‘Persona 3 Reload’ Review: Happiness Is a Warm Gun

Picture this — you’re an orphaned teenager who is transferring to a high school in a town you used to live in ten years ago. It’s late when you get off the train and head to your new place of stay, a dorm.

The clock strikes midnight. As you exit the station there’s a shift in the atmosphere, you pretend not to notice it. There are puddles of unidentifiable red color liquid staining the ground. The power seems to be out as well. Making your way downtown no one greets you. There are coffins lining the streets instead excluding an ominous aura.

This somehow does not bother you.

When you finally reach the dorm, it’s dark inside. There’s a lone little boy dressed in what seems to be a prisoner’s garb who greets you. He asks you to sign some sort of contract, which you do. The bay then mysteriously disappears and in his place are two girls one of whom seems to be wielding a gun.

Sound intriguing? This is the beginning of Persona 3 (Reload).

There are 24 hours in a day. Persona 3 however has the Dark Hour, the 25th hour nestled away that begins just after the stroke of midnight. During the Dark Hour, monsters known as Shadows come out to play while most people sleep unaware in coffins. If that doesn’t sound bad enough, there’s a disease being spread, the Apathy Syndrome that’s linked to the Dark Hour and a mysterious never-ending tower, Tartarus, that appears where your school is supposed to be.

There’s some hope in the darkness. A special group of people who are the only ones who can stay awake, fight the Shadows with special abilities and summoning their Personas. They are the Specialized Extracurricular Execution Squad (SEES) — a group of high school students, our protagonist one of them, who to get to the bottom of things and rid the world of the Dark Hour once and for all.

Persona 3 is what heralded a new era for the franchise. It was the first RPG game that incorporated dungeon crawling mechanics with a social simulator. You fight evil by night and assume the role of a normal high school student by day. You attend classes, travel by monorail, hang out with friends and summon personas by shooting yourself in the head.

Persona 3 has many iterations.

The original Persona 3 released in 2006 for the PS2. A year later FES, came out and featured an epilogue that added to the main story and tied up everything with a neat little bow. Then came Persona 3 Portable for the PSP in 2009. This time the game gave you the option of having a female protagonist, who allowed returning players could experience the story in a whole new way. In 2023, Persona 3 Portable re-released for PC, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch and Xbox. Now, in 2024 we have Persona 3 Reload which is an overhauled version of the original Persona 3.

Each version has its strengths and weaknesses. The original made the breakthrough, FES expands on the story, P3P gives you a female protagonist. FES doesn’t play as smoothly as P3P, nor does it give you a new set of eyes to experience the story. But P3P being on a portable device does take some of the magic away from the cutscenes and some of the sequences (especially the exploration). P3R gives you the best of the original overhauled from the ground up but doesn’t have the expanded FES epilogue nor the female protagonist.

The UI, the graphics, the character models, combat, Tartarus and the city are all very stylized and sleek. Thus aesthetically distinct, there is still something reminiscent of Persona 5. Playing Reload after being used to P3P on the PSP does give you whiplash. You feel like you can interact with the world much more than you could before and the world also feels very lived in. Whether it’s taking the monorail to school or exploring the charming city of Tatsumi Port Island, it feels very tangible.

How do you even begin to take on the Shadows that threaten the world? You get by with a little help from your friends. Social links are always important in the world of Persona 3, strengthen the bonds with your friends to get that edge in the fight. The social links this time are fully voiced and fleshed out, adding more gravitas to the bonds you forge. The group genuinely feels like friends and not just random students doing a club activity. You can study together, watch a film together and do various activities that add to life’s little moments while simultaneously boosting your social stats.

In this version of the game. You don’t need to romance every girl to reach the max rank, something you had to do in the previous games (unless playing as the female protagonist). You can keep things strictly platonic. Previously there really weren’t any social links for the boys. This time round while there may not be ‘social links’ as such, there are a lot more meaningful moments that add to their character. Everyone feels real, rather than just an NPC.

Unlike Persona 5 which had distinct palaces to explore, in Persona 3 you simply have the never-ending Tartarus. There is a whole new set of moves and combat mechanics that are fun and challenging.

First up is Theurgy. This is akin to a limit break attack that can be unleashed by the Persona users after the gauge is filled up. These can’t be used that often and are unique to every character, employing them wisely tips the scales in your favor. Like the Baton Pass in Persona 5, here we have the Shift. If you’re successful in knocking down a Shadow by exploiting the weakness, you can pass the turn to another character or try to take down the Shadow with whoever knocked it down in the first place.

The Monad doors that appear in Tartarus have also been revamped. You can tackle an unforgiving environment and a particularly challenging boss for a lot of loot. Monad doors were considered end-game areas in order to level up, but this is now not true. You no longer need to defeat The Reaper before venturing through the door as you used to. But just because you have easier access doesn’t mean the fight is going to be easy. If you aren’t careful, you’re walking right to your demise.

Persona 3’s story is significantly darker than the other entries in the franchise. In Persona 5, the Phantom Thieves banded together not only because of a shared common goal but also a sense of camaraderie; they were friends. In Persona 3 you’re thrown in together not because they wanted to be together but because they had no other choice. The relationship between the team is infinitely complicated but as the game progresses you see how they go from being teammates and allies to actual friends.

Persona 3 also has the most (dare I say, badass) way to summon a Persona. To summon the giant floating guardian to help defeat the Shadows, the users must shoot themselves in the head with a gun, an Evoker. Technically an Evoker isn’t an actual gun. No one dies by shooting themselves in the head in Persona 3, there is no gruesome blood spray, but it is clearly painful. In order to summon a Persona, the user needs to go through extreme mental stress. What’s more stressful than shooting yourself in the head? The Persona user is essentially killing themselves for their true Jungian self (the Persona) to arrive. In the beginning of the game, it paints an especially evocative image: to hold a gun in your hand, seeing the fear, the uncertainty, the hesitation to pull the trigger even when you know that it won’t kill you.

Persona 3 still stands as the franchise’s boldest take; be it the method of summoning one’s Persona, the themes in the story, the characters and their grief and the setting itself. It’s hard to say Persona 3 Reload is the ultimate adaptation of the story of Persona 3 as it doesn’t have what FES or P3P contain, you’ll still need to play those to get the full picture. Instead, Persona 3 Reload presents the core story of Persona 3 with a modernized take for a new audience.   

So, pull the trigger under the moonlight in the darkest hour.