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Persona 3 Reload is a JRPG set in Japan in 2009. The player character is a student who transfers to a new school, only to discover that civilians living in the nearby town are being attacked by shadows during the Dark Hour – a secret 25th hour which occurs every day at midnight.
Fighting alongside the other members of the Specialised Extracurricular Execution Squad (SEES), the player must find a way to defeat the shadows and end the Dark Hour, while preparing to face an even greater threat – school exams.
This was my first time playing Persona 3 (which originally released in 2006), after starting the franchise with Persona 5 earlier this year.

Gameplay (medium quality)

• During the Dark Hour, the school transforms into a giant tower known as Tartarus, which you’ll need to ascend one floor at a time, while fighting against various types of shadows.
• Combat is turn based, and you’ll control a party of four characters chosen from the leader and nine companions, which includes a few classmates, an android, a dog, and a random 8 year old kid.
• Every enemy type has a different set of strengths and weaknesses against melee and ranged attacks, and elemental magic including fire, ice, wind, electricity, light, and dark. Hitting an enemy’s weakness will stun them and give you a bonus attack, which can be passed to another character if you want to hit a different enemy with a different attack type. When all enemies are stunned, the whole party can team up for a powerful all out attack. However, enemies can also gain bonus attacks by hitting your party’s weaknesses.
• While each companion specialises in specific types of magic, your leader can switch between multiple personas, which potentially gives him access to every spell, including heals, buffs and debuffs, whenever you need it.
• Most fights are fairly easy. The first time you encounter each enemy, there’s a bit of trial and error while you hit them with different attacks to work out their strengths and weaknesses. But after you’ve discovered an enemy’s weakness, the next time you fight them you should be able to kill them before they even get a chance to take their turn.
• At certain points in the story you’ll have to defeat bosses, and as you progress higher up Tartarus, you’ll encounter gatekeepers, which are like mini-bosses. Some of these fights can be tougher, and they’ll pose interesting tactical challenges. They might inflict status effects such as charm, poison, or fear, on your party. They might regain health from specific attacks, or reflect damage back at you. Or there might be multiple enemies with different resistances, which force you to kill them one at a time instead of using area of effect attacks.
• P3R’s biggest flaw is that Tartarus eventually feels very repetitive. There are a total of 267 floors, which is really excessive. Its similar to Persona 5’s Mementos, where each floor has a random layout, and roughly every 50 floors the visuals will change. But its mostly just hour after hour of fighting the same enemy types (which occasionally get a colour swap and a different combination of strengths and weaknesses) over and over again.
• You’ll also be given side quests to rescue civilians who are trapped in Tartarus. Thankfully there are teleporters every few floors which means you can quickly get close to their location.
• Outside of combat you’ll attend school classes, socialise with companions and other characters to advance their personal stories and level up your bonds, work part time jobs to earn money, study for exams, and perform various other activities to increase social stats. But you probably won’t have time to do everything, so you’ll need to carefully manage your free time each day.

Story (high quality)

• Main story is very well written, and there are some interesting twists as you learn more about the school’s past, and the origins of Tartarus and the Dark Hour.
• The other members of SEES are fun characters to interact with, whether you’re fighting shadows together during the main story, or just hanging out with them in your dorm.
• Side stories relating to other students, bookstore owners, an mmo player, and a few other characters, are mostly good, but they’re let down slightly by the grindy nature of levelling up the social links. Each character has 10 bond levels, and sometimes you have to hang out with them multiple times before their story progresses. Even though I tried to minimise my trips to Tartarus, I was only able to complete 13 of 21 social links. I’m not bothered about getting higher bonuses for fusing new personas, but I don’t like leaving stories unfinished.
• English voice acting is excellent for almost the whole cast. The one exception being Koromaru (the dog) whose barks and howls sounded very fake, and obviously like a Human voice actor pretending to be a dog.

Technical (high quality)

• It took me 95 hours to complete the story, and this is the biggest reason why I actually enjoyed Persona 3 much more than Persona 5 (which took me an exhausting 120 hours). During both games, I started to feel like “I just want this to end now” around the 80 hour mark. Fortunately for P3R, by that time it was quite clear that the end was in sight.
• I didn’t encounter any crashes, bugs or framerate problems.
• Controls worked great on my Xbox 360 gamepad.
• Music is great. I especially liked the tracks which played in town during the evening, and during the 2nd semester classes.

Recommendation

Persona 3 Reload is a great JRPG, which fans of the genre should definitely enjoy. Combat against regular enemies can eventually feel repetitive, but boss fights are very tactical. Story is excellent and features many interesting characters. There’s enough content to buy at full price or on a small sale.