Persona 3 Reload is a fantastic game. The ending brought me to tears, the game being 75% more voiced than previous persona games is fantastic, and it improves upon Persona 3 FES in so many ways. It could have been better than P5R... but it's held back by many problems I have with it. I can respect faithful remakes, and the fact that so much of Reload is unchanged is great, but there are many aspects of the original Persona 3 that Reload should have changed, and didn't. Despite the battle improvements, Tartarus is still as sloggy to play through as ever. Mementos worked because it was supplemental to hand-crafted zelda-like dungeons in P5R (and Ryuji IK), but when 90% of the combat side of the Persona game is just the boring randomly generated labyrinth, it's boring. It can't carry a whole game. This on top of other questionable aspects that Reload kept in, like having to max all stats to unlock the social links for the female party members, it's just egriegous. I wish that Reload had been more experimental with its remake nature, tweaked the core of the game more, but as it is I think its faithfulness is holding it back from being truly one of the best persona games. All of this in consideration, the game could have been a 9 or even a 10, but it's brought down to an 8 because of its issues. It's fantastic, a must-play, the best way to play Persona 3 to date (albeit not definitive, smh Atlus), but I wouldn't rccomend P3R over P5R, or even P4G for that matter. It's fantastic, but it could have been even better.