Persona 3 Reload retells the RPG's story but borrows from Persona 5 Royal's style: "We've made lots of smaller tweaks to improve it"

Nearly a decade ago, I put around 60 hours into Persona 3 Portable but I never finished it. I certainly enjoyed my time with it (it just so happens that the timestamp on my last save is exactly 10 days before my son was born), but with so many different versions of Persona 3 available today, the thought of returning has always been a little intimidating. Though having several versions is not unique to Persona 3, it is still a bit of a confusing fact to wrap your head around – from the original Persona 3 to Persona 3 FES, Persona 3 Portable, and now the upcoming remake, Persona 3 Reload. That's not even counting the various ports over the years.

So what is it that sets Persona 3 Reload apart? Well, first and foremost, it's a remake of the original Persona 3 story. Functionally, that means everything from the original PS2 game but don't expect major elements from Persona 3 Portable or Persona 3 FES to make an appearance. For example, P3P's female protagonist option is nowhere to be seen – and doesn't appear to be something they're sitting on quietly.

"Very early on we were thinking what we wanted to do was create a really high quality remake of the original – not FES or not Portable and the other ones," says Ryota Niitsuma, producer on Persona 3 Reload. "Like our beginning was, for now, Persona 3 the original's what we want to focus on, so that was kind of the theme of our development here."

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But it's not all doom, gloom and jettisoned content for Reload. Despite lacking certain bits and pieces from previous alternative versions of Persona 3, it does add quite a bit otherwise. While a retelling of the original Persona 3 story, there are still new events to explore between characters and a significant visual overhaul on top of new combat mechanics and a sophisticated retooling of Tartarus, the mysterious main dungeon area that players can explore at night.

"At the very base, what we wanted to do was keep the core of the original game, like we wanted to respect the original, and that was what kind of defined what we would keep from the original game," says Takuya Yamaguchi, Persona 3 Reload's game director. "And that includes both the story and characters and kind of those elements. However, there's a lot of supporting elements of a game that go in to support these kinds of core themes. And we wanted to focus really heavily on updating those, these kinds of supportive elements, and that's like additional link episodes and explorations of kind of who Strega is and then also the battle system, Theurgy, which is something that we have added to the game."

The point seems to be that anyone not familiar at all with Persona 3 might be best served by a recreation of the original, in order to experience the classic version with a new coat of paint and an improved user experience. The changes that have been made would appear to be in service to removing mechanical friction and adding narrative nuance.

But when it comes to changes in Persona 3 Reload, it would seem that the aforementioned Tartarus is one of the most significant ones. "There's lots of fan feedback and lots of user feedback on how to change it, and we took a lot of that into consideration," says Yamaguchi. "We knew that this was a top priority to change. We wanted to make it more interesting and, like always, exciting when you're exploring it."

Thanks to Tartarus being inextricable from the story of Persona 3, though, this proved challenging. "We couldn't really make any major changes to that without disrupting the kind of flow of the game itself," he continues. "So instead we made lots and lots of small tweaks. And this kind of accumulation of small tweaks is what allowed us to really improve the experience here."

While the original Persona 3 (and various other iterations) was a looker in its day, Persona 3 Reload certainly brings it to an entirely new level. P3P, despite being largely the "definitive" version of Persona 3 to this point, made certain compromises thanks to its very nature. The PlayStation Portable, though impressive in its time, does not really stand up to the heights of modern handhelds in terms of visuals and sheer power. Reload feels a bit like if P3P did not have to make those compromises.

More specifically, Reload feels a bit like if P3P did not have to make those compromises and was released after Persona 5 Royal, which absolutely pushed the stylish aspects of the franchise even further. It's not Persona 6 by any means, but it's hard not to see the influence that P5 and P5R had on P3R. It makes the game feel like something of a new Persona entry that just so happens to have an old story.

In fact, this is the most obvious change in P3R. According to Yamaguchi, the team took inspiration from P5R to make the characters a lot taller than they were initially. Increasing the size of the game's characters isn't as simple as all that, however, as the developers couldn't just chuck the newly resized versions into the game on their own; it required an entire visual overhaul that ultimately ended up with them changing aspects from "the UI and the background and the environment and everything else to kind of match the same size of these kind of upgraded characters."

All of my impressions are, admittedly, based on a limited amount of time with Reload. I was able to play close to two hours during a recent preview event, and that was restricted to roughly a week's worth of in-game time. Anyone who's familiar with the story of the original Persona 3 or, well, any Persona game at all will tell you that it is a mere teardrop in the ocean that is these games. It's hard to make any grand proclamations based on that, but what I can say is that those hours and that digital week were enjoyable and, at times, fascinating.

Frankly, I don't envy Atlus. Remaking a much-beloved entry in a much-beloved franchise full of incredibly dedicated fans sounds like a nightmare. How do you balance adding and updating enough to make it worthwhile yet still respect the fact that there's a reason you're bothering to remake the original in the first place and clearly it already resonated and resonates with audiences? The fact that Square Enix seems to have threaded this needle entirely differently and competently with Final Fantasy 7 Remake only makes the potential answers here even more complex, and I'm not sure there's any one right way to do it. But from my experience so far, Persona 3 Reload certainly seems to be one viable path forward for all of the above.