Persona 3 Reload Vs The Original Analysis

you may or may not know this but Persona 3 is one of my favorite video games of all time it's easily in my top 10 if not my top five uh games ever made and I also think it has one of the most powerful messages that I've never quite encountered anything like it in any other game or or Media or show or movie The Way That Persona 3 handles its admittedly much more serious and sensitive material tends to be very sophisticated usually and while its storytelling isn't perfect and there tends to be a lot of different interpretation depending depending on the medium you're playing Persona 3 the original game can be very different to say the portable version or this brand new reload and I've played basically every version of Persona 3 I've played the original Persona 3 Fez which has like an additional DLC uh portable the movies manga and so on like there's a lot of Persona 3 media that I've consumed and when it got announced that the reload would be coming effectively a remaster of the original game I was over the moon excited to to say the least and I thought about scripting this entire video but I thought about it and realized I didn't want to make this video too formulaic and I want to speak a little bit more from the heart about a game that means so much to me and this is not going to be an analysis of Persona 3 reload story or anything like the game's been out nearly 20 years and if you want a story analysis either go watch a different video or you can play the game yourself to experience it which I highly recommend speaking of which spoilers there will be Major Spoilers for Persona 3 even though we're not going to focus on the story that much we will touch on it here and there where necessary what I really want to do today is talk about the ways that it compares and differs to the original games because every time an old classic game gets remade instead of you know a faithful just upgrade upscale remaster inevitably things get changed whether it be small subtle things like the atmosphere or the tone and visuals or even very major things like in the case of Final Fantasy the Remake is quite different to the original game in many ways and how does Persona 3 stack up against the original Persona 3 games is it more of a replacement or a companion piece to those now it's made me happy to see that Persona 3 reload has gotten such a positive reception so far and the few but negative reviews that I've seen tend to compare it to Persona 5 most prominently and while there is some utility in that I don't think it's necessarily the best tool to judge if Persona 3 reload is a good game because admittedly while I do think reload got um what I'm going to call Persona fived in many ways I'm not sure that's the best frame of reference because you could easily just as much compare reload to its original game and by that measure reload looks absolutely stunning in just about every capacity and I also think they didn't want to make a true evolution of Persona 5 with this remaster that was not really the point you know there's a lot of mechanics that admittedly did not age so well or things that Persona 5 and even Persona 4 improved on but I I don't think they were trying to rectify all of those because they would be changing the original experience too much they would be bending that too Strangely I think so to illustrate what I'm talking about here's a perfect example about framing is Tartarus in the new Persona 3 reload any good well that completely depends on what you're comparing it to if you're talking about Tartarus in comparison to the handcrafted palaces of Persona 5 then Tartarus is a boring monotonous Nightmare and it's terrible however if you're comparing this Tartarus in reload to the original experience of Persona 3 it is Miles better like it's night and day it's not even close there are a few elements of the old Tartarus that I think are kind of charming and unique but by and large the new Tartarus design and the things that you can do in the layouts and everything and the way that you interact and move about the environment is so much more player friendly than it was you know in the original game that it's it's not even close like yes tartaris should get praised completely if compared to the original but compared to palaces to be honest like I'm sleeping on that Persona 3 reload never set out to be the next evolution of persona games or or or be a replacement for Persona 6 or anything it just wanted to be the original game but do some things slightly differently so the reason I laid all that out is because I think your take on Persona 3 reload depends almost entirely on what you're comparing it to and I just want to establish that for the most part I'm going to be comparing the reload to its original experiences the OG game Fez and uh even portable now I think it's pretty clear that uh Atlas and the developers and the leads on Persona 3 reload wanted to make Persona 3 a much more digestible modern gaming experience because they know that Persona 3 in its original form If released today would not be appealing to the broader Gaming Community and I think that's true so I can understand them wanting to do something a bit more familiar or uh accessible for a modern gaming player base and that would mean some changes and some big ones at that would need to be made but they even self- admit that they know a lot of the charm and and the specialness of the original Persona 3 was in its rough edges and a lot of the things that hadn't been smoothed out so let's just look at the big picture here I think Persona 3 reload did a plethora of things to its gameplay and greatly improved proved the original gameplay Loop of Persona 3 in many ways that includes combat and even the you know day-to-day activities Social Links and so on but I also feel that I think it loses some of its Edge and its charm in its creative Direction now being very familiar with the original game and all of the little details that I've come to know and love over the years I'm going to be acutely aware of any of those details that change from the original to the reload now in all fairness some of the things in the original Persona 3 probably could do with some up dating or needed to be changed as maybe they were just in poor taste some outdated or irrelevant humor and so on and I can understand them changing those things but there's a few other ones that just leave me scratching my head and honestly yearning for the original experience and I'll give you a few examples well first is actually the opening cinematic there's something about watching these cutcenes side by side that tells me everything I need to know about how this reload is going to be handled from a I don't know let's say a maturity perspective and when I say opening cinematic I mean both the like title intro as well as the first like in-game cinematic they're both very different and even the songs have changed too as much as I really like full moon full life it's a great new song and I think it fits the theme and tone of Persona 3 reload really well I don't think it fits the original game quite as much you can tell that where the differences in its uh actual tone are going to be felt Persona 3 reloads opening is great don't get me wrong and I think the production value and the art direction is fantastic I I love it however it does feel like it's been softened a little bit its edges aren't quite as sharp as they used to be the original Persona 3 opening feels like that game you shouldn't be playing it's that thing you know in the back of your mind that your parents definitely wouldn't want you playing something like this it felt I hate to use the word edgy to describe it that that's probably the best descriptor at the moment the Persona 3 reload opening has a lot of those Great Moments and does capture a bit of that energy but there's something about the opening of portable and the original game that just isn't quite able to be replicated i' would also like to point out that reloads intro makes C's feel a lot more like a big group of friends when in the original game most of the time they're very disconnected and ciz was never really the closest group of friends at least at first and I think that's conveyed brilliantly in both the original opening and Portables and obviously this fits the tone better for reload because they are a little bit more friendly with each other and close than they were in the original games which we'll get to a little bit later down the road so so not only do the opening titles for each respective game have a very different tone and atmosphere and feel to them but even the first cinematic that kicks the whole game off and we're going to go ahead and break these down because what the original creators of Persona 3 understood is there's a lot you can tell to the player and convey feelings to them just through simple editing or even not saying anything at all now part of that is due to technical limitations where they couldn't maybe say as much dialogue as they would have liked to and those technical limitations are no longer a problem and I think they still went the wrong direction with it which I'll explain but let's go ahead and take a look at these there's a very different energy that comes from both of these cut scenes one of them is able to convey a lot without saying anything and the other needs to kind of overe explain what's happening I'll let you watch them station right now [Music] s hey yo [Music] and there that's all you need cuts to Black yukari's crying no words are spoken and so much is conveyed now let's look at how it's done in [Music] [Music] reload just put it to my head and then pull the [Music] trigger come on there's no way I can't and that's how the reload intro goes I know just you watching those two side by side one of them made you feel very different than the other and I'm not saying that I hate this intro or anything like that but the original is able to cultivate so much more tension even to a point of almost making you feel uncomfortable or anxiety inducing this reload intro has like the literal events of what's happening but edited in a way that loses all of the energy and I also think yukari speaking in this was the worst thing they could have done her not saying anything in the original intro was one of the most powerful things about it now if I'm being totally fair I can't just dock reload on points for this because Persona 3 Portable also has the same problem yukari speaks in this moment which I do think deflates a lot of the attention but I think that's due to Portable technical limitations and they couldn't have the actual cinematic so they need to sort of explain what's happening through text more often than not and I get that however those technical limitations are not a problem with reload so theoretically we should have been able to have that really anxiety inducing editing going on still I think they were afraid of making their audience too uncomfortable and offut so early in the game but again part of that uncomfortableness was its appeal in some sense now we're not going to go scene by scene comparing every single to its reload counterpart I just want to take a look at one more example but you can basically assume that a lot of what I'm talking about in terms of the energy that's lost in these cutcenes can be applicable to almost all of them in reload there are some cases where I think it's the opposite and reload does its cut scene better and I'll point out those moments if I do see it but I want to take a look at one more example because just like the intro this is one of the most important moments in the game and this is the protagonist or Makoto's Awakening those monsters we call them Shadows go [Music] on Persona and perfect beautiful Awakening scene with a proper amount of time to let everything kind of slow down and then pick back up again the pacing is just brilliant now let's look at reloads no [Music] way that's it one of the monsters that attacked us that's the [Music] shadow go on per so now [Music] and that's the reload version now I don't think this one is as poorly edited as the intro cut scene is and there's actually a few things that I like in reloads version more than the original particularly the stuff with yukari I think my problem is I just greatly prefer how slow the original tried to build up that moment of the first Awakening that's such like an important moment in the entire cut scene and I think it just goes by a little too fast in reload like it's not paced properly now to mention Thanos literally ripping orus apart is a lot more visceral in the original cut and reload feels like it's been softened up to some degree now we could sit here and pickup art cut scenes all day but I don't really want to do that because there's many moments in depictions of certain events in the game that I prefer across all of the mediums like there's certain depictions and interpretations that I prefer in the original game there's some things that I actually prefer how reload does it and there's stuff that I prefer the most how the Persona 3 movies handle it as well well so what I'm getting at is there are multiple interpretations of events and moments that are handled much differently depending on what you're playing or watching and so to get the most well-rounded view I recommend playing the original game reload and watching the movies because it's a mixed bag of what interpretations of certain events I prefer and this was just a few examples but I hope this shows that I do think in general reload does have its edges softened compared to the original game and once again they admitted that's what they were doing and I do feel there was a conscious effort to not make the player overly uncomfortable with this reload because the original game had the danger of doing that especially for a modern audience but let's put that stuff on the shelf for now and maybe we'll come back to it a bit later I want to talk about gameplay because as much as these scene comparisons made Persona 3 look like the perfect game or the gold standard Persona 3 is certainly no perfect game and that's made abundantly clear when you take a look at the structure of the like day-to-day experience part of the gam playay and even Tartarus in combat which we'll talk about in just a second but Persona 3 would introduce practically the game defining mechanic that all Persona games are fundamentally built on now which is the time management system now I'm going to assume that everybody watching this video is at least Vaguely Familiar with how Persona 3 gameplay Works which is during the day you have the option to participate in social activities or hang out with people which will in turn give you the ability to make stronger personas or you can do things that will increase your stats like your charm or your academics you can study you can go you know to to the cafe and so on like you can do daily activities to increase these RPG player mechanics and then during the night time you can either choose to do these exclusive nighttime activities or you can go to Tartarus one of the biggest problems with the original Persona 3 is that the game is so front-loaded with daytime activities and Social Links that it leaves nighttime very Barren feeling and this is made even worse when you play something like Persona 5 Royal where the nighttime activities are almost as stacked as the day it just isn't the case here and this is made you know deliberately because I think the design was you know you're supposed to go to Tartarus almost every night and kind of Chunk away at it every so often but I think the way a lot of people play including myself is you basically try to stretch as far as you can into tardus for one night and then you'll have like basically two or 3 weeks to do nothing during the night time except go to sleep one of the best things Persona 3 reload did was take a lot of effort to alleviate this problem most particularly through a lot of expansion in the already existing places and mechanics you can interact with like going to the nightclub is now a lot more interactive than it was before and then you even have these nighttime episode activities where you can spend time hanging out with a member of C's and you'll get a reward for it they may even get some new combat abilities and you'll get some items to use in tardus and so on now when I said earlier that I feel reload got Persona fived in a lot of ways I mean that in both a negative and a positive way the negative we already covered I think you know being Persona 5ed in something some sense made it lose a little bit of its charm in areas that we've already covered but it does come with a few upsides and this being the overall UI design is much more player friendly like the old UI in Persona 3 was very minimal and it was non-descriptive with its icons and text and stuff like that it was a bit harder to navigate and a little bit more obtuse with the complete overhaul of the interface in just about every capacity I have to say the quality of life changes are much appreciated even though you can clearly tell that they used the persona bones and blueprints to make this menu in UI design I think that's totally fine and it's also not quite as like flashy or over the-top or rebellious as Persona 5's menu was and it's a lot more chilled out while still retaining a lot of the charm and aesthetic of the original design too Persona 3 reload introduced a lot of brand new mechanics most of them for the better and very positive ones however it also took away some features from the original and the ones that I was most sad to see go are the condition system and also the change to social links now when it comes to the party condition system the way this works is each character had a little icon representing how they were feeling you had like excellent condition you had normal good condition uh a bad one and then also sick and depending on how your player was feeling or your character was doing they would either deal more damage in combat if they were in excellent condition that is however if they were tired or sick their evasion would go down they'd become more susceptible to status ailments and so on and occasionally your party members would get sick for reasons completely complely out of your control which was slightly annoying but is something that added a bit of decision- making to the game playay also this interplayed with what you do at school because you could choose to go to sleep during school during uh like a lecture or something and you would have a better chance of being in good physical condition for Tartarus but you would miss out on something like attaining more academics or Charm or something like that this required you to exercise a bit of forth thought if you even wanted to go to Tartarus that night if it would be worth it and stuff like that and while the uh class system still is here where like you can choose to stay up or go to sleep it pretty much only alternates between obtaining more charm or courage this doesn't have any effect on your battle condition or your party or anything you do in Tartarus Persona 3 reload specifically also opened up more nighttime activities where you can go to E toi strip mall instead of just being relegated to the dorm or the mall area and this makes the condition system even more irrelevant because there's less of that decision- making of if you want to go that night and stuff like that now for people who have only played Persona 4 or five or Royal uh you'll know that interacting with your friends and your colleagues your relationships can only move forward however in Persona three your relationships can be reversed if you say the wrong thing during dialogue or do something bad to them and in the original game this was even more brutal because while they can still be reversed in Persona 3 reload uh you can prevent your relationships from still moving forward if you really pushed it in the old game you could outright break your relationships which would prevent you from fusing those personas in the Velvet Room this was a very brutal punishment for treating people poorly or making the wrong decisions but I think that's fine I wish they would have brought the system to where you could break those it just makes you know all of the choices and dialogue options you choose have much more weight and impact to them the old game everything you said mattered and that's still partly true in reload just a little bit less so due to the fact that there is less permanent punishment now like for example they even changed a few of the Social Links that were important to those reversals yukari is the most iconic one where she basically is about to be jumped and or assaulted by these guys and you come through and save her and if you make the wrong decision in the original game by trying to hug her she gets absolutely pissed off at you and your relationship then reverses and they don't really set you up for that in this or at least it's not the same they give you dialogue options but it's pretty clear which one you shouldn't pick there's a lot of these decision-making moments in all of the Social Links where it could potentially become reversed where you're able to skirt that a lot easier than you were in the original game speaking of impact and weight this new reload has a rewind system which allows you to turn back time a little bit in case you make a wrong decision while I feel very conflicted on this because on one hand I like the idea of it if you accidentally mess something up and want to go back and correct something I I think that's partly cool but it makes you having to live with the impact of what you did much lessened and let's not pretend that in the original game people didn't just make safe states and things like that to go back and correct a mistake if you made one but still it feels like the game is almost partially encouraging it making everybody's playthrough more or less the same just found the reversals to not play as much of a role as they did before and the inability to break relationships makes it feel like it doesn't have any ultimate weight now the thing is with Persona 3's Social Links they're a bit all over the place and I mean that in the original game too reload more or less keeps all of them intact with the added benefit of making everything voice acted now which is a benefit in a lot of ways there are some characters that I grew to love and I think their voice acting elevated their characters to a such a level that made them Unforgettable for example akinari is one of the characters that I liked in the original Persona 3 but I loved in reload particularly because of his voice acting he's a a young man dying from a hereditary disease you know presumably some kind of cancer and you're not able to help him with any of your powers he just wants somebody to spend time with him you stand there by him because even though there's nothing you can do it all to help him he wants to finish his story and help find some kind of meaning in his life the new voice acted Social Links really made a lot of them stand out or hit in a different kind of way that I'd never experienced in the original game and that is one of the biggest upsides to these voice acted Social Links in reload I think they did an excellent job with these again admittedly some of the Social Links are way less interesting than others got to a point where you really end up caring genuinely about these characters and the time you spent is very valuable so much so that near the end of the game even even though I had maxed out a lot of the Social Links I would still spend ample time doing nothing with my favorite characters just because I wanted to be around them more minus a few lame ones I think overall Persona 3 still has my favorite lineup of Social Links and their characters maybe right next to Royal while we're sort of on the topic of Social Links I want to segue into some of the new added story elements exclusively in reload and a lot of the new story elements come in the form of these nighttime activities where you hang out with a member of and I genuinely really enjoyed these because you get a lot more characterization of some of the members that don't get you know enough Spotlight in the original game so for those unaware in the original Persona 3 you couldn't actually hang out with any of the male party members and develop Social Links with them uh if you're playing as Makoto now the only exception to this is in the portable version you can play as the female main character in which you can hang out with the male party members and it's a bit of like a different timeline it's not that stuff gets weird from there we won't really you know go down that rabbit hole but in reload you can hang out with the male party members now but they're not really Social Links but you get some great story stuff and like uh exclusive items that you can only do by you know developing those you learn about Shinji in his past which was a criminally underdeveloped part of the story in the original game you learn about akihiko and his foster parents and his sister you learn about Ken and the dark place his head was at and you even learn about Jun P's inferiority complex more or less stemming from when he played baseball all of this new additional story is fantastic and one of the best things reload did they also gave much more characterization with Takaya another element of Persona 3 that I felt was a bit underdeveloped mostly in the games was stga and Takaya gets a lot more one-on-one time with Makoto and they talk and they really get to you know discuss ideologies and where they absolutely conflict Taya attempts to genuinely explain where him and stga are coming from and the fact that they don't want the dark hour to be destroyed as it would mean the elimination of their powers and thus potentially your purpose if you're a Persona user and so you can see where he's coming from even if you fundamentally disagree with it I really like their interactions a lot and they are paced well throughout the plot Because the actual plot of Persona 3 does have a few pacing issues and that are still present in reload okay so let's move on to changes in Tartarus and the complete overhaul of the combat system because while I think they still wanted to retain a lot of the DNA that made the original Persona 3's combat work they also have expand Ed it a lot to where it is much more akin to Persona 5 now now let's talk about that for a second because I think a lot of people who just played reload and not the original found tartar to be extremely grindy and boring and I get that I totally do and even in the original experience I would say that's probably true for most cases there again there are some charming things I like about the old Tartarus but in many ways the new one is significantly better and it's also not trying to be Persona 5 palaces I've seen people directly comparing persona three tardus to palaces and I just think that's not a fair comparison and I'm sure the thought even crossed their mind of like oh what if we just completely redesigned how the dungeon crawling Works in reload and but I don't think they wanted to do that because it would be straying away from the original Vision far too much they know Tartarus is boring in the original game and they still want to make Tartarus and not a palace and I get that so the trick was finding a happy medium between modernizing the gameplay and maintaining the original Vision which is a tough task I will give him that and for what worth I'm going to say I'm very positive on the new Tartarus there is a few things in particular to the charm and aesthetic that I think is Lost in Translation but generally speaking from a gameplay perspective Tartarus was significantly less tedious and grindy than it has been in the original game and also portable it has the same general outline like all of the floors are randomly generated you have a couple of treasure chests but you have this new system called Twilight fragments which I don't think I hear people talk enough about these are little items that you find throughout the world or by doing Quests for Elizabeth or something like that that you can use to open secret chests within Tartarus itself the Twilight fragment system is absolutely genius and gives you a lot more to strive for and interact with than just you know beating up shadows and opening chests in the original I found the refresh Tartarus to be a very pleasurable experience and I mean that mechanically I think what it gains in quality of life and gameplay mechanics that are fun it loses an atmosphere and charm now when it comes to combat reload makes a few major changes that were not part of the original at all so in the original game you had the one more system which attacking an enemy weakness would Grant you another turn and then after you know you have a neutral attack or something it would move on to the next person's turn however in reload you're actually able to do something called shifting which is equivalent to passing the Baton in Persona 5 now you don't get nearly as much of the like damage benefits that you would from passing around the Baton it's not as emphasized in this game but it is possible and this fundamentally changes how combat flows and I think what it most greatly impacts is how physical skills are balanced in Persona 3 if you've only played Persona 5 or Royal physical skills are just one thing basically uh and in Persona 3 you have three different types of physical you have slash strike and Pierce and these can all be their own individual weakness or strength and what this means is that generally speaking physical builds are going to be the best because you can strike weaknesses and pass back to like the main character and just dish out physical damage and kill every battle essentially so it feels like the combat mechanics have been much more modernized but the enemy balance and mechanics didn't modernize alongside it so it's a very strange jua position and also let's talk about the new mechanic of theories or what are basically limit breaks these are special onetime use abilities uh specific to each character that will charge at different rates depending on their personality so for example yukari's a limit break will charge faster if she heals the party or matsuru will charge faster if she deals status ailments to enemies and so on and while everybody's limit break is going to charge to some degree by just participating in combat you can kind of Leverage their personalities to charge them faster if you want and these are pretty broken to be honest and this is also where the main character's Fusion spells come from as that was a big mechanic in the original game it's been reworked here where that is now part of your limit break Simply Having certain personas in your compendium will give you access to different abilities and some of them are insane but the thing is the big uh FL in the system I think is that it's very easy just to stack limit breaks and maintain them up until you get to the uh floor guardians or basically what are The Gatekeepers in this game and then just use it all for that final battle because a lot of what made those mini bosses tough was requiring the right team composition and Elemental weaknesses you can exploit and stuff but the limit breaks will deal that certain Elemental damage ignoring their resistances so the dominant meta ended up being something like Farm regular enemies and Tartarus get to gatekeeper and then use your limit breaks uh on your first turn and then at that point you're already probably a fair chunk of the way through the fight and then it becomes a lot more digestible so I don't dislike this system as a whole but I think it needed some tuning and let's also talk about how the monad doors work so monad was its own Block in Tartarus in the original game but they essentially separated out into randomized doors throughout the different blocks of Tartarus and then each one has like a special Mona door near the end on sight of these normal monad doors you're going to encounter mini bosses that are quite akin to The Gatekeepers in terms of strength and power they're going to give you about the same amount of trouble but once you defeat them located behind them will be these treasure chests that have all kinds of goodies that you can use in the antique store to get some of the best gear in the game this is a little bit different to how the like Fusion system worked in the original Persona 3 where you actually fused a Persona of yours into a weapon this is a little bit more like Gathering very rare materials to create these said weapons and you don't actually fuse your personas into these anymore uh which does reduce a little bit of the incentive I think to make good personas that would make good weapons but that's neither here nor there point is a new system in reload is the fact that you will get one of these arconic cards at the end of each special monad door on a block and then these will give you the ability to obtain these during the shuffle time after a battle and obtaining these certain Arcon cards will give you like a new condition for example it will raise the stats on your current Persona or you'll be more likely you know to get a certain item throughout uh your time in Tartarus or it'll raise your Social Links stuff like that it's a really fun little mini game that is a replacement for how Shuffle time used to work it just randomized your cards and it was either basically getting XP health or some kind of weapon and that was about it they also had a card that would attract the reaper which as far as I'm aware isn't actually a thing in this game like the reaper is still here but the card that attracts him is no longer part of the shuffle time I believe and they got rid of the randomization system entirely at this point I'm not even sure why it's called Shuffle time still if the cards don't actually Shuffle anymore but it's it's whatever I guess outside of Tartarus combat I don't have much to comment on because the full moon events are more or less intact from how they were in the original mechanically speaking the only differences are occasional move sets that are a bit different and also most prominently it's aesthetic a lot of the bosses in their Arenas in particular they just don't have the same aesthetic flare as the old ones do and it's not because of a lack of technical limitations or anything I think I have this theory that the older games uh more specifically wanted to go after a more unique looking background because maybe they couldn't do everything mechanically that they had ideas for so they really wanted to sell the atmosphere and make the visuals something that stands out however in the new game I think they focused a bit more on the actual mechanics of the boss and forgot about the subtle details that make the atmosphere work for example the shadow located underground with all the wires like this looks far more menacing in the original game and even like the tank enemy I would say this atmosphere looks way more threatening than how it does in reload and then unfortunately I have to say the same for the nxs arena this just doesn't work uh they they they bathed him in like lime green where I don't recall much green being in the original game like maybe a hint of it but that was more just like the Eerie reflection of the Dark Hour itself I I think the dep I think that's the problem the depiction of the dark hour and the color scheme they used for it just feels a little bit off like found myself not quite as immersed in the environment when I was in the dark hour in this game and it's I don't think it's because because I've already seen it before and I've played the game I actually think it's because the color design is not very dialed in I I think it's a strange choice that they had to just bathe everything in like this lime green like in the nyck arena the floor looks like like a laser tag arena or something it just looks um a bit silly and that's the only word for it and I think that's what took me out of it occasionally is I know that sounds like a nitpick but the color scheme of the Dark Hour was just a bit off now speaking of nitpicks I'm going to get this one out of the ray right now I understand understand this is a nitpick but I'm going to say it I hate the new evoker sound okay I mean I don't hate it but I greatly prefer the original sound the OG one sounded like so beefy like let me just give you a listen between these [Music] two Comm [Music] so look I understand how incredibly nitpicky that sounds but when you play something for so long and get used to these sounds that you're hearing all of the time in combat and then for them to suddenly change like your brain is going to notice it and I think I'm still yearning for the classic sound I just think it's a it's a better sound for the situation overall but I just prefer it now this is another one of those things where it feels like the charm had been Stripped Away from the game or the thing that very much made it special has been removed Persona 3 is the only Persona game where you as the main character are able to use use whatever weapon you like and I mean weapon class like so in Persona 3 reload you can basically only use swords however in the original game and in Fez you can use anything you want you can use bow and arrows boxing gloves Spears like you name it this had a deeper effect of just simply being a different weapon it actually changed how you engage with uh you know shadows and Tartarus you could be uh a bit more Elusive and try to snipe them with an arrow or you could use the big hammer and like have a giant big wind up and really predict where you think their movement's going to be so you don't get caught off guard and this actually changed the way that you interact with the environment even in a very small way and on top of that it's not a gameplay thing but depending on the weapon You' use you'd have different evoker lines you know if you're using something like the bow and arrow Makoto would have more shival ristic sounding lines when summoning his Persona and like different Victory poses and stuff it's just little things like that that you can tell a lot of love and passion went into this game getting all of these unique animations for the main character and stuff but you're only able to use one weapon type in reload which again I'm not B out of shape about this but it is one of those things that's it's kind you're kind of sad to see it go now let's talk about the last month of the game in which all of the plot twists have been revealed after you refuse to kill ryi and accept the fate of ncks and thus death and the end of the world you then have to play out one more month before Nick's arrival and this is where everything completely changes the score is very different on your day-to-day activities the city you're in starts to feel very different than it did before and you are overwhelmed with this sense of dread and hopelessness and it paints an eerily similar picture to some of the worst cities in real life it feels uh a little bit too close to home sometimes you can see that death by despair is inevitable apathy syndrome has fully taken hold and the only thing people have left is st's you know fake prophecy about NYX thus after overcoming and defeating stga and even defeating NX himself or at least temporarily Makoto makes the ultimate sacrifice and takes on the power of the universe with the help of all of his friends and people he's met along the way to seal away Nicks for good now I want to talk a little bit about the ending because the ending of Persona 3 is one of the most powerful endings to any piece of media that I've ever experienced and I mean the reload in that category as well I do still prefer the original ending overall and I'll explain why just a second but everything starts to snap into place once you realize what's going on and also you come to realize in this moment that yes Makoto's been the main character of the story and that's who you've been playing as whole time but it starts to sink in that this story is really about IUS she was a robot that had a directive and when she could not fulfill that directive and no longer had one then she had no reason to exist she had to find her own reason to live her reason for living became to discover her own purpose in some real sense this story is about finding your own purpose as an individual as you go throughout this life which we all do and I don't think you get a message more fundamental than that you realize the point of life is to spend it with the ones you love and this is exemplified perfectly in the final shot as his friends come up to the rooftop one last time to see him go I really enjoyed how they portrayed this ending it does have a much higher production value than was what was felt in the original game however there's only one small gripe that I have and it's the fact that they changed perhaps my favorite line in any anything ever now granted it's not like they changed the line completely it's just that they worded it in a way that sort of strips it from its original intention I think it it doesn't feel as powerful as the way that the original one does in my opinion the point is you don't need to be on some misic complex to save the entire world in your life to have any kind of purpose or meaning sometimes you just need somebody to take care of and that can be enough I feel like I can sit here and compare the original game and its scene directions its gameplay and everything to reload all day and I this video would probably be 18 hours long and nobody wants to watch that and if I sound like I've been very negative on reload I don't want it to come across that way at all I think I just have a better time uh an easier time explaining and expressing myself when I dislike something rather than praising something that I like even though that is the case even though I have my nitpicks with reload all things considered the G improvements to the game playay the way that they maintained the heart and spirit of the original Persona 3 through a lot of the Social Links and uh many of the design choices I have to commend them for I would still give Persona 3 reload probably a 9.5 out of 10 I think that's a very very high rate rating I may even feel a little bit differently after the answer comes out in September that will be the full Persona 3 experience because that's the other thing this is lacking a little bit of additional content in particular the answer you know which we'll be releasing but also in portable you don't have any of the female main character stuff and so I don't think reload is necessarily a replacement for the original game does it keep all of the major stuff intact and more or less reconvey the story that the original Persona 3 was going for absolutely do I have a problem with some of the direction and handling of the characters and cut scenes and stuff like that sure I think it lost a little bit of its Edge in this entire process would I recommend Persona 3 reload on its own absolutely yes play this and if you love the characters you love this world and are attached to them which you know you probably will be by the end of this I still recommend playing the original reload is not a replacement I think it's more of a companion piece to everything else hell even play portable if you want Persona 3 is one of my favorite games of all time and a remaster being so near and dear to my heart I do think it did Persona 3 enough of a Justice to be played but I still think it's a companion piece to the original and they should sit alongside each other this is not a replacement for it

Channel: Ch0pper

Views: 33,840

Keywords: persona 3 reload, persona 3 reload vs original, p3 relaod vs fes, p3 reload worth it, persona 3 reload vs portable, persona 3 reload review, persona 3 reload gameplay, persona 3 reload explained

Id: 5ySaQtKxFIc

Length: 41min 39sec (2499 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 15 2024