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See your favorite moments beautifully remade from scratch, along with an all-new opening music video.

Plenty is different back in the outside world, too. First and foremost, I can physically run around 3D city streets and classroom hallways, as opposed to moving a cursor to callout bubbles in a relatively static environment like in past Persona 3 iterations. In general, the camera maintains a tighter shot, making bouncing around locations feel more intimate and nearly first-person.

During battle, both the ability to take direct control over party members as in Portable, as well as enabling the CPU to dictate their behavior as in the original game and FES, are available. The battle user interface has been completely overhauled to take functional and stylistic inspiration from Persona 5, with the commands "Persona", "Item", "Guard" and "Attack" each corresponding to different buttons in a similar fashion. In addition to the returning "Analyze", "Tactics", "Target" and "Rush" commands from prior iterations of Persona 3, a "Survey" and "Assist" function have also been added. Persona 3 Reload implements an improved variation of the "Baton Pass" skill from Persona 5 in the form of the "Shift" ability mapped to the left trigger. "Shift" enables the current active party member to pass their turn onto another character after successfully landing a hit on a Shadow enemy that knocks them Down, allowing the next party member to potentially knock other enemies Down if they are in certain formations.

Following the game's official reveal, Atlus shared several additional details about Reload. P-Studio chief director Kazuhisa Wada and game producer Ryota Niitsuma clarified their intentions of producing a completely faithful recreation of the original Persona 3 experience, including implementing multiple "new scenes and events" beyond the retained narrative. However, the pair confirmed that as a result of remaining solely faithful to the game as it was originally released, non-e of the story content integrated into either Persona 3 FES or Persona 3 Portable would be remade for Reload, such as the epilogue chapter "The Answer" or the second female protagonist and her associated content.[14] Wada clarified following this interview however, that other story and gameplay elements first added to the main story scenario in FES would still feature in the game.[3] During a separate interview published in Weekly Famitsu, Wada, Niitsuma and game director Takuya Yamaguchi also expressed enthusiasm towards introducing alterations to the existing game's controls and map design, highlighting that the game's main dungeon, Tartarus, would undergo a "particularly large change" in structure from the original game due to the increase in environmental density, as well as interactive features and landscapes within existing areas.

However, in an interview with Famitsu, translated by Siliconera, the development team confirmed that the focus will be on the base version of the game. According to Personal 3 Reload producer Ryouta Niizuma, the game “…is a project that prioritized remaking the original Persona 3 for modern consoles.

I had only just played Persona 3 Portable in the last few years, so that hundred-hour saga felt relatively fresh in my mind going into my demo of Persona 3 Reload. I was excited to hang out with all my old pals, but a bit skeptical that it would be different enough to warrant the time investment all over again.

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The few unlucky humans who don’t get turned into coffins become prey to horrifying creatures called Shadows, who only appear during the Dark Hour.

We scored this a 9 because of the voice acting, amazing animated cut scenes and overall story. The repetitiveness towards the end was the main reason this was not a Masterpiece for us. At the end it got slow and we had to push ourselves to finish it. Now there are two paths and if had chose to end the game early, we probably would not have felt this way. However we persona 3 reload gameplay wanted the best ending and took longer then we both expected. This was still a solid game and we both enjoyed the game.

The game's official box art drawn by Shimada is an intentional recreation of Persona 3's Japanese PlayStation 2 key art, featuring the protagonist alongside the Persona Thanatos. Multiple revisions were made to update the homage, as Soejima and Yamaguchi discussed whether to just feature the protagonist and his Persona, or alongside the other main characters in the game.

Fights come with a swift momentum that's effortlessly stylized to match the kinetic look and pace of combat. And that's key for a turn-based RPG, keeping things moving and never letting you get bogged down as you go through the motions of what could otherwise feel like pretty similar battles.

Dungeon crawling through Tartarus is now more rewarding. There are many interesting new activities to do during the daytime to strengthen your party before the deadline for the next full moon Shadow boss fight arrives.