Please note this is the opinion of the author and not the entire Noisy Pixel staff.
When Episode Aigis was announced for Persona 3 Reload as DLC for a remake of ‘The Answer,’ a bonus chapter from the PlayStation 2 re-release, Persona 3 FES, a lot of people were asking, does this mean there’s a chance for the female protagonist to be added as well?
Producer Kazuhisa Wada, whilst interviewed by the Japanese outlet Famitsu, answered this question with a hard ‘there’s no chance of this happening’ and ‘Additionally, we as the Persona Team need to work on completely new titles in addition to remakes.’
This only raises a new question for me as a huge Persona fan.
What’s the point of even making Persona 3 Reload without the female protagonist?
Persona 3 has a confusing set of re-releases to the layman. The original game was released on the PlayStation 2 in 2006; it was re-released in 2007 as Persona 3 FES and then remade for the PlayStation Portable in 2009 as Persona 3 Portable.
The FES release contained the epilogue chapter, referred to as ‘The Answer’ as well as a collection of other small additions, and Portable was an entire remake for the lower-in-power handheld console and recreated its scenes in a visual novel style to compensate.
There were also some other changes. While the original release and FES had your other party members controlled by AI, whom you could recommend to use certain action patterns, Portable used Persona 4’s battle system, which stripped bare AI control, only implemented direct commands, and made the protagonist use only one weapon. It also had a female protagonist option.
When a game is released with a nameable character designed as a self-insert for the player, as many Atlus protagonists are, many will ask for a female protagonist.
For Portable, it was a huge boon, and people were a bit upset when Persona Q, a crossover game between Persona 3 and Persona 4 for the Nintendo 3DS, didn’t include her. Come Persona Q2, a crossover between 3, 4, and Persona 5, and she was among the cast to much applause.
With two different re-releases of the original game, people were expecting a definitive version. A remake should aim to be definitive because people are going to play the original whether or not the remake is good. And you want the expanded player base for the new version to acknowledge the history of what came before.
But no, Persona 3 Reload was developed as a remake of just the original base game. While it had new visuals, a refined translation, and a new voice cast, there was no Answer chapter and no female protagonist, and the changes to the systems (in my opinion) worsened the experience of the game.
It’s a $70 USD game, equating to roughly $110 here in Australia. Further, the season pass with Episode Aigis will cost another $35 USD on top of that (which was on FES’ disc), which means it’ll be a $105 USD game (and $165 of my own Australian dollars). FES launched for the PlayStation 2 at $30 USD dollars.
And to top it all off, I might be a huge fan of many of Atlus’ games, but this remake of Persona 3 felt somewhat cheap. I’ve played FES and Portable more times combined than I have fingers on one hand, so I feel I have a solid reference point.
I have a litany of complaints about the visual framing of cutscenes, the lack of understanding in regards to the moodiness or tone of scenes, new scenes just repeating information the player already knows about as if they don’t trust the player to remember anything, the fact the protagonist is locked to just one weapon, the removal of the tiredness mechanic which integrates into the story and progression, the fact it’s far easier to 100% complete the game which is antithetical to the original design; the list goes on.
And it would be way easier to forgive most of that if they added the female protagonist.
I go back to Wada’s words: “Additionally, we as the Persona Team need to work on completely new titles in addition to remakes.” Why would you consider remaking Persona 3 without a character who is so widely beloved when now encouraging a vaster audience to play and enjoy your game?
They say the cost and hurdles were too high, but they were remaking this game and saying that even Episode Aigis wasn’t in the cards. It doesn’t feel like it has much in the way of the creative vision to craft itself as an interesting revisit to the media.
Persona 3 Reload is even using Portable’s script. Even with a new translation, you can tell because it keeps various small additions like characters making small noises and saying ‘….’ to remind you the person is there in a scene or describing something visually that otherwise wasn’t because the visual novel format of Portable didn’t allow for scenes to show every character at once or wasn’t utilised to display as much visual information as effectively as it could have been. So, the script for the game already exists.
When the game was announced, it was theorised that they might be doing all of the animated cutscenes in the engine, so they didn’t have to animate versions for both protagonists in a remake, but that was squashed very quickly.
It makes it even more baffling when you take into account things like the re-release of the PS Vita game The Caligula Effect, Caligula Overdose, a Persona-inspired game written by Tadashi Satomi (the writer of Persona 1 and 2), added in a female protagonist, despite being made on an absurdly low budget. They even animated new cutscenes for her to match the original, alongside a ton of extra story content. Far, far more than Reload brings to the table.
And then they made a sequel for that game, one of the best games of all time, which was also on a low budget and had a female protagonist option.
So now we have Persona 3 Reload, a very pricey remake that does little to set itself apart from previous versions and even lacks features.
What was the point?
