In 2006, the most unrealistic parts of role-playing game Persona 3 were the monsters. The secret Dark Hour that plunges the world under a sickly green moon at midnight. A supernatural realm, hidden in the fictional Japanese town of Tatsumi Port Island. But that was 18 years ago. In ground-up remake Persona 3 Reload, you’ll instead suspend disbelief at the thought of regularly eating at restaurants, or all of your friends being free on the same days.
Unrealistic or not, we did all of that and more in our latest hands-on with Persona 3 Reload. If you’re not familiar with the original game, by day you live a slice-of-life fantasy as a student at Gekkoukan High School, hanging out with pals and keeping on top of school work. By night, you and a band of students head into the Dark Hour to slay Shadow monsters and save the town.
Our time in Reload begins at the end of a school day, around five hours into the full game. Our last preview was spent battering Shadows and swooning at the game’s gothic makeover, so this time, we’re here to party – and by that, we mean doing everything but saving the world.
Before stepping foot out of the classroom, we’re invited to sports practice and a trip to the arcade. Both are enticing offers, but we’re dying to explore Tatsumi Port Island. A modern-day graphical overhaul with a gorgeous lighting system means the area has never looked this good, and there’s plenty to keep you busy. We spent our afternoon buying weapons from a shady policeman and meeting a school friend for dinner, but as the in-game days unfurled we also squared up to misogynists, had our fortune told in the middle of a nightclub, and discovered the epic highs and lows of high school track team practice. We also spent an entire day joining a restaurant’s online fan club, but the less said about that one, the better.
In last year’s re-release of Persona 3 Portable, Tatsumi Port Island could only be explored in 2D. Reload brings things up to speed by making the jump to 3D. It’s a massive improvement – as with Tokyo in Persona 5, and 4‘s sleepy town of Inaba, being able to move around and see what’s going on each day is a blast. However, Persona 3 Reload director Takuya Yamaguchi tells NME that Reload’s cast – and the island itself – has had a bit of a growth spurt since our last visit.
“When we were working on the new town and everything, one of the key changes was changing the size of the characters to be more realistic, says Yamaguchi. “Because they’re now a little bit taller, we changed the scale of the town to fit that. One thing that we were really careful doing was not [going] ‘Oh they’re taller now, it’s realistic, photo-realism done!’ We wanted to keep the feel of Persona 3 – we had to make sure when you’re walking around it felt like the game, so we made sure to balance that and look very carefully when we were working on the environment.”
If you have played the original game, you should still recognise its upscaled locales. Yet while some areas of Reload seek to preserve elements of the original game, don’t expect everything to be as you remember.
“Persona 3 [has] an amazing story and core gameplay,” explains Yamaguchi. “We tried not to change that at all really, but what we did was add a lot of new elements and aspects that made the game hopefully feel fresh for veterans of this series.”
Our first taste of this comes when Mitsuru Kirijo, the head of Shadow-fighting vigilante group SEES (Specialised Extracurricular Execution Squad), invites us to explore Tartarus after school. Here, we get to play with Reload’s all-new Theurgy system, which offers powerful moves that can be used when “emotions run high” in battle. Each member of SEES has their own Theurgy move, and everyone has a unique way of charging them up. It adds a lot of texture to Reload’s dungeon crawling, and it’s the addition that Yamaguchi is proudest of.
“I think [Theurgy] is really cool for two reasons,” he says. “The first being that it helps highlight and emphasise what makes each character individual – I think that’s awesome. It also helps make the battles a lot more interesting, and dynamic, as well.”
It’s true – Theurgy, along with an updated battle interface that’s more in line with 4 and 5’s stylish aesthetics, vastly improves turn-based combat in comparison to the original game. New battle theme ‘It’s Going Down Now’, which pairs returning rapper Lotus Juice with singer Azumi Takahashi, captures the effortless cool that the Persona series has come to stand for. We catch ourselves head-bopping along several times during the preview, but we’re in good company – Reload producer Ryota Niitsuma tells us that it’s the song he’s been listening to the most.
“We took a lot of the elements that made the original battle music, and we incorporated them and adjusted, upgraded, and added new elements to it,” he says.
It’s a philosophy that’s been applied to the rest of the game. From everything we’ve seen in our hands-on, Reload takes the soul of Persona 3 and uplifts it in every way. Some of these changes – like being able to run instead of walk through Tartarus – are small improvements. Others, like the removal of 3’s punishing ‘Tired’ system that made exploring the Dark Hour a chore, are game-changing.
We only played Reload for an hour – a drop in the ocean, considering Persona 5’s playtime clocks in at around 100 hours – but as it stands, all signs point to this being a phenomenal remake. Can February roll around a little faster, please?
Persona 3 Reload launches on February 2 for PlayStation, Xbox and PC.