izigame.me

Let me make something clear right out of the gate: I think Persona 3 is a good game.
I've seen people have problems with the game's pacing, Tartarus, some of the Social Links, and so on. Some of these complaints are valid, but this review is not about the problems that people have. Persona 3 is more than an ordinary game; it is a commitment. It took me a solid month and then some of playing the game for 2+ hours per day to finish, and other Persona games are even longer than this. Most people who have played a post-PS1 Persona game know this already, and in case you are interested in Persona 3 as a game, know that you are not in for a quick game you can beat casually in a week or two.
This is the end of my criticisms of Persona 3 as a game. This review is more about Reload as a re-re-release of an 8.5/10 game, and the problems that I have with taking a game, applying things learned from 18 years since the original release, then putting out a more expensive version of that game on the market.
With this being said, it may come as a surprise to learn that, seemingly despite the negative rating, I liked many of the changes that Reload introduced.
Fully voiced Social Links are a welcome addition, and should be the standard for all Persona games moving forward. The extra hangout scenes with your teammates are a good alternative to adding in entirely new Social Links while adding to the characters we normally only see in cutscenes and optional dorm dialogue. The OST changes and additions are very well done, although it is a Persona game, which are almost incapable of making bad music in my opinion. Particular kudos to Changing Seasons, an already good track I think Reload made 10 times better. Grinding has been made far more tolerable over FES, although I find the battles, especially towards the end, were much easier for the most part, though not on the same level as P5R, which I'm not sure whether to attribute to vanilla P3 simply being a more difficult game than P5 or due to ATLUS designing their games around a better challenge. The UI has been given a major and welcomed overhaul.
I could go on, but this is still not what I am most concerned with in this review. If you are wondering whether or not Persona 3 Reload is worth it as a product, and you have the money (or other means, cough cough) to play this game, consider this the end of my affirmative recommendation. If all of what I've said so far sounds good to you, you will enjoy Persona 3 Reload. Have fun.
What I'm writing this review for is a sense of frustration as to what Persona 3 Reload could have, and, in my opinion, should have been. Persona 3 Reload is the product of immense hype and comes at the heels of 18 years of porting, spin-offs, and adaptations. I paid over $100 CAD after taxes (roughly a full shift's worth of wages at the job I had at the time) for the most bare bones pre-release of a game I already knew the story of, but nevertheless wanted anyway due to my desire to see a definitive version of this game.
This is where my problems begin. Persona 3 Reload, despite what the price point might have you believe, is not the "definitive" version of Persona 3. What you pay for is a remaster of the 2006 original game, and while it is well done, there remains that feeling of disappointment when you consider that there was so much content from FES and Portable that did not make it to this $80 repackaging of a classic that had already been repackaged multiple times.
Game development is hard. I cannot pretend that this is not the case, and considering that while a remake of an already existing product cuts down on the effort of creating and designing an entirely new game from scratch, there was still a tremendous amount of effort that had to go into recreating Persona 3 with all the new mechanics introduced in Reload (even if it was done in Unreal).
Nevertheless, throughout my experience in Persona 3 Reload I always had the internalized disappointment that we were not getting something to finally put the nail in the coffin and say: This is Persona 3, and everything that Persona 3 has ever been can be experienced with this package. Yet here we still are 15 years after the fact and the female protagonist is still relegated to the archaic presentation that is Persona 3 Portable; acceptable on PSP, perhaps, but to still be sold separately in the same presentation on modern hardware at a price greater than P4G is absurd to me. Persona 3 Reload was the perfect opportunity to give the female protagonist concept from 2009 a glow up alongside the original Persona 3, yet ATLUS never did this but expects us to pay them a huge price as though they did. I was displeased with this reality, sure, but I still played through Reload and enjoyed it anyway.
Then came the straw that broke the camel's back for me, and that was the announcement of the "Expansion Pass". This was the point where I decided that I wanted to write a review like this.
Persona 3 FES was a remaster of Persona 3 that came out in 2007, fixing some of the issues that Persona 3 had, adding an easier difficulty option, extra social links, the works. However, they also put in an epilogue that follows the main cast after the end of the game, called "The Answer", as sort of a way to give some closure to fans after the ending that I already consider to be excellent. "The Answer", however, is not excellent. It is advertised as a 25-ish hour epilogue, yet 22 of those hours are spent grinding through Tartarus-lite, and the story beats aren't worth the grind.
Now imagine that Persona 3 re-releases almost 2 decades later, and gives fans the option to buy some kind of "Digital Premium Edition" or whatever you will. I didn't buy it, I don't need the extra clothes or tracks or whatever. Besides, if some kind of DLC does come out, I can just jump in on that for a little extra money later in exchange for saving money now, right? Maybe I'll want to play The Answer later down the line, since I liked Reload enough, no?
No.
The Expansion Pass is about the biggest waste of money I've ever seen in my life. It bundles in a bunch of crap I don't want with an epilogue that isn't even good for 47 fucking dollars plus tax. All of this ON TOP of the fact that the premium editions some paid over $130 for STILL have to pay for it. There are probably 10 games on sale right now that you could buy for that kind of money and have an infinitely better time for far longer than Episode Aigis, and all of this for a thing that was in the then definitive version of the game 17 YEARS beforehand. ATLUS expects people to pay out the ass for old content as an add on to more old content instead of giving it all in one package with 18 years of content remaining locked to older versions that are impossible to acquire without sailing the seas or becoming a retro enthusiast.
There is no excuse anymore, yet many still pay ATLUS what they want. The artists who actually made this game are most likely not reaping any of the rewards of this extortion, either, so all of their effort doesn't even play a role for me at this point. Call this review what you will, whiny, entitled, I don't care. I'll probably pay for Persona 6 when it comes out in 5 years or whatever because I still like this series regardless of the shitty business behind it. The reality is that this is what makes money, and this has been true for a long time. The reason why I wrote this review the way I did is because we paid the definitive price for a non-definitive experience, and in order to get closer to that experience we need to pay even more. I know there is no plan to release the female protagonist, but if they did I bet they'd charge an additional $50 for that, too.
I can't change this reality, it is simply too profitable. That doesn't mean I won't call out a bad deal when I see it. It could have, and should have, been more.
tl;dr: Persona 3 Reload is a bad deal, even if it is a good game.