For a lot of my time being aware of Persona as a series my friends who love it have begged me to play Persona 3: Portable specifically, claiming it to be A: the game I would like the most and B: possibly the best the series has to offer. Around the time Portable came to Steam, rumors of a remake were floating around, so naturally, I waited.
Reload eventually does come around. It looks good, sounds good, the combat is modernized, and it's even on Gamepass. No reason to not touch it.

Persona 3 is a bold attempt at creating the most realistic possible environment for the average 16-year-old JRPG protagonist. In some ways, it works. In many, its formula wears thin. Yet the story and message is compelling enough to justify pulling through it. Reload, however, does very little to improve the base game, only damaging its presentation and trivializing whatever challenge existed.

Ultimately, I feel that this game is too fucking long. Not frequently am I against long games, and neither is ~60 hours criminally long, but the way P3 is structured with its life-sim gameplay loop makes the game drone on for what feels like forever. The first few months I found this system quite novel, and as a college student with nearly not enough spare time on their hands I appreciated the whole "make the best of the time you have" notion. Yet, around November-December (late game) the system begins to wear extremely - you simply run out of things to do. At this point you simply do not have a need for any of the day-to-day facilities / activities. Money is not an issue, and all of your social skills are maxed out, so the only thing really of value are the Social Links.
The problem with the Social Links was, at this point, I had completed all the links I cared about. Sure, I could have skipped the day, but with such a heavy emphasis on completing the links, I felt a need to attempt at enduring the Moon and Magician links. At this point I’m not engaging with the story anymore. I have no active interest in these stories, all I want is the reward that comes with them. Obviously, this will vary from player to player, but it feels antithetical to have a message about valuing each person in your life and then encouraging the player to engage with characters they have no value for.
Granted, this is a very small handful of social links. Many of them are very likeable and interesting. The Star, The Sun, and the Hierophant, for instance, are all relatively compelling (the sun especially) and are worth reading. The character progression felt natural, and the messages they wanted to send were good. The issue is that at some point it’s too much reading. I stop caring because I just finally fused Thanatos last night in Tartarus and want to get to evening ASAP so I can actually use him.
Had the runtime been cut by 10-20 hours, I feel this loop would have gone a lot better. I liked it at first quite a bit, but it overstays it’s welcome by a lot. The story itself does not warrant a runtime this long, because unlike most RPG’s most of this games runtime isn’t directly advancing the plot. I’d much prefer a 60 hour game like Xenoblade Chronicles where those 60 hours are traversing new environments, rather than 60 hours of simulating my life with a side of ripping up demons with my entourage of Sick Mythology Ghosts.
The actual gameplay, the turn-based JoJo’s inspired combat, is a fun as a turn-based RPG will get in my opinion. I’m not a big fan of turn-based games, say it’s Pokemon trauma or simply that it’s a dull medium, but I liked the way this game did it. Again, in the early hours it was fun attempting to figure out the best way to stun the enemy in front of me with my limited ability set and seeing how I could chain moves together. Eventually though, much like the LifeSim gameplay, it too gets stale. By endgame you are more than reasonably strong, and have enough Personas in your arsenal to consistently topple any enemy in front of you. The challenge doesn’t scale well with the player’s own strength. Rather, the system itself can’t scale with the player, because the way this game creates difficulty is by having enemies that simply break the rules of the game, either attacking more than once a round (Reaper) or having access to every element in the game at once to consistently buttfuck your team. It doesn’t exactly feel like a challenge, just that you are getting screwed. This is really the only way to make difficulty because the new systems in place, being Theurgy and the lack of Tactics, makes you unbelievably strong. While I understand the removal of Tactics, Theurgy does nothing but make the game trivial. You should not have access to a move that will one-shot both the final boss and the Reaper (the normal superboss). Not before NG+, at the very least. Endgame personas like Alice, Messiah, and Helel are already so powerful there is simply not a need for something like Armageddon to exist. Nothing justifies its existence.

The story Persona 3 offers is the actual reason I wanted to play this game, and aside from the day-to-day formula fucking up the pacing, I liked it a lot. There is a lot this game wants to say, and many of the themes hit very close to home. Some of the ideas are relatively simple, like valuing the people in your life and putting trust in them, while others are more thought-provoking, such as asking the player what they want to actually do with their time and, later, life. I think these ideas only hit as hard due to the gameplay – had I not been making dozens of connections with seemingly random NPC’s and plotting out how I use my day to get the most out of it I don’t think these ideas would have been driven home so hard.
However, those are the points the gameplay tells. The actual story tells something much more moving and personal. The main cast of P3, SEES, is a substandard group of teens who, for the most part, have been consistently dealt the worst cards possible in life. Each one of them has something that haunts them and thus an equal reason to be in the fight. It's a lot about losing and learning to work through that loss. That through each other we all find purpose and meaning, and that's more than enough to keep going. The emotional apex of P3 revolves around these characters choosing to stand against impossible odds for the sake of each other, staring the literal human version of death in the eyes and crying "I want to live." It's very much about the struggle of being. It's hits home in ways I can't describe. It's very powerful. But in the moment, watching this unfold, I barely cared.
Why? The games pacing. With how long it actually takes to get to that point, I had emotionally checked out. It wasn't that I was never invested, because I found Aragaki's arc very emotional and impactful, and mostly because during that midpoint the game's story moved. By the time I had reached the end, the game stretched itself so thin I was just waiting for it to be done. When the wheels on Persona 3 spin, it drives its point way in. But the moment it starts to slow, it loses all of its impact and never gets it back.
SEES themselves are relatively enjoyable and have distinct ideals/motives and personalities. Their writing is good, believable, and you get to witness their arcs transform them very smoothly and believably, save for Aigis and Mitsuru. It feels rare to see a main cast this big and have them all be so notably diverse. Fuck, it’s rare to have a character that is literally a Normal Dog and have them be equally as nuanced as every other human without saying a literal fucking word. It’s impressive.


Here’s a critique that’s Reload specific.
This game FUCKED with the art direction and tone of the original. Colors in Reload are far more saturated than they should be, starkly contrasting with the games relatively darker tone. The original game’s color palette consisted of a lot of darks. It’s much harder to convey the weight of trying to stop the world from ending as a group of teens when the living room is plastered bright greens and blues rather than the dark greens and greys of the original. I shouldn’t have to open the settings menu and turn the brightness slider down 3+ notches to achieve a fitting tone.
The artstyle itself also got terribly generic. P3’s artstyle was pretty damn distinct when it came out, and the emotion expressed in each sprite was unparalleled. Reload released with an artstyle that is a slightly updated version of what Persona 5 has been preaching, and the charm the original once held is completely lost. This itself doesn’t detract much, the art is still good, but it’s a shame to see P3 stripped of it’s original identity in turn for something that looks like everything else.
Something about the lack of FEMC and Epilogue can go here too.

Persona 3’s greatest sin is simply that it is too long. A lot of my enjoyment was retracted by this games length. And as a remake, it doesn't do much to improve it's predecessor. Otherwise, it’s alright. A lot of the things this game hopes to achieve I truly believe were done better in Neon Genesis Evangelion and Xenoblade Chronicles.

If this is the best Persona has to offer, I don’t think I’m interested in what else it has in store.