Persona 3 Reload Review

 

 

So at the time I started writing this article I finished Persona 3 Reload just a week ago. It's been on my mind every day since and for good reason. It is a very fine video game, but it isn't without its flaws. Now to start off let me give you a brief history of my experience with the Persona series. Persona 3 FES was actually my first entry. It was the last game I ever bought for my PlayStation 2, but unfortunately one day I woke up and went to turn on my PS2, but it wouldn't turn on with the FES disc still inside. I don't think my PS2 could get fixed so instead I bought a PS3 later that year.

I wanted to play FES so badly as the little I remembered playing was fun. I especially liked building up social stats and hanging out with people, but there wasn't a way for me to play it on my PS3 so I never ended up finishing that run. I didn't get my first real Persona playthrough until I decided to buy Persona 5 on a whim in 2019 and oh man I was so upset I took so long to play it. It was one of the best games I ever played and honestly thought it would've changed my life in the same way that Final Fantasy IX did if it was released at the same time. That's how good Persona 5 was and thereafter I played Persona 5 Royal which I loved even more, then Persona 5 Strikers, then Persona 4 Golden on Steam, and finally to where I am today with Persona 3 Reload.

Now being able to play this game in full I realized just how little I played of the original. This was practically, a whole new experience for me. So to start off my first impressions weren't that good. It's hard to express in written words quite what I felt without making it sound worse than it was, but I came into Reload expecting it not to be as streamlined or polished as 5. Reload is a remake, but not to the extent of like Resident Evil 2 Remake or Final Fantasy VII Remake so I knew probably the battle system and the dungeons weren't going to be as streamlined or varied and there were probably more gameplay mechanics that weren't going to be up to par. I know for certain franchises the father you go back the harder it is to get into it and that was kind of true for Reload. 

The pacing at the beginning of Persona 3 Reload is dry. To those that didn't play to summarize quickly Persona 3 Reload has you set in the role of high school student who just transferred to a new school and he learns from his other schoolmates that he shares a dorm with that there is an alternate dimension filled with monsters with shadows and you're recruited into their group called SEES to fight these shadows. That's the gist of it, but my problem with this in the beginning is just that your character is inducted to this without any reason or explanation of what SEES is trying to accomplish. It's rather aimless and for a good while in the beginning of the game you're not given this answer so there's no sense of purpose or urgency for exploring Tartarus. This is in contrast to Persona 4 and 5 where in the beginning you exactly know what you're trying to accomplish by visiting these other worlds. 

The story doesn't pick up until June, but once you get there you'll find yourself hooked to the story and speaking of story I didn't even get to the first full moon on my first playthrough all those years ago so to reiterate I definitely came in this fresh. Persona 3's story comes with a lot of emotion in regarding life and personal trauma. It doesn't exactly try to answer these questions or give solutions. It's more about the weight of these things and how they affect us. I want to go more in depth about it, but I will leave that up to my spoiler section. For now, let's focus on another aspect.

P3R's gameplay. Persona 3 was the first Persona game to feature the calendar system that came with the social aspect that Persona 4 and 5 are also known for. You have a given number of days leading to an event in which you spend time in between hanging out with teammates and other characters and also exploring a dungeon. With being the progenitor in the series there were flaws of course that were improved in later installments, but as I was informed this remake alleviated a lot of those issues. Though, despite just playing Persona 5 Royal before Reload I'm not entirely if 5 did this, but in Reload you are told when most of your friends are available to hang out with you which I heard wasn't in the original. You had to keep track in your head or write down the days that these friends also known as Social Links were available. Reload also used Persona 5's texting system to alert you when you can hang out with certain social links or do certain activities. It doesn't tell you everyone however so you should still check on the map which highlights every available social link during that time of day that's available. I enjoy this time saver as well.

 

In the original I found the social aspect of Persona 3 to be way better than the combat and I'm not sure if I quite feel the same this time around. I do enjoy hanging out with most of the social links, but Tartarus and the battle system has improved so much that I feel like I enjoy the dungeon crawling as much as I do the social sim aspect. The "1 More" system is here and it works fine as it always does, but thankfully the Baton Pass mechanic from 5 was added for Reload which is now called Shift granting you to make the most out of your extra turn. I also appreciate how there are multiple physical attacks this time and Tartarus from what I heard has been overhauled to make the dungeons less monotonous by having though it can still get that way sometimes because these are still randomly generated floors. I think the biggest factor in why I love the dungeon crawling so much more is that the game is more difficult than 5. I absolutely love 5, but it is way too easy especially the Royal version and it was quite nice to have the first real boss of Reload to pose a threat. In 5 I had to do nothing more but think about weaknesses, knock every enemy down and do an all-out attack which would usually kill whatever enemy or enemies there are and in boss fights use some buffs and just attack and heal when necessary, but in Reload the farther you get the less likely a single all-out attack will kill a group of enemies so I have to think about how to exert as much damage as possible and enemies hit harder so I want to use buffs more often for random encounters and have to carefully assess turn order so I can make sure my team can survive the next hit from an enemy or take out the risk of an attack by inflicting the enemy with a status effect if I don't have the option to lower an enemy's attack.

I love this. Reload is great middle ground between Persona 5 being too easy and Persona 4 being too hard for me. Just a slight annoyance, but as useful as status ailment were in the beginning they became almost useless by the end of the game and of course against every boss, but that's not just a Reload issue that's an issue with JRPGs as a whole, still ailments in this were way more useful than in 5 majorly because they stay on even when an enemy is hit except for the frozen status for obvious reasons unlike in 5 when attacking an enemy that had any status ailment except for burn or despair it would remove it so there's even more incentive to use them in Reload.

 

Reload also adds the Theurgy mechanic which are the new super moves. Persona 5 Royal also had super moves with Showtime attacks. Showtimes were way overpowered in Royal as they dealt ridiculous damage with no cost to them and their activation requirements were very loose. The Theurgy mechanic on the other hand is more balanced. They have no SP or HP requirements, but they build up over time like Overdrives or Limit Breaks from the Final Fantasy series. I actually would say they are pretty close to the Overdrives in Final Fantasy X because the meters build up under certain conditions. The protagonist builds up by switching Personas, Yukari by healing, and etc. Theurgys meters will fill up regardless, but meeting these conditions help them build up much faster. Their damage output isn't as powerful as Showtimes where it's a guaranteed victory so these are more in line with Golden's duo attacks. I quite liked Theurgys. Not only are they magnificent spectacles, but they also add that extra bit of strategy to fights. They have saved me a few times in fights, but they were never the auto win . mechanic to win a fight. I do say however that a couple of the Theurgy conditions aren't explained well like Akihiko's. His builds whenever he has an active buff on him. The way it's worded makes it sounds like it'll build when you directly cast a buff on him. I also find one of the later character's Theurgy conditions to be counterproductive, but overall this is a good mechanic. The Monad rooms also offer a great challenge and had me stressed out quite a few times so if you're looking for challenge you can find it. Reload also offers difficulty options. I started on Normal, but switched to Hard after I started finding the game a bit too easy.

Difficulty also comes in the game's economy system. Like a few other RPGs you gain the bulk of your money by selling items. If you play by regular means then you would find that you won't have much money to upgrade your equipment on the regular basis or stock up on healing items. Reload does offer some leeway like most games offering free items from chests, but conquering an entire Tartarus block won't net you sufficient equipment for your entire team. You would have to grind in order to get enough money so you won't have to feel broke all of the time and in the beginning it's fine. You can grind gold hand shadows by visiting the fortune teller to make them appear more, but that can still be tedious as even with the fortune it can still be a while to find multiple rare shadows and if you're trying to avoid over leveling too it's not giving you an option. You can gain money too from side quests and working jobs, but they offer so little money that it's never an option to rely on those. Jobs are more so for improving a social stat, the money is just a plus. You also have crafting in this as well, but that will also take some grinding too. In the later part of the game when I tried to do more persona fusions which requires money to pull Personas out of the compendium is when I started to feel money becoming scarce too especially since pulling out some personas can be as high as 70,000 yen. Overall, I don't think it's that big of a deal. it's just something I wanted to talk about and will probably matter less on multiple playthroughs if money, items, and personas carry over in New Game +.

One of the best things about the modern Persona games is the music and Reload has great music. Persona music just knows how to make you feel good and how to set tones perfectly. The night time songs in all three games are bona fide bops. The original Persona 3 had hip-hop influences in it which are recreated here. The rapping in this game and Japanese games in general have always been corny, but there's also something endearing about it too. Reload has remade all the tracks from the original and while I cannot attest to all the new renditions I do remember "Mass Destruction" and "Iwatodai Dorm" from the original and I prefer those versions. The warped voice effects in the original sounded cooler to me and something about the new Mass Destruction sounds off. It's not bad though. I just wish there was a way to switch songs from the original into this and when you find the CD shop I was hoping this was the case, but that shop literally does nothing. You can buy DLC to change the music, but it's only for Personas 4 and 5. Your only option is to mod the old music in, but that's not a choice for console players. This OST is definitely going to be on my rotation for years to come regardless.

Reload is gorgeous too. Everything has been fully remade. The character models look so pristine. I think it's on the level of Royal's or maybe even better since this game is also available on PS5 and the Series X, but what I'm most impressed about are the overhaul on the menus. They look so fucking good! The water motif is so tranquil and ethereal looking and the character portraits on the status screens are top notch. I'm so glad that they pulled this from 5 because 5 also had fantastic menus. 

To sum up my overall thoughts this is a fantastic game that I recommend to anyone that's a fan of RPGs or good games in general, but there's more I need to talk about in depth about the story and certain parts of the game so here is your spoiler warning.

 

*SPOILERS*

 

 

There's a lot to say when it comes to Persona 3 Reload's story. I liked it. It's more straightforward than Persona 4 or 5's. It appears at first to be quite simple and perhaps cliche, but once you get further in you realize it's much more and that's because of its subject matter regarding death. Many games, most games nowadays have death in them. You kill endless amounts of living beings in Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty, Super Mario, Final Fantasy games, etc. but Persona 3 doesn't make it some rudimentary gameplay element that mindless partake in and don't give a second thought to it actually reaches out from the confinements of this software and actively make you think about it seriously. Sure at first it just feels sad that your dad died Yukari, but I think it was when I met the Sun Arcana, Kamiki that it actually felt real. 

 

 

You meet Akinari Kamiki during the early part of Maiko's social link and my initial reaction was a bit weird. His appearance and mannerism to me made me believe that he wasn't real along with Maiko calling him Stripey. I thought he was her imaginary friend until he talked to me. Once I started his social link I couldn't dismiss it anymore. Akinari Kamiki was born with a terminal disease. From the beginning of his life he knew that his life was going to be short. He coughs a lot and looks sickly. He expresses how people either avoid him or constantly tell him how sorry they feel for him. He is constantly reminded every day of his life about his doom and when he said "everybody is going to die someday it's just going to happen faster than me," that's when it really sank into me and made me feel uncomfortable and later on he expresses his feelings of frustrations of why he had to be born with this. I can understand that he feels that it's unfair and along the way he copes with it and actually finds a purpose in his life. He decides with the little time he has left to write a children's story about a pink alligator and its friend. Once he finishes his story he hands the notebook he wrote it in over to you and mysteriously vanishes. Later at the end of the game you meet his mother who explains her son died right before his twentieth birthday and how her struggles with raising him. She decided to live her life to the fullest and do everything that her son couldn't. This tugged at the heartstrings the most and when you present to her with her son's notebook she asks you to hold onto it because she wants to hear from her son when she meets him on the other side. Man, this is definitely the best social link in all the games. I'm just a little surprised that she didn't mention about getting his book published.

 

 

 The subject of death is further spotlighted in the story when one of your teammates Shinji Aragaki dies. Playable characters have died before: various Final Fantasy games for an example, but this one hit different. I guess it's because you spend more time getting to know these characters by hanging out with them that it harder despite not having Shinji in the party for very long and also unlike those other characters you attend his funeral. I was sad and pissed at the same time because I barely got to use him and it started bringing up memories of family members passing.

What really set in the dread for me was when Ryoji's true identity was unveiled and he informed us that the end of the world is coming. A world ending plot isn't anything new at all, but given how much death is a part of this game's story it felt appropriate here and more real. Sure, I knew my team would end up winning and preventing it, but the way it was presented here made me feel the unbearable weight and fear of my own mortality. It asks the questions of how would you like to die. Would you like to spend your last moments oblivious to when it will come like most of us or know and spend your last moments making the most of it? The choice to kill Ryoji and forget everything leading to the Fall is the former and not killing him and fighting Nyx is the latter.

Persona 3 becomes morose as everyone on your team knows that the world is coming to the end they may all die and still have to live their regular lives while everyone around them is completely oblivious to it. No video game has ever made me seriously think about death before.

 

 

To get away from the gloom for a bit I wanted to talk about other parts of the story. I think 3 might have the best cast in the modern trilogy sans Ken Amada. The cast of Persona 3 feels the most like real people to me. I was surprised at how unlikeable and likeable Yukari could be. During the beginning of the game she seems very nice, and it seems like she doesn't like Mitsuru that much. Well it's hard to describe. It wasn't that she exactly disliked her as she said herself in the game, but I think distrust describes what she was feeling. Yukari was feeling like something was off with Mitsuru which she confided to your character at school when she said she thinks Mitsuru is hiding something which she was right about.

Mitsuru I didn't end up liking as much as I thought. From the brief time I played the original I just thought she was hot and that's still pretty much all that I feel about her now. She reminds me as a combination of Makoto and Haru. She has Makoto's seriousness; focusing only on studies and she's even the student council president and a third year, but she's also rich too like Haru and deals with having her father murdered and getting out of an arranged marriage by a stuck up asshole. She does have stuff to make her different like throwing out French words randomly, and her execution stuff, but overall she feels just as stiff and boring as Makoto. Even after maxing out her social link I still never seen her laugh or show off any particular interests or quirks. She felt more like a trope. I had some hope after her father died and when she hung out with Yukari in Kyoto, but she was still pretty much the same.

Junpei reminded me of Ryuji and they are kind of the same, but there are differences. Junpei isn't as short tempered and he is more girl crazy than Ryuji, but he has probably the best growth arc out of the entire cast. I was cool with Junpei and overall I liked him more than Ryuji and Yosuke even from the jump. He wasn't fucking up like the former did a few times and not annoying to people different from him like Yosuke was so I was pretty cool with him and he just ended up getting better as events went along. Yeah, he did fuck up during the first full moon which had me annoyed and he was pissed off for a bit after the second full moon which did bother me as well. Actually him and Yukari are similar in that regard. Both of them had some unlikeable traits in their journeys, but overall I did find that I liked them both. Junpei gets better as the game goes along as well. We see he's insecure about himself overall and that he has no purpose beyond working in S.E.E.S., but when he comes across Chidori he finds something else to live for. We see his kindness when he realizes that Chidori's hand is bleeding and after being kidnapped by her he lets out his insecurity about feeling important and once Chidori is taken into custody he realizes how much he could care about someone genuinely beyond looks and he perhaps has one of the most touching and badass moments in gaming with his death and resurrection.

Akihiko Sanada comes off as the white haired anime bad boy trope that girls love, but that's not exactly apt. That is true, but he's more than that. He's the captain of the boxing team, which oddly we actually never get to see at all during the course of the game despite it being a big part of his character, and he's popular with a lot of girls at school though he's too cool to pay attention to them, but Aki is secretly very awkward with girls which you find out during the beach scene. I figure it's because he never had to try before. He's conventionally attractive on top of being popular on his sports team and some people would think he wouldn't have a personality because of that which I never understood. It's impossible for someone to not have a personality. We're all exposed to the world and have our own thoughts and opinions on things, regardless this doesn't apply to Akihiko. Aki focus on training comes from a death he had to deal with. He grew up in an orphanage with his younger sister, Maki, but one day the orphanage caught on fire and she was trapped inside dying. He felt like he was too weak to do anything so he picked up boxing as a way to strengthen himself not only physically but emotionally.

 

 

Sanada's character is also tied with Shinji Aragaki. When we first meet him he is the cliché edge lord but once you start to hang out with him you find out that he has a soft side. That too may be a cliché in itself, but I can't say that it was entertaining to me and it was really cool to find out that he's the best cook in the dorm. My man is a whole professional chef and you learn that he was in the same orphanage as Sanada and they're practically the homies for life which elevates him more. He is shy about his interests which is why he pretends that he was sleeping when the girls came into the dorm. It's just a shame we couldn't get him for the entire game. He edginess is stemmed from his guilt from killing Ken Amada's mom when he first got his Persona which I can understand, but there's something in regards to that I have questions and issues with that I will delve into later.

So there's also Fuuka, the sweetest and most kind person in the group. Her introduction in the group is when the game's story finally picks up some. You immediately feel compassion for her due to her bullying but she also turns out to be a very sweet person. I personally would not have forgiven Natsuki for locking her in the gym, but Fuuka is way more kinder than I. I also like how we get to see just about every character's room and Fuuka has the cutest one personally. She has a lot of flowers arranged on shelves with yellow sheets and rugs, and I'm especially a fan of the boombox in the room. When we first see her in her room we discover that she is a bit of a nerd too. She's a hacker so she's definitely into computers which you can see whenever she's in the living room in the dorm she's always sitting with her laptop in front of her. Fuuka is also a sci-fi nerd too which you learn by reading with her or going to the movies with her.

Koromaru. What is there to say about him that others haven't? He's great! This is definitely no ordinary dog. He's practically human since he can understand everything that the party says and its helpful that Aigis translates. 

Speaking of Aigis what a great character! I didn't expect to like her as much as I did. I figured she was just going to be the cliché robot who learns about human ways and she is that, but it's done in such a non-arbitrary way. Aigis learns more about becoming human from the affection of the people around her. She has some of the funniest interactions in the cast due to the voice acting. I especially love her dialogue in Tartarus. There are a couple of hang outs where the group is eating together and I'm wondering is Aigis eating because she's a robot? Aigis is also pretty central to the story being one of the main reasons that the events in the game even occur and by the end of the game she's practically human.

As for the actual plot of Persona 3 Reload I think it's pretty standard stuff. I've seen many stories where a company was conducting an experiment and then it goes wrong creating disaster, but 3 puts a misdirect in the plot. You were told in the beginning that Mitsuru's grandfather was trying to obtain time manipulation powers from experimenting on the shadows, but he was actually trying to destroy the world and Ikutski was actually a part of it and had us killing the full moon shadows in order to bring about the end of humanity and not to erase the Dark Hour. I actually suspected something was off about Ikutski from the start. It might've been his mannerisms, but it was also suspicious of me that he could experience the Dark Hour, but he also says that he doesn't have the potential to have a Persona. I figured he was lying and he had a persona the whole time because every other person that we see who experiences the Dark Hour has a persona except for the people who fall prey to Apathy Syndrome or get pulled into Tartarus. There was Mitsuru's father too at the very end of the game which also brought up questions.

I feel like this game could've went further with the remake aspect as to fix some of these questions regarding the story. Like with Persona 5 I feel that the Apathy Syndrome part could have been explained a little bit better. We do see people around the city afflicted with it, but I'm still unsure exactly what causes it. I assume random people gain awareness of the Dark Hour, but a shadow devours their mind which is why they end up like that, but that's just an assumption the game as far as I remember never explained it. There's also questions about the experiment that the Kirijo Group conducted. Mitsuru said that Tartarus and the Dark Hour were created as a result of the explosion when the experiment on the shadows went foul, but if the Dark Hour was created as a result then where did they get the shadows? Also it said that Shinji Aragaki's Persona went wild and accidentally killed Amada's mom in front of him, but you can only use your persona during the Dark Hour (mostly), so what were Ken and his mother doing during the Dark Hour and from earlier conversation in the game Mitsuru said it's rare for a shadow to appear outside of Tartarus too and the event happened in the Port Island Station Outskirts.

And then there's when Chidori is in the hospital. She uses her powers to heal some wilted flowers without summoning her persona. Up to this point we never see anyone use their powers outside of the Dark Hour or without summoning their persona and no attention is brought to her doing that other than Junpei going "Wow!' I thought he was about to ask her how she's doing that in broad daylight, but that question is never brought up. We also see when her persona goes wild and chokes her before Shinji injects her with a suppressant. Maybe I missed something and need to replay the game, but when all of these instances occurred it just brought up questions that were never told to me, but I don't think they were ever answered. If this was the case in the original I think Reload should've did more to make the story and lore more cohesive to fix inconsistencies like these. I also thought that how a couple of the characters were introduced were random. Ken and Koromaru's intros were very random. Just one night I think during a new moon or half moon a shadow is detected in the city and Akihiko is the only one not at the dorm that late and when he gets there Koro has already defeated the shadow and the party arrives to find Koro injured and then I think a week later he's added to the team. With Ken just one afternoon after school Ikutski brings him by the school and informs the party that he'll be staying at the dorms. It just feels so weird and when he joins it's a little less random. We see him overhearing Aki and Shinji's conversation revealing that Shinji was the one who killed his mother so he asks to join the party. That's not as random, but his initial appearance was off-putting and once after the full moon where Shinji died I wondered why Ikutski even allowed this boy to join S.E.E.S. fully knowing that we were responsible for his mother's death. We found out later that Ikutski wasn't right in the head, but I still wondered why he did that and why Mitsuru or Sanada didn't fight back against that decision when they both knew who he was. I don't like Ken as a character really either and having a child fight in this various situation. I know other video games do this too like Pokemon and Final Fantasy, but I guess this feels different since it's set in the real world. 

 

Strega also felt underutilized and a bit sloppy in the story. In their introduction we see a random person wake up during the Dark Hour when Strega comes informing the man that they have a hit on him before Takaya shoots him. At school the next day a pair of gossiping students talk about a revenge website where you can request revenge against people and you can also get a URL for it from the club, but this part is never brought up again. I also might have missed it because I picked the "Why aren't you wearing a top?" option, but I never found out what Strega's actual goal was. If I just picked the wrong option I think that was a mistake to only leave that up in a dialogue option and once Chidori is captured they don't make any kind of effort to rescue her until November. They weren't aware that killing the full moon shadows wouldn't erase the Dark Hour so I would think they would try everything they could to prevent that so rescuing Chidori so they could have an extra person to fight against would make sense. Freeing her way after the fact didn't make much sense to me and then it seemed like their goal was changed from preserving the Dark Hour to allowing Nyx to come to end the world which made little sense to me. Takaya was against us fighting the full moon bosses because he thought that the power of Persona was a gift and taking away that power for everyone was an insult so I didn't get where he suddenly became a leader of a cult for Nyx. It's like they started with the idea of the revenge site, but dropped it and then just added the cult thing to them at the last minute. I don't know. Strega could've been done a lot better. Chidori is excellent though. Jin is wack.

Lastly I want to talk about the confidants. This game has the worst social links out of the three to me. The Sun Arcana is the best social link out of all the games, but there are so many other ones that I just don't like at all. Kenji, Odagiri, Tanaka, Mutatsu, and the Moon. I did not like any of them, well Mutatsu had grew on me and I only got far enough in his rank as I did because in the later part of the story there's not much to do at nights and I hated Tanaka so much more than Mutatsu that I wasn't going to do anymore of his after just the second rank, but I'm kinda glad I did finish Mutatsu's ranking because he had a pretty touching moment at the end trying to reconnect with his family after he fucked up. I didn't like Kenji because he just felt weird and his whole relationship with his teacher made me feel odd. In the beginning I thought it wasn't real, but as it went on I was like oh he's actually in it for real, but the dude feels so off to me that I couldn't find myself to max him out. Odagiri is just a snob and goody two shoes. He reminds me of those annoying stuck up characters like Draco Malfoy in Harry Potter. Persona 3 also has the worst social link with the Moon arcana. I don't know what's up with the Moons in the Persona games, but they are the worst, but this takes the cake and I didn't mean that as a pun, but it is what it is. The Moon social link is Nozomi Suemitsu. Immediately I'm turned off about him when he quizzes me on food like how nerdy men quizzes girls on anime to prove their really into it. He is those guys, but with food. He is also the stereotypical fat person that loves food joke which I thought was played out even in the 2000s. I couldn't bear him to get beyond his first rank and I didn't regret it because towards the end of the game when we go on the school trip he is still annoying acting like the worst commenters on the internet. Not to end on a bad note, but I think I liked Kaz and Yuko's confidants the most aside from the Sun and the SEES member ones. Kaz just feels like the homie and I felt an emotional connection for him once he revealed that he's still trying to run in order to keep a promise to his nephew so his nephew will go through rehab. And I like Yuko cuz she Black and she's cute. Actually, I was quite shocked to see a black character in this game with an actual name. Persona 4 and 5 just had a couple Black nameless NPCs. Like what happened? When Persona 6 comes around can we get another one as a social link or better yet as a team member?

I do like the other non-social link hangouts that are still kind of like social links with your party members. These hang outs flesh the characters out and we get to have more opportunities to establish our friendships with them. Akihiko's is the most memorable for me probably because I think his is the only one I was actually able to finish. I think I may have only done of couple of Ken's, but I didn't like Ken at all so there's that. All of the female party members get official social links. Yukari's is very good. We get even more about her relationship with her family as she talks about her mother and not wanting to end up like her. During her social link she also reveals that she hasn't seen her mother in ten years which surprises me. Who was raising her since then? I thought it was implied that her mother and father were raising her together but when her father died Yukari's mom raised her alone, but apparently not. It's weird she did mention being in a foster home or with other relatives or something since then. I didn't get to complete Fuuka's social link but it wasn't doing much for me. It was all about her trying to learn how to cook so she could be helpful with the group. In one rank she mentioned how she was into tech and electronics which she got from her dad and how she was viewed from others for being less girly because of it. I actually would've preferred it leaned into that, but maybe it would've at the end. Mitsuru's I just found a bit too cliché with the whole rich person who isn't accustomed with what normal people do on the level that it's unrealistic and again the arranged marriage and inheriting the family business was treading the same ground to me even though I know 3 came before 5. I wish I got to see more personality from Mitsuru. I did Aigis's too but only managed to get as far as rank 6 but I enjoyed what I saw though I was a bit underwhelmed. Even Elizabeth had one of a sort with her outings request and these were fun. I enjoyed these more than the Caroline & Justine outings from Persona 5 and I think a lot of that is due to them not taking time because since the twins' requests took time and the only reward were skill cards there wasn't much reason for people to want to do those over working on leveling a social stat or a confidant.

Despite all of these criticisms as I mentioned I loved this game. This is easily a 9/10 for me. The characters and difficult battles are really what kept me going. Persona 3 Reload will be a favorite that I will visit again just not anytime soon because this ended up taking a total of 116 hours for me to complete. This video game's music has been stuck in my head every day since and I look forward to Persona 6 whenever that may come.