Topic: Persona 3 Reload

That is Reload beaten. No spoilers but what a beautiful ending, bawling my eyes out over here 🤣 I dunno whether it elevates the game in quite the same way I've seen people suggest, but it's deffo a high note to close for sure. Especially as - after all of their hype - the final boss was weirdly easy!

Now back to Persona 4 Golden...

@Pizzamorg Good to hear that the ending was worthwhile in the end! I'm looking forward to it myself.

Personally I'm now at the end of September and the game is really starting to feel like a grind. Each month is essentially one long grindy day in Tartarus, plus a quick run through the rest of the month grinding through every social link / party member interaction available. Now, one could argue that this is just the Persona formula...but Persona 5 definitely had more variety and depth in this point of the game IMO. It doesn't help that the game has thrown party members at me with little to no fanfare (outside of Fuuka). They don't really feel earned to me.

That said, I reckon this pattern can only go on for so long, and I'm due for a major twist. I also expect I'm around 2/3 through the game?

It is funny @Buizel because they clearly agree with us. I am playing P4G for the first time, and by July, I had already got several of my core party members to the 5 - 7 range in their Social Links. They also cut down significantly on the randoms around town and gave more context for the ones that are included, plus offer more tangible gameplay benefits for pursuing these beyond just exp bursts.

That seems to me like an admission they hadn't got the formula quite right yet in P3, so it again makes it so baffling to me that Reload hasn't had more work in that regard. That all the meaningful social links don't open until the back third of the game when things are starting to build to the climax, and forcing you to max out your social stats for each of them so you have absolutely nothing else to do outside of battle.

Like I get it, P4 is kind of more of a slice of life, lower stakes kind of story (at least it has been so far) but it ends up feeling higher stakes because the game is so much more focused. P3 is dealing with world wide ramifications that should be so urgent and immediate but you spend like a third of the game dicking around, no care in the world, hanging around with characters that have no relevance to the wider game whatsoever. Why wasn't all of this cut? Or completely reworked?

I think this is the crux of it. The pacing of P3 just doesn't feel right. P4 works as a slice of life...the focus is the day-to-day life until the deaths come about - it's therefore easier to get immersed in the world and its characters. Meanwhile P5 is just so chock-full of things that it feels like everything is worthwhile. P3 feels like it's more focused on the main story...but 90% of the time the main story is ground to a halt.

So that's Persona 3 Reload done. I can already feel the "post-Persona depression" sinking in. Especially in this case considering (ending spoilers) the MC's death in the final scene which...eh...really felt like a massive downer after all of this. Generally satisfied with the ending here though. I think there's a great story told here...I'm just not sure how well it works with the game's calendar system.

I still maintain that the pacing in this game is off — if anything, it only got more grindy in the final two months. IDK, I feel like Tartarus was maybe 100 floors too tall — it just needed that one extra thing to shake things up a bit. The day-to-day activities also started feeling like a grind. Am I the only one who ended up with pretty much nothing to do in evenings / days off, but had a stacked afternoon after school? I managed to complete all non-school s-links with plenty of time to spare, but didn't manage to complete a single school-related s-link — having both spread myself too thin on the latter, and prioritising the (very late emerging) party s-links on school days.

On the topic of S-links...a mixed bag, really...but on the whole still a highlight of the game. A lot of the time they feel quite one-note...but there were some memorable stories here, tackling particularly difficult issues, and it was heartwarming to see these characters overcome them. Some highlights include Sun, Hanged, Hierophant and Tower. Shoutout to Devil for being a character I loved to hate as well.

Overall, great, albeit flawed, game IMO. I'd be keen to play the Aigis DLC when that comes out, but otherwise I think I'm done with P3 for at least a few years.

Nah @Buizel your experience was basically the exact same as mine.

You waste like the first four months of the game just chatting to randos around the town or in your school that have no bearing on anything outside of I guess a very brief line of dialogue right at the very end. Why is it like this? They solved this issue in 4 and 5, so why were those solutions not implemented into this game?

You also can't really spend much time with your core party outside of brief dorm hangouts until the back third of the game. And they clearly realised this sucked, because 4 and 5 do not follow this formula.

Also, gating these interactions behind having maxed out social stats is dumb in every sense. It makes no sense narratively, because I literally live with Fuuka, we cook and do gardening and other crap. But I'm not able to ask her to walk home with me? What sense does that make?

And its dumb from a gameplay perspective, because the back third of the game is a complete mess. The big story developments and the hangouts with my core party keep overlapping, so I have to keep sacrificing them, but then I have all this dead time for all the social stat boosting activities I don't need any more because you forced me to have all these maxed out by like the end of the Summe to make sure I can squeeze in the party hangouts. And they clearly know this sucks, because again, they never do it like this again, so why was it not fixed here.

@Pizzamorg Yeah the social stat balancing towards the end was particularly egregious. Once you've maxed these out you essentially make significant portions of the game pointless. Tbh I did find this to be somewhat of a problem in the other games (P5 at least...I don't remember specifically how it worked out in P4), but not nearly to the same extent.

I agree they shouldn't have gated the party S-links behind the max levels. But personally, I think the easy way to alleviate problems with social stats across the board would be to, rather than gating things behind certain levels, add some element of chance to the mix. I.e. you have a 20% chance of getting Yukari to walk home with you at Charm 3, but maybe a 90% chance at Charm 5. Kinda like how skill rolls work in DnD. This way you could have things available earlier in the game, but also incentivise people to continue building their social stats (maybe even removing the finite cap on these stats, or at least having a buffer between "good enough" and "guaranteed success").

Despite lacking the gameplay improvements of 4 and 5, Reload has hit me the hardest a game has since Persona 5 funnily enough. The ending has been haunting me since I finished the game for the first time this past weekend. If this was my first experience with Persona, I think it would have been my favorite game, period.

@Azex Have to agree about the ending. I really can't get that final image of Makoto on Aigis' lap out of my mind.

I also finished Persona 3 Reload now. It took me 88 hours and I'm so glad to have finally finished this game. The last two months dragged on for far too long. Or it depends on how you see it. These months could've been fun if something had actually happened. I still can't believe that Atlus didn't add a single new story event to the remake. The original game was flawed in many ways and they had a chance to improve upon it. While they've improved upon the gameplay, added some variety to Tartarus (which still was a drag anyway) and added "social links" for the male party members, there was a severe lack of story events where the characters hang out with each other.

Persona games are about being social. I was anything but social by the end of the game as I had nothing to do most of the time, specifically during the evenings. I just went to bed as I just wanted to get to the end as quickly as possible. And yeah, I agree with you guys, the ending was fantastic. Really goes to show how differently it hits when you actually see what's happening instead of imagining it through a visual novel like I did with Persona 3 Portable.

All in all, I loved Persona 3 Reload. It's hard not to, it's a Persona game and I love this series. But I'm so frustrated that they botched the remake. It could've been so much better because the potential is there. I loved the characters, the story, the music and so on. This is still the best way to experience Persona 3.

In regards to the DLC, I'm definitely not buying the expansion pass. I'm done with this game, I can't stand more dull dungeon crawling. According to some online searches, the DLC is 30 hours long and it's basically more Tartarus. It sounds absolutely awful, so I'm skipping it.

I am about to go into the final battle but I have been putting it off for a week. I don't want this game to end. I used to be a Vanilla Persona 5 fan but now I am Team Blue. I have the Limited Run copy of Persona 4 Golden coming and cannot wait to play. It may also have turned me into a Shin Megami fan as I just preordered SMTVV and am looking for a 3DS and SMTIV. I also bought Soul Hackers 2 for cheap and started that game this week. I am so late to this party but there is so much content to dive into I will be gaming on this franchise for years!!