persona 3 was a game with identity, intent, purpose, intentionality, heart, and, most importantly, creativity. i don't enjoy the lot i've been cast in life where i have to play bad versions of persona 3 and say why they're bad, whether it be the answer, portable, or this. reload is not just a bad remake of persona 3, it is a bad game that tells an interesting story in a ho-hum and pedestrian way. it takes so many narrative risks and choices from the original presentation and either waters them down or overly explains them to make sure the lowest common denominator doesn't have to interpret art. even divorced from its source material, this game fails to create a gameplay experience worth investing time in. as a remake, it fails to capture what persona 3 meant. as a JRPG, it is a dull affair with little challenge or complexity. persona 3 reload fails to be worth the effort it takes to play it.

the design doc of persona 3 reload had a very clear goal: leave no one behind, whether it be in story or gameplay. this results in story cutscenes being more explicit and less interpretive (compare the opening FMV with yukari) and gameplay that refuses to obstruct the player in meaningful ways. to be more specific, reload sacrifices any need for the player to become competent with its systems to make sure that anyone can beat this game. theurgy makes the game brainless and poisons basically every boss fight (ken can get a theurgy skill a little over halfway through the game that casts mediarahan + samarecarm + tetrakarn + makarakarn on the entire party). resource management is embarrassingly easy to trivialize (yukari can cast media for literally 1 (one) SP; there is a veritable buffet of SP items that you can trip over in daily life for little to no investment; theurgy overall negates the importance of SP and running out of SP is not the death knell it could be in orginal). social links as a whole are extremely easy to manage both due to point requirements being lower to accommodate for needing to spend more days on new content like linked episodes. hell, remember persona fusion? now it's been greatly dumbed down such that even triangle fusion isn't available anymore. this game is a concession that persona 3 was too ambitious and needed to be toned down. this is a remake that asserts that persona 3 did too much and tries to do less instead.

i'm not even beating the dead horse that is my opinion on party control because there's so many more issues to address. on basically every level, this game has either simplified or deescalated the complexity of its mechanics to accommodate a mainstream audience. i don't think there's inherently anything wrong with making persona 3's systems more accessible, but i think these capitulations go overboard and rob the game of compelling gameplay moments. there are no bosses in the game that truly force me to approach a challenge in a new way or think outside the box in the way that bosses like change relic did. every boss in this game is made longer to accommodate for theurgy damage values without any sort of intelligent design to make the fights feel more exciting for that length of time. boss fights are longer and easier because it's more cinematic to see mitsuru skate around and use her theurgy instead of letting the player use their own competency-based skills and strategy to end the fight. i am not the person who's going to cry that atlus sold out or whatever, but i am the person who's going to tell you that persona 3 reload feels like an undercooked experience because it consistently refuses to ask anything of the player. this game is easy, this game is simple, and this game is uninteresting.

above all else, this game begs one question: who on earth is telling atlus/sega that persona games need to be longer and have more content? persona 3 was a game that had a slowburn start that reload now turns into a bloated nightmare. everything takes so much longer in reload and everything feels more belabored, so i can't blame anyone for getting burnt out or even fucked off from this game's plot by the time things start picking up steam. on top of this, a lot of the new slice of life content wastes so much of the player's time. why do we need multiple scenes dedicated to kenji's performance on job day? i remember when saying that persona 3 was 70 hours felt like i was talking about this gargantuan piece of art. meanwhile, in reload, i hit 70 hours somewhere between september and november. these games do not need to be this long, and it actively ruins the experience to do so. persona 5 being a triple digit hour experience was a bad thing, not something to aspire to.

it's hard to not be at least a little offended because, whether or not P Studio intended it, they have basically hollowed out what made persona 3 so unique, so special. reload looks drab and unimpressive in UE4, and so much of the moody visuals get lost in the graphical fidelity. iwatodai dorm feels too bright, and then when january rolls around, they make the color scheme so muted that it is genuinely comedic. and there's just some really baffling and ugly visual decisions they made, like how everyone in club escapade stands motionlessly in pose. meanwhile, lotus juice has his fingerprints all over the OST in a way that just doesn't work ("mindin' my biz, so mind your own biz"). persona 3 was more than just a game with impressive systems that engaged the player, it was also a piece of art that had an aesthetic that gets lost here. this game feels completely identity-less when compared to the original because the original was both a deconstruction and a hybrid of genres. in many ways, reload doesn't just fail to live up to that artistic intent, it outright doesn't seem to know it was even there in the first place.

and i get it, as a fan of persona 3, my opinion has a giant asterisk at the end of it. why listen to a star wars fan tell you about why phantom menace is the worst movie ever? i will own up and openly admit i expected this game to be bad and had greatly wanted it to not exist. i had a feeling atlus would fuck it up somehow. i don't like being right about that. at the same time, i think there are missteps here that would stand out regardless of familiarity with the source material. yukari's edginess is completely deleted from her character here and she now just sounds and acts like chie on vyvanse rather than a girl with abandonment issues and trauma. fuuka got turned from "weird girl who serves as the empathetic core of the cast" to "girl who could have a thrilling conversation about spoiled milk". and reload isn't the first time akihiko's been sanded down to "protein fanatic who trains a lot", but it's probably the most offensive here. wouldn't it be really fucking funny if, the whole time you were studying with him, akihiko was doing something wacky like squatting above his chair instead of sitting normally?

these characters have been reinterpreted so much that they've lost their core identity that was integral to the plot of persona 3. i don't get the feeling that i'm seeing akihiko or mitsuru, i instead sense that i'm getting how someone interprets them after nearly 2 decades of fandom and spinoff content. yukari still has those "mean" lines but they lack any emotional root, so they come off as nonsense mood swings rather than a scared girl lashing out. and i'll just say it, karen strassman clears the fuck out of dawn bennett when you compare the final aigis monologues (fwiw, in both these instances, i blame the direction, not the VAs). these characters have been done better and it's really jarring that reload tries to flatten them rather than give them more dimensionality.

there's room to broadly interpret these characters, but constantly trying to make a self-serious character like akihiko the butt of a joke that he's in on speaks to how much he's being mischaracterized here. when akihiko was in a comedic scene, it was because he was the straight man, not because he was a this big goofball constantly playing to the crowd. these characters don't feel like themselves in a profound way, and i'd have to wonder how much that comes across to anyone who hasn't played original. does akihiko just seem like a wildly contradictory character to new players? truthfully, i have no idea if any of these people would've resonated with me had this been my first exposure to them.

i don't hate what all of reload's new content wrt characterization, and i honestly really liked some of the stuff they added for shinjiro and ken. but there's just as much that is unnecessary and outright bad. when we said they wanted more backstory on strega, we didn't mean that we wanted you to turn takaya into another akechi. if you're going to remake persona 3, why even bother if you're going to do such a disservice to its characters and setting? sure, you made some of the UI stuff look neater and more Persona 5-y, but what does that meaningfully add to the experience? when i saw the trailer for reload, i immediately asked myself "what does the water motif have to do with persona 3? why is the main character sinking into water? what are they going to do with that?" and it turns out they just wanted a cool main menu animation and nothing else. i want to say that P Studio was just misguided, but some of this content is so actively bad that it makes me wonder if any of them even liked persona 3. so much of this feels like it's trying to fix something that isn't broken, like it's an apology for the source material. this isn't a persona 3 remake for people who liked persona 3. but, then again, who else was it supposed to be for if not people who wanted another persona 5? persona 5 is the new cash cow and my dread for this being a P5ified version of persona 3 was well-founded.

i kept trying to go "how would i feel about this game if it wasn't a remake of a game i love?" and that's an impossible question for me to answer. i can never know because i will never play this with the eyes and ears of someone who didn't play the original. again, as much as i've come to detest this game, i don't have it in my heart to give this a lower score, mostly out of pity, but also out of overcorrecting my harsh opinion as a fan of the original. still, i think many of reload's failings come from a place of trying to simultaneously be a remake and game for everyone. i don't think it's wrong for games to put off people. in fact, the best games often aren't for everyone because they can't be. P Studio emphasized making a game that was so mainstreamed and accessible that it would never present any obstacle or mechanic that could alienate players at the cost of making a game that players could actually be engaged with. i can't think of a broader way you could miss the mark with a persona 3 remake.

Nunca joguei os Wario Lands que o inspiram, e seria idiota de não jogar, se Pizza Tower for algum indício. O visual cartunesco e trilha sonora cativante atraem jogadores despercebidos, mas além dele há um universo de truques e otimizações de movimento que me prenderam bem depois dos créditos rolarem - rejogar cada fase e aperfeiçoando meu jogo para pegar o ranking perfeito foi um deleite do começo ao fim (Exceto a fase da fábrica todos os meus casinhas odeiam a fase da fábrica).

O ratinho merece um jogo só dele ele é mt fofo.

Here's where I'm at with Pokémon Uranium: I think I'm someone who is more or less perfectly suited to discuss this game in a macroscopic sense. I am currently working on a PhD in Radiation Detection and Measurement, so I work with radioactive material, nuclear science, and even some energy and non-proliferation policy on a regular basis. I played this on stream with a number of peers who are all very well-educated in nuclear science, and we spent our time commenting on some of the nuclear-related things we saw. We did not finish the game, we dropped it around Gym #5, and I went and watched some of the gameplay on the internet to see what the rest of the game has to offer.

As previously noted, I have a degree in Nuclear Engineering, and I am working on a doctoral thesis related to radiation detection and measurement. I therefore, take umbrage with the way much of the science in this game is conveyed. It's a fictionalized game, sure. It's relatively unrealistic to expect the game devs to understand what the Klein-Nishina Cross-section is. But I really, really dislike how the "Nuclear Pokemon" are essentially just different Shadow Pokemon seen in the Gamecube Pokemon games. I think from a gameplay mechanic perspective, this is a really interesting take on the type chart, but from a story and flavor perspective, I just can't take it seriously. I understand it's not necessarily fair to critique a game strictly on its story and presentation, but the foundation of nuclear being presented as this mystical miasma of power is just plain faulty, and it really paints nuclear energy in a questionable light at best.

One example that generally stood out to all of us took place at Nuclear Plant Epsilon before the third gym. Not only is it entirely unrealistic that a new nuclear plant would be sited right next to an old site that had had a significant nuclear accident only 10 years prior, but the way that radiation is shown as this weird green gas is flat out wrong. I get that your player passes out from radiation sickness, and is later "treated" for it for the sake of a story, but that's just not how it works. If the game is going to lean into something that is extensively researched as nuclear science, I personally feel like there should be at least some responsibility from the devs to make sure that they get it a little closer to reality. It really feels like a few devs were really interested in what happened in Chernobyl and explored the idea of "what if this but in the Pokemon world?". I might be being a little too hard on the game for not being entirely accurate, but in a world where nuclear energy still struggles to be widely accepted by the general public through concerns of safety, Pokemon Uranium does little to assuage those concerns and instead leans into the idea of a modern "mystical corrupting ether power".

There's another factor that I want to bring up related to the presentation of "nuclear", the fact that there's an item that allows you to talk with Pokemon in English in this game. Generally, I feel as though it's a bit of a cop out to have the magical fantasy creatures to be able to suddenly speak English with the help of some device. I preferred the abstraction of people being able to understand their Pokemon through a serious of verbal cries. With the inclusion of the P.E.S., suddenly you can have Pokemon monologue which feels really weird. Then there's the fact that on Route 6 you have to knock out a series of Owten, that you can now understand. It gave me a weird ick feeling that I'll have to generally explore more, but in short I felt really uncomfortable attacking these animal-like Pokémon that could speak English. It's like if a Slime in Dragon Quest could suddenly demonstrate extreme intelligence. It's the exact problem Undertale demonstrates: "would you attack innocent creatures if you could understand them?". Ultimately, I won't dwell on this ethical concern too much, but I had to roll my eyes when I learned that Nuclear Pokemon (or "irradiated Pokemon", which agian, not how that works) are menacing killing machines who can only say something to the effect of "CRUSH KILL DESTROY".

As a Pokemon game, it's quite similar to the early 2010s Pokemon games where you REALLY have to grind to get Pokemon that can stand a chance. I think there's something to be said that the team was able to make a variety of relatively interesting fan-Pokemon, and it's great that they have a lot of ideas of what could be done to shake up the standard play loop. But at the same time, I really have to wonder why some obviously frustrating features were carried over, HMs being the prime example. Then there's also the fact that some Pokemon are hilariously intrinsically broken. Inflagetah, which I used for maybe an hour, is so obviously better than anything I had used up to that point that I have to wonder if it was worth using anything else, especially given how long I often took for anything to level up. I'm not expecting an Exp. All here, but fighting countless numbers of Smores and Minyans gets old quickly. I can't fault them for this too much though, this DOES feel like a Pokémon game, and quite impressively so.

From a pure Pokemon fan perspective, Pokemon Uranium is a really interesting and exciting fan game that presents a lot of interesting ideas, and creates a world that feels lived-in, and fleshed out. Design-wise the Pokemon are interesting, the world is interesting, and the story is nothing we had seen in a Pokemon Game until maybe until Sword and Shield. But I cannot get past my many gripes with the experience. It wasn't terribly fun to play, and I couldn't get into the story when it mattered most (mainly because of my own mental blocks).

Play it if you'd like, it's a really well-made fangame from a technical perspective, but I didn't really enjoy it.

It kinda sucks to play but it's charming in a way nothing else is because, I mean, fucking look at it? It's a Cartoon Network anime apocalypse MMO, possibly the most 2009 concept ever published as a video game. Surprisingly cool in some regards like the player outfits and enemies, but the gameplay is persistently dull despite some occasional challenge. It's something pretty much nobody would give a shit about if it wasn't for the aesthetics. However if they made this today it would probably end up being even more forgettable mobile gachashit so I'm glad you can at least take it for a spin thanks to a dedicated fan effort, because the novelty of the whole thing makes it a fun romp for a few hours. Playable museum of a bygone era.