Is Persona 3 Reload REALLY That Good?!

if there's one thing everyone knows about Maddie it's that he's a DieHard Persona fan a complete Fanboy of the franchise quite frankly we've talked about it a decent amount here on the channel from Persona 5 Royal to one of my favorite video essays we've ever done here called the future of persona where we made a lot of predictions and a lot of them have come true including a Persona 3 remake which is what we're here to talk about today in Persona 3 reload this was a pivotal game in the series history where they really took that big dive and did a social focused gameplay that we know and love except now you have it rebuilt with Cutting Edge Graphics modernized quality of life features and signature stylish UI that you've come to know and love from this series and so when Sega reached out and said hey you want to check this out of course it was already on my list I've been playing it since January 19th so I put a decent amount of time into it and Persona 3 reload is literally way more than I expected it to be so we're going to talk about all of that if you're interested in Persona 3 reload it's available right now on Xbox game pass Xbox series X and S Xbox One Windows PC PlayStation 5 PlayStation 4 and steam out of the three social focused Persona games being 3 four and 5 I got to be honest three had a story that really resonated with me but everything surrounding it from tardus to the Social Links never clicked with me so I was really curious how I would feel about Persona 3 reload I'm here to share some thoughts with you all today shout out again to Sega for sponsoring today's video Let's Kick things off talking about the story just so you get a general idea of what's Happening here each Persona game is built around a particular theme so Persona 4 was reaching out to the truth five was fighting against Injustice three is a very dark theme about life and death and I think that's the most captivating part of it all especially as you get toward the end of the game it really starts to hit harder and harder like the original enemies in Persona 3 Fest but we won't talk about that until later what's happening is this thing called The Dark Hour in the middle of the night there's this additional hour on the clock where what's happening is everyone appears to be in coffins no one remembers it ever happens and your group cease is immune to this and so you see this big tower known as tardus appear we got to investigate this thing you take out your evoker you put it to your head you summon your persona and you start crawling through a dungeon trying to figure out what's going on in this world as you do so you're going to be navigating your social life and making bonds with friends to help fuse new personas and when you're fusing those new person as you'll be able to use the XP gained from the social link mechanic to fuel those new personas in your party just like any Persona game you don't need to play prior personas to understand what's happening in three reload it is a completely self-contained story which is a great thing meaning you could try it and love it and that's it that's your experience for Persona and you can just move on I ask you just to pay attention to the characters there are new Vaas uh some hit and miss in my opinion I think like Jun did a really good job but there are some like like akaho or I'm just I'm not feeling it at all but the characters as an arc pay attention to their quiet sadness they all have a shared trauma if you will and they gradually open up about that yukari being the first one and I think that it's a really underrated cast in how they open up to one another and this game with some of its new events even draw that Bond a little bit closer so just know Persona is as driven by themes as it is its characters and with that let's begin with General thoughts on the game overall way better than I thought it' be the opening hours were a crawl though and it does remind me that Persona 3 doesn't really start until you hit July and for new time fans I think that's going to be a bit of a growing pain because when you look at Persona 5 or Persona 4 I feel they do a really good job of roping you into the main plot pretty quickly the first hour of person 3 does that then you start your social life and from there nothing really happens for a good stretch of time not until May but anything of significant consequence that takes off the story in a particular direction I don't think is until like June or July so you're going to spend a lot of time familiarizing yourselves with the social mechanics they've made a decent amount of tweaks here I got to be real though some of these Social Links I I feel like Atlas could have done more to retool them it's great that every main link is fully voiced that's a great quality life feature enhancement but there are some like Kenji where he's like yo man going to ask out my teacher rank up and I'm thinking to myself between Persona four and five and five Royal there was this significant climb and it felt like every rank was gradually more and more purposeful and especially in five so I thought going back to three reload this is a good chance to take some of those Social Links and clean them up a little bit but unfortunately in some cases the Social Links are you know not great I also do wish that they added perks that you would get like for example in five you do the confidance and you get some gameplay Buffs but what Persona 3 does is adds a lot of gameplay perks it's just through Tardis that you unlock it so Tardis was the more contentious part of I think Persona 3 a lot of people love the 200 plus floors of dungeon crawling many people get tired of it quickly so this was probably the biggest task for Atlas to tackle in my opinion my original theory was just to take each block of tardus and kind of turn it into a palace like Persona 5 but when they stuck to their guns I went all right I respect that you want to retain the original vision of what tardus is which is this Monumental climb to the top how do you make that fun well they have done a magnificent job of that I am eating my words completely tardus is actually tolerable and not just that but really fun and I look forward to going through it now you have a new thing called Twilight fragments you can use these to open chest so like you're going to be around the the Overworld like tatumi Port Island and you're going to find a Twilight fragment and then you can go inside Tardis and when you do you get unique Loot and that kind of scales you up quicker without using any of your yen to buy stuff from the police station they also have this new thing called a monad door pretty much it's a hallway that you're going to find and when you run through it there's going to be a boss at the end and behind that it's going to be really valuable loot so a lot more loot driven visually it looks really good like is kind of creepy now you can see things in higher detail like the blood draped across the floor and each block is varied differently there is one stretch I think it was block three I'm trying to remember where it can get a little confusing to navigate it can get a little tough in that sense these floors compared to what I've experienced in Persona 3 Fest and Persona 3 Portable are much bigger it feels more deliberate that you'll start at one end and have to navigate all the way to the other where sometimes in even Persona 3 persona on a four you would spawn and maybe the stairs have would be right next to you that was really nice especially when you were feeling like the climax of The Narrative and you just wanted to get to the next floor to get to the next part in this game it's kind of more difficult to rush through things they do have a new system called the thirgy mechanic basically if you've played Persona 5 royal you'll remember showtimes this is that uh IUS has one that is so raw I mean these are where the Persona artists are just flexing like just complete flexes I mean everything from the UI to the menu work to even when you call in a persona it's about to be a crit how like the banner that appears is behind the player character little stylish touches like that elevate the feel of persona so much but the 3dg mechanic is fantastic they have shifting so again Persona 5 will go to that they had baton passing this means that now you can Target a weakness and then pass it to yukari or pass it to June or pass it to akih and so this gives combat a better flow you feel like immediately the switch flip when you're doing Persona 3 in those opening I'd say three hours you know the combat's great it just feels kind of stiff but you realize just how important to the future of this series shifting or baton passing whatever they're going to call it next how important that is because it opens up combat entirely there's a totally different flow there to the game speaking of flow Beyond tars which we'll bounce back into a little bit they've also added great quality of life and enhancements like the network features so if you're kind of unsure what's happening during the day in Persona 3 it was also in Persona 5 and Persona 4 Golden you would press a button and it would show on the menu like what is everyone doing with their Social Links today Pretty much telling you who's available what are people doing in their daily lives telling you what's available this is just good to kind of check the schedule effectively in a quick way they also added the phone basically from Persona 5 so you press the square button in my case and you'll open up your phone phone and you'll see a bunch of messages from everyone who wants to hang out Kenji Yuko and so on everyone wants to hang out and this gets you around quicker so these are great quality life features because I like that you get to zip and zag everywhere in Persona 3 because my first experience with the game was Persona 3 Portable I recently played Persona 3 festen and now here I am with Persona 3 reload so even though you lose some story moments in it I did like the snappiness of Persona 3 Portable it also fit the kind of visual novel feel uh but here in reload they have a really good balance of gamep play and snapping back and forth between things and keeping the flow of the game pretty quick I have not finished it yet but I will say that right now it's clocking in longer than I think Persona 3 Portable would for most people like Persona 3 Portable the first time I played it was about a 40h hour game this game will push you past at least 50 60 hours for sure but I think it's time well spent and for those who are concerned maybe I have a lot of viewers out there who want to play persona but the time commitment is too big this is definitely I think more manageable comparatively speaking back to Tardis they have this new mechanic with Shuffle Time shuffle time's already been the series as many of you already know with like three and four sometimes you get random stuff and and it was just I don't know it was needlessly annoying as how I put it and so what happens now is when you do a shuffle time it's the same thing you pick between the Cards like more XP more money or hey I want this Persona and then you'll start to get these Arcana burst cards that as you're in Taris will give you little Buffs so at one point I had a full Arcana burst and I was getting extra XP and extra money as long as I stayed in Tardis the moment I left though is when I lose it all so you're kind of crawling up and earning bonuses and gaining momentum and this is actually a really great addition you're also going to be able to like zip around quicker with an upgraded Dash and do an upgraded attack that pretty much guarantees getting Advantage when you get Advantage you hear one of the best battle tracks in the entire series take a [Music] listen Angel the ene down on own and yeah the new music here is great I don't really like the new mass destruction there's this like in in the beginning that just scratches my eard drums in a way I I can't really shake off so I'm considering buying the DLC to change the battle track it it's it's a weird thing for me I don't think it'll affect you but for me it just I it's a particular instrument that's just wubbing a little too loud and it's very distracting and so that bugged me for a lot of my playthroughs so I was always trying to get Advantage anytime I could but in the social life part of the gameplay there is this new track called pain of view that plays in the evening time just take a listen [Music] y'all in the day never [Music] G yeah like god tier stuff um speaking of god tier there are sometimes in moments of persona that you're going to make little mistakes like I wish I did this during this day Persona 3 has this rewind feature that's been introduced here in reload and I think this is going to be great for newcomers so let's say you answered a test question wrong and you want to redo it you can literally Press Start and it'll rewind you to like the evening of the day before it's a really interesting addition to the game that I never thought was fully necessary and I try not to utilize I'd say it's the equivalent of like saves scumming and balers Gate 3 like like you save before every major story decision in case it doesn't go out the way you want it to this kind of prevents you from saving constantly as the game's doing and so you can rewind and go you know what I should have spent time with this person instead or I I I needed to upgrade my academics for this test I should have done this you can rewind multiple days even if you wanted to so it allows you to replay things with a little more strategy and I think this will be good for newcomers speaking of newcomers I've been talking a lot about the gameplay I should have mentioned the difficulty so I feel like this is much more manageable compared to Persona 3 Portable and Persona 3 Fest especially Fest where you could not control your teammates directly this is a great upgrade uh Persona 3 Portable you could control your teammates but the similarity between those two versions was that enemies hit you like a freight train even on normal difficulty they would destroy you and so here in Persona 3 reload I think purist might be a little upset it's definitely easier I wouldn't say it's like Persona 5 Royal level easy but but like I haven't died yet put it that way uh but if you do die you can get a retry in a big boss fight which is good it doesn't just go back to your old save or send you down to the bottom of tardis so the game does a really good job of keeping you from losing progress but the difficulty is much more I'd say newcomer friendly especially with the new difficulty options there like my first time playing Persona 3 Portable I'm not ashamed to say was on easy because the first boss I fought just knocked me on my butt with like 80 damage in a single attack and I said look us smt fans out there I get it you're masochist in a particular way for me though no no I like a nice solid turn based experience and I thought easy was tough enough here in this game played on normal and I think I could have gone into hard but that's with all the mechanics in your hands like thgy and shifting and everything all out attacks being easier to pull off from the shifting which by the way at the new animations it looks incredible if you do have dead teammates and you complete a fight they don't get XP Persona 3 is still I mean just Persona in general is still like old school in this way and I I don't get why I I hope they try to adjust for this in the inevitable Persona 6 but uh what you can do is go to a door that you find in Tardis it'll basically level you up in this really weird complex way like you can select certain characters and scale them to level um it's not always there so it's it's something you have to be on the lookout for but it's good to have if someone's lagging behind which means unfortunately that if you want to level someone up individually you will have to grind so yeah Persona 3 reload I mean I already saw the review scores um yeah it's that good it really is it's a really good time I mean I'd recommend to you Persona any day of the week but I do think Persona 3 reload is a great starting point for a newcomer it helps it's on Game Pass so if you're still a little unsure you can try it out there again it's available on Game Pass Xbox series X and S Xbox One PC PlayStation 4 PlayStation 5 I mean it's everywhere steam I think the story is going to click with a lot of people especially the theme of life and death I think they did a good job in improving some of the characters in The Game and their usefulness but yeah I'm looking forward to seeing your thoughts on Persona 3 reload are you planning on picking it up let me know down below with that take excellent care of yourselves shout out again to Sega for sponsoring today's video and I'll catch you in the next one stay sexy stay active I love you all peace

Channel: MrMattyPlays

Views: 79,147

Keywords: persona, persona 3, persona 3 reload, persona 3 reload review, persona 3 reload impressions, persona 3 reload preview, persona 3 reload gameplay, mrmattyplays

Id: DPKwA6LFY6s

Length: 16min 15sec (975 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 02 2024