Name: This Game Has A LOT of Love in it, and Has Fantastic Writing For Dialogue
Item: Persona 3 Reload
Rating: 9
Author: Todd Lewis

Story:

The story is arguably the best amongst the modern popular Persona 3, 4, and 5. The stakes are very high and the concepts are intriguing. The characters are written well and the dialogue between them is so natural and with a great amount of detail added to school interactions, side conversations, and more. Very Interesting story from an anime game. I speak as a science fiction snob where my expectations for curve balls in fiction is high.

Gameplay:

This is where people will turn off on this game. I can tell you right now that if you are a newbie to the game and don't know persona fusions and just the general rotation of the gameplay, your ratio of dungeon crawling to social linking will be like 70/30. This will shift to more social linking once you learn to optimize your time in Tartarus. But that's where things get dicey for fans of dungeon crawling and turn based combat. 

Based on how you optimize your play as a Persona player/newbie, you lose dungeon crawling and the game becomes more menu management--which some may enjoy, but not all will. If you love the social links and prefer elements found in a good visual novel, then this game is a buffet of elite cuisine. Its NOT a visual novel AT ALL, but the social links make the game feel it leans that way, when in truth you interact with the social links to increase your battle prowess. Its a great synergetic system between the two core foundations of gameplay. In short, THANK BOB the game has fantastic writing, because if it had Star Ocean caliber writing, this game would be booty cheeks.

Presentation: The game is beautiful as far as moody, dark anime games go. They pretty much grabbed Persona 3 from 2009 and remade it in the Persona 5 Royal Engine with a lot of its QOL elements incorporated. After reading the prior sentence, if you're a Persona 3 fan, that's all you need to hear. I can't recall a single thing they changed from 2009 Persona in this remake that was negative, personally. Aside from the female protagonist not being in the game, this version of Persona 3 is the definitive version of Persona 3 in existence and I am looking forward to a Persona 4 remake.

Still Not Convinced? Is There More?

If you want probably the highest tier in existence of turn-based anime rpg combat, this is it. The game is also dripping with style. The music is fucking fantastic; if you bought the game just for the soundtrack, I would understand. The art of the Personas is sick and their fusion system is very deep if youre a xy table nerd (not a bad thing!). The games also have lots of other media that you can indulge in. They have a fighting game, dancing game, manga, anime, xcom game, dungeon crawler, dynasty warrior game, and share demons in another game franchise, SMT.

Hard to not find something cool about Persona, even as a normie, but if turn-based combat and anime in general isn't for you, Persona RPG games are not for you and that's okay, there's plenty of other kind of Persona to go around.

Persona 3 Reload

This Game Has A LOT of Love in it, and Has Fantastic Writing For Dialogue

Player Score

Todd Lewis