th hour) bathes the world in a sickly green glow. Tartarus, constantly warping and changing appearance, whether a twist on something familiar or totally alien, always feels eerie and impossible. And while the city’s initial cleanliness and modernity aren’t nearly as gloomy as the original Persona 3’s, it makes for a strong contrast between the story’s early days and its climax, when things are falling apart to the point that trash gets left to gather.
Persona 3 ReLoad is worth playing, a strong reincarnation of a beloved game. But it does have some significant structural issues that are worth going into. For one, this isn’t a definitive version of Persona 3. It’s a definitive version of the original player character’s Persona 3. The female player character introduced in Persona 3 Portable and her story are both absent. Yes, granted, adding another potentially 100-hour campaign would be a big lift. But her route is beloved for a reason, and if you’re going to remake Persona 3 from the ground up, why not go all in? The same is true for The Answer, an epilogue starring Aigis that was added to a revision of Persona 3 called FES. While The Answer is coming, it’s as paid DLC—which Atlus has a long history of overcharging for.
More directly, while Persona 3 ReLoad’s new story material is strong and its gameplay an elegant refinement of Persona to date, structurally it’s still 2006’s Persona 3. The original 3 was not meant to be a game where you could, even with careful play, do everything on your first go-round. Subsequent entries are more lenient there, and it’s those entries ReLoad pulls its mechanics from.
This creates friction between the game’s structure and the player’s toolkit. This was most visible for me in the dissonance between the player character’s social stats and the ensemble’s availability. Between comparatively limited opportunities to hang out, the tension between lower requirements for advancing individual Social Link stories and the gating of several of those Links behind other Links, and the relative ease with which you can build up the player character’s Social Stats, it’s very possible to find yourself with days where there isn’t much to do, particularly in the late midgame.
With that said, as a long-time Persona dweeb and turn-based RPG fan, Persona 3 Reload is damn good. I’m glad to have taken the hundred hours to play it, and I’d be up for giving it another hundred. It’s time well used.
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