If you were hoping that Persona 3 Reload would include content added in later versions of the game, you’ll be disappointed to hear it’s just a remake of the original game.
You would think that with the luxury of hindsight, Atlus could look back at the three different versions of Persona 3 and combine them into one complete package to make up Persona 3 Reload, a remake of the PS2 title formally announced at yesterday’s Xbox showcase. Instead, for some baffling reasoning, it is choosing to not do that, instead opting for the route that just makes the original release of the game, and won’t include anything from FES or Portable. Persona 3 Reload producer Ryota Niitsuma and chief director Kazuhisa Wada confirmed this in a recent interview with IGN, where they explained their reasoning behind this decision.
“So first I’d like to mention that since the basic concept of the Persona 3 remake was to remake the Persona 3, we don’t have the FES and Portable contents included,” Niitsuma explained. “We wanted to really genuinely work on recreating the Persona 3 experience.”
Niitsuma continued by saying they “can’t really go into the details at this point yet, but we have remade basically everything from scratch as for Persona 3 the original version. So we have newly recorded voices, we have new scenes and events. We also have both new and arranged music. We’ll be kind of releasing that information, following everything. So please look forward to that.”
Wada also explained that the main updates Atlus is focusing on is to bring it more in line with Persona 5, but keep everything from the original version in terms of story. The frustrating point for fans is that many want to be able to play as the female protagonist introduced in Persona 3 Portable, making this remake quite alienating to a huge portion of the fan base.
Atlus does have a history of releasing new versions of its games, obviously Persona 3 being one of them, with Persona 4 later receiving its Golden version, and Persona 5 its Royal version. There’s always the possibility Atlus is planning something similar with Persona 3 Reload, but there honestly doesn’t seem to be much of a reason to not do so.
Persona 3 is due out early next year on PlayStation, Xbox, PC, and Nintendo Switch.