(BacklogBeat's Game Club - March 2024 nomination)

This was a great time. The pacing's a bit weird but the aesthetics are gorgeous, the world is intriguing and the gameplay's pretty great for what it is. It's also probably one of the best sequels I've ever played? I don't think it's a masterpiece or anything like that, it just legitimately takes everything, and I mean everything from the first game and improves upon it to a degree that I've rarely seen before. The jump in quality is just absolutely insane.

Never finished the main campaign back when the game first came out so I thought I’d give it another shot in preparation for Side Order and it’s…fine? I don’t know, it kinda lands like a wet fart after Octo Expansion but that’s what happens when you set the bar too high. I ultimately enjoyed my time with it but half the levels felt like a slog to play through and after three games, the aesthetics are no longer interesting enough to carry it. Three games in and it already feels like Splatoon is running out of ink.

(This is purely a review of the single player campaign. I have no intention of diving into the multiplayer side of the game and therefore cannot judge it on that front)

Oh no.

I was going to start this off by saying that I've personally dealt with a lot of the subject matter that was tackled in the game and that's why I think it's abysmal but I don't even think you need that to recognize how awfully mishandled pretty much everything is. The whole game feels like it's PSA video on bullying/suicide/parental abuse/whatever else they tried to shove in here that was specifically made for middle schoolers. It's so distilled and surface-level that it would've been insulting had it not been for the almost satirical performances and downright cringey writing. It's also a mess on the gameplay front. The environments are pretty to look at but what's there to interact with isn't interesting and the chase sequences are not only devoid of scares, they're incredibly unfun because they're based on trial and error more than anything else.

Kind of obsessed with how bad this was.

Liked this a lot more than I thought I would. I gave it a shot back when it was first added to PS+ Extra and didn't vibe with it but I'm super glad I gave it another shot. It's just another Ubisoft Open World™ game in many ways but my god does the setting absolutely carry it. Bummer that it's probably never getting a sequel because I would absolutely love to spend more time in this world even after spending 43 hours exploring it. I adore the (relatively) small map size because it allowed the devs to make it extremely dense instead, which I love. I also thought the gameplay was quite good and nowhere near as bad as people were making it out to be, but that could be due to the Spider's Thread update that apparently changed a lot of how the combat works.

I just wish the opening hour weren't so weak, it's easily the worst part of the game which is a shame since first impressions are everything.

Probably one of my least favorite Megami Tensei games I've played, if not my least favorite. I'm kind of almost suprised at how medicore and more than occasionally bad this was? Atlus' lower tier releases (non-Persona/SMT) the past few years haven't been amazing but they're certainly way better than this.

The sabbath system is neat and the gameplay in general is fun but everything else across the board is puzzlingly mediocre. The characters are fine but the story falls flat, the visuals and music are servicable at best and the dungeon design ranges from boring to atrocious (the soul matrix being mostly optional isn't an excuse).

I don't know what else to say, honestly. I'm just shocked.

It’s a full moon again.


I’d like to preface this review by saying that Persona 3 FES means the world to me. You’ve probably heard a version of this statement from a lot of different people about a lot of different games so I’ll spare you most of the details, but for a long stretch of time it was my favorite game of all time and, even though it was eventually dethroned, it’s still sitting very comfortably at number 2. I’ve loved a lot of games, but none have been as formative as P3 FES was to me. I played it when I was young (younger than I should’ve been) and I don’t think a single piece of media has influenced the way I navigate life as much as P3 FES has.

Writing about games I love is always hard because I constantly feel like I’m not doing a good enough job at translating that love into words. It’s difficult. It’s difficult to put into words how much I adore P3 FES to the point where it feels like there aren’t any words that could describe it, so you’re just going to have to take my word for it if I haven’t been convincing enough.

This preface is part of this review because I’m very well aware that no remake of Persona 3 in any shape or form would have ever satisfied me completely. I’m not delusional, even if I had personal input on the remake and decided to keep everything from Yumi Kawamura to the animated cutscenes to the original voice cast intact, I would have still ended up dissatisfied. I say this because I feel like I’m about to rip into Persona 3 Reload, but it all comes from a place of love and I can tell they at least tried to recapture the magic of the original in some areas. Nobody likes being a party pooper and I genuinely went in wanting to love it as much as FES. Even though I didn’t, I still ended up having a great time with it (as can be seen from my score) and I genuinely hope in my heart of hearts that people end up adoring it.

This preface is also here because most of this review is going to be comparing this game to FES. It’s impossible for me to put myself in the shoes of someone experiencing Persona 3 for the first time through Reload nor do I want to, which means it’s also impossible for me to judge Reload as a standalone game. It is a remake and unlike something like Final Fantasy VII Remake which had no intention of being a 1:1, faithful remake of the original, Persona 3 Reload has every intention of being a faithful and modernized version of Persona 3, and I will be judging it as such.

Alright, preface done. Let’s get into it.


You can’t plug your ears and cover your eyes.


Persona 3 FES opens with what honestly might be my favorite cutscene of all time. The intense sound design coupled with the unique framing of everything happening on screen is fucking enchanting. I’ve never seen anything like it before or since. In Persona 3 Reload, this scene is recreated but…something’s missing. The sound design is less effective, the framing is less interesting, there’s now dialogue in it that kind of ruins in the tension, and it’s cut in half with the latter part of the cutscene being replaced with an in-game sequence. This is how I feel about Reload’s presentation in general. It’s mostly not bad by any means, it just constantly feels like something’s not quite right. The cutscene direction is lacking (at times severely) compared to the original (the awakening scene, for example, is nowhere near as effective as the original’s) and the visuals themselves are a mixed bag. Persona 3 FES isn’t the most gorgeous PS2 game, but it’s consistent at the very least. In Reload, it’s very normal to go from an area that looks absolutely gorgeous to something straight out of Pokémon Sword and Shield within the span of seconds. It’s mostly due to the lighting, which ranges from impressive in locations like Gekkoukan High, to “Nintendo hire this man!!” Unreal Engine™ lighting in locations like Tartarus (with the exception of a block or two), to some of the worst, straight up atmosphere-killing lighting I’ve seen in a game in locations like Yakushima and the dorm, the latter of which being the most important location in the entire game. The game’s also obsessed with using green and blue filters, the former of which is used during Dark Hour sequences and looks fine, and the latter being used in some nighttime scenes and looks abysmal. Persona 3/FES had a certain je ne sais quio which managed to elevated its atmosphere that is not only missing from its sequels, but also unfortunately its re-releases.

It's not all bad on that front, though. The new character models need some getting used to due to the change in art style (Soejima is no longer the lead artist) but they look absolutely gorgeous and are among the best I’ve ever seen when it comes to this type of art style, and the UI is absolutely wonderful and manages to, in my opinion, edge out Persona 5’s which is quite a feat. You spend most of your time looking at menus in turn-based RPGs and Atlus is seemingly one of the few companies out there that understand that.

Gameplay is where Persona 3 Reload shines bright and completely eviscerates its prior iterations. I’ve never hated FES’ gameplay (I’m pretty sure 95% of the people that had issues with the party being controlled by AI never actually played the game and were regurgitating what they heard online because the game was balanced around it, but I digress), but Reload plays like butter. Tartarus has been given a facelift worthy of being on a second season of a Real Housewives franchise, the combat is snappy and really fun to look at (SHIFTing feels so much better than Baton Passing and it’s all in the animations), the fatigue system has been thankfully removed, teleporters are a lot more plentiful and a lot of the additional content from P3P has been carried over like rescuing people that have wandered into Tartarus. All of the quality of life improvements on the life-sim side that were introduced in Persona 5 have been carried into Reload as well, which makes that portion of the game feel a lot smoother as well. Out of all the improvements, Social Links now being fully voiced might be my favorite one. It genuinely breathes life into characters I never cared for in the original and it’s going to be tough going back to earlier Persona games which only had voice acting for specific ranks. Not forcing the MC into a romantic relationship with female Social Links is also a fantastic change.

The new “Linked Episodes” introduced in Reload are absolutely fantastic. I still wish the male party member Social Links were carried over from the FeMC route, but this is a good enough compromise and to my surprise, most of it is actually brand new stuff and not distilled versions of their Social Links from P3P. I found Ken’s Linked Episode in particular to be fantastic. The new Strega scenes are a nice touch as well, though they do little to improve on what has always been the weakest part of Persona 3’s story. Still, they’re relatively harmless so it’s ultimately a good addition.

Next up is music and well, this one’s a bit of a doozy.

Yumi Kawamura is Persona 3. She was always Persona 3. She will always be Persona 3. End of Statement. For those that have never played a Persona game and don’t understand the importance of the vocalists in these games, they are what Utada Hikaru is to Kingdom Hearts, except if you heard Utada’s voice most of the time while playing through the games instead of just the openings and endings. Yumi, Shihoko and Lyn (alongside Shoji Meguro) were all integral to their respective games. Replacing them would be unthinkable and yet, with Persona 3 Reload, the unthinkable has happened. Yumi Kawamura has been replaced with Azumi Takahashi and in a ballsy move, they sound completely different than one another. Gone are Yumi’s rough and energetic vocals, replaced with Azumi’s soft and youthful vocals instead and the results are, well…interesting to say the least.

In new tracks composed specifically for Reload, Azumi shines. Tracks like “It’s Going Down Now” and “Color Your Night” sound absolutely wonderful, the latter of which has become one of my favorites from the entire series. Things get complicated, however, when we look at the tracks that were initially composed with Yumi Kawamura in mind. Tracks like “Want to Be Close” still manage to sound absolutely wonderful, but not all of them were so lucky. Tracks like “Memories of You” and “Paulownia Mall” lack some of what made the originals amazing but still sound relatively good while tracks like “Mass Destruction” completely miss the mark. “When the Moon’s Reaching Out Stars,” one of the best songs from the original game, got dealt the worst hand. I truly haven’t heard a song get this butchered since Fergie sang the national anthem at that NBA game.

Since we’re on the topic of audio, let’s discuss Reload’s English dub.

Persona’s dubs have always been exceptional. Persona 3’s dub was very impressive at the time, Persona 5’s dub was fantastic, and Persona 4 might genuinely have my favorite dub of all time. They’ve never been perfect, mind you, as there’s always been a character or two that had weird or funky dubs like Fuuka in Persona 3/FES, Chie in the original Persona 4 (I said it!) and some of the confidants in Persona 5, but in general it wouldn’t be controversial to say that the Persona franchise was the gold standard when it came to this type of stuff.

It pains me to say that Persona 3 Reload’s dub is extremely hit-or-miss. Atlus West and Sega, for some odd reason, decided to go against what Atlus Japan did and overhaul the entire cast, recasting all of the characters in the process and the results are all over the place which, for a franchise like Persona, is a little shocking. There are some characters that are straight-up upgrades from the originals like Yeung’s Fuuka, some that are indistinguishable like Clark’s Mitsuru and Robinson’s Junpei and some that sound completely different but still end up working like Saab’s Akihiko, Solcum’s Shinjiro and Lee’s Ken.

And then there are Yukari and Aigis, two wonderful characters with troubling performances (for different reasons) and the reason this has its own section in the review. Let’s investigate.

Case 001: The Case of Heather Gonzalez’s Yukari Takeba

Due to the way it’s structured, Persona 3 has some of the franchise’s best character arcs because it doesn’t rely on social links/confidants for character progression and instead does all of it in the main storyline, which is something that P4 and P5 mostly moved away from to their detriment. Yukari’s arc is simple but effective, and I’ve always thought she was a shockingly realistic portrayal of someone who has gone through a lot of trauma. Michelle Ruff’s performance in the original Persona 3 perfectly straddles the line between mean and sincere and is genuinely a perfect fit for the character. Yukari in general is, in my opinion, one of the original game’s best parts.

I say all of this because Yukari in Persona 3 Reload is not nearly as good of a character and it is solely due to Gonzalez’s performance.

I don’t know whether to pin this on Gonzalez’s performance or Arem’s direction, but…there’s no way around it, Yukari in P3R just sounds poor. Not only does Gonzalez fail to straddle that line, it feels like she never even attempted to get on it. The cadence in which she read her lines in is incredibly annoying, her vocal fry sounds unpleasant and feels put on, and her acting in general feels like it’s a step below the rest of the cast. She sticks out like a sore thumb and it’s heartbreaking. I’ve seen and heard a lot of recasts in my life and I’m not being hyperbolic when I say I’ve never seen one completely demolish a character and their arc like this. None of Yukari’s emotional moments (like her wonderful scene in Yakushima) are as effective as they should be because the performance is just not up to par.

Case 002: The Case of Dawn M. Bennet’s Aigis

If Yukari is one of Persona 3’s best parts, then Aigis is unequivocally the best part of Persona 3. She’s the heart of the game and probably has the best arc in the entire series (she also happens to be my all-time favorite Persona character so I’m a bit biased). One of the best parts about her character was her voice, which slowly and subtly transitions from extremely robotic to almost human. It legitimately is one of my favorite parts of FES and a large part of why I adore the character.

In Persona 3 Reload, Aigis does not sound like a robot. Her voice has been changed to sound like a modern AI’s (which doesn’t make sense because the game still takes place in 2009, but sure) and the slow transition, while not completely removed, has been downgraded. This is not on Bennet nor Arem, but instead on the Japanese team that wanted the performances to be more faithful to their Japanese counterparts^, because Aigis’ voice slowly transitioning was a fucking masterful decision that was made by the localization team back then. Now that it’s no longer there, it feels like part of the character has been completely gutted and it sucks. Unlike Gonzalez and Yukari though, Bennet’s performance is actually quite good. It’s just the shift in performance that’s a shame.

^This is speculative on my part, but Atlus Japan was pretty hands-on with Persona 5’s dub based on some interviews I’ve read and seen (see: SEH-Kamoto gate), and I assume this carried into Reload.


The Arcana is the means by which all is revealed.


In 2009, Atlus released a version of Persona 3 that ultimately failed to capture a lot of what made Persona 3 special due to extremely scaled back presentation. Still, it’s worth a play due to all of the additional content and much improved gameplay. It is an okay version of Persona 3, but FES is still superior.

It is now 2024.

Atlus has released a version of Persona 3 that ultimately fails to capture a lot of what made Persona 3 special due to extremely different presentation. Still, it’s worth a play due to all of the additional content and much improved gameplay. It is an okay version of Persona 3, but FES is still superior.

So where does this leave us? A version of Persona 3 with all of the original creative intent including voice acting, dialogue and general presentation in addition to an epilogue but relatively dated gameplay, a version of Persona 3 with modernized gameplay but presentation that fundamentally changes the entire game feel for better and for worse, and a version of Persona 3 with a completely unique protagonist that has a different set of socials links that cuts back on the visuals in a major way to its detriment.

There is still no definitive way to play Persona 3. Moreover, the best (in my opinion) version of the game is still (and now forever will be) stuck on the Playstation 2 with no modern ports. I can’t lie and say this isn’t endlessly frustrating. The charitable read on this, however, is that Persona 3 has three different versions that all genuinely offer completely different experiences. I really can’t think of anything like it. I know this, though: if there’s any game worth experiencing three times in three completely different ways, it’s Atlus’ magnum opus.

I won’t sugercoat it, though: if it hasn’t been clear already, I think Persona 3 Reload fails to hold a candle to Persona 3 FES. The new visuals and lighting kill some the atmosphere, some of the new performances disappoint, the quality of the redone music is inconsistent and it overall just feels a bit…cheap at times. I think Persona 3 Reload is the best way to play Persona 3, no question about it, but I’m almost prepared to say it’s the worst way to experience it, though I’d have to revisit P3P before putting a statement like that out into the universe.

But I don’t know, I don’t think I’ve been entirely fair if I’m being honest.

Playing through Persona 3 Reload was joyful in many ways and heartbreaking in many others. How can I fairly judge a remake of something that I’m as intensely connected to as Persona 3? It’s a nigh impossible task. Even after all of this, I still don’t know how to feel about Reload, not really. I don’t even think I ever will but that’s okay, because regardless of what version of Persona 3 I’m playing through, the first three notes of Memories of the School are enough to make me well up. Maybe, because I love Persona 3 so much, I’m getting too caught up with what Reload is going to mean to other people versus what FES meant to me. Maybe, because I don’t think it’s as artistic, atmospheric, emotional and effective as FES, I’m scared people won’t like it as much.

But maybe I should be thankful that Reload was at least good enough to not sever the connection I have to Persona 3. Maybe that’s all I needed it to be.

Maybe that’s enough.

The wind... It feels so nice...