Persona 3 Reload is far from what you'd consider to be a short game. Much like the majority of the Persona series, players can expect to spend hours of their time plugging away through the lengthy story, interacting with characters, and engaging in side-content.
Although HowLongToBeat estimates that your average run of Persona 3 Reload will probably take roughly 61 hours to complete, you can expect it to go on for much longer than that depending on how many extra things you do along the way. That's why it's so fascinating to see runs go in the exact opposite direction, as one speedrunner has now managed to complete the entire game, true ending and all, in under 10 hours.
The feat was pulled off by YouTube creator FurryWulfz, who completed the lengthy RPG in nine hours, 51 minutes, and 53 seconds, to be exact. She also did the whole thing on the Merciless difficulty setting – the hardest of the bunch, which isn't for the faint of heart even when you're not racing against the clock. Not only did she avoid using skips to jump further ahead into the game, but no powerful DLC Personas were used to defeat enemies faster, and as it wasn't a New Game Plus run, the speedrunner didn't have any previously-acquired items to work with.
Beating the Merciless bosses so quickly is impressive enough as is, but arguably the main challenge of a Persona 3 Reload speedrun is the sheer amount of text that you need to flick through. Although FurryWulfz made good use of the game's fast-forward option to speed through most of it, she was still very much on the ball when it came to rapidly mashing through all the dialogue options to ensure that no precious time was wasted. She's clarified that she wasn't using a turbo button to do this for her, either.
It's a really interesting run overall – you'd be forgiven for guessing that it might involve skipping all of the optional content like relationship-building and gardening, but that's not the case, or at least not all of the time. During the run, FurryWulfz manages to max out her social link rank with track team manager Yuko, frequents the arcade in Paulownia Mall to boost the stats of her Personas, and spends plenty of time working part-time jobs for more money and Social Stats.
At the time of writing FurryWulfz is the world-record holder of this speedrun category, having managed to cut over an hour off her previous record, which was almost 11 hours long. We'll just have to wait and see if anyone else is brave enough to take on the challenge.
Be sure to take a look at our list of the top 25 best RPGs to find more great games to play.
After 17 JRPGs across 30 years, Bandai Namco is gearing up to release more Tales of remasters "fairly consistently" and "as much as possible"
"Persona is a story about growing up": Atlus lead reveals why the JRPG series always centers around a young male protagonist, but doesn't rule out adults or women in the future
