if you wish Persona 3 Reloaded Will include content added in later versions of the game, you’ll be disappointed to hear it’s just a remake of the original game.
You’d think that, with the benefit of hindsight, Atlus could have looked back at three different versions of Persona 3 and combined them into one complete package, making up Persona 3 Reload, the remake of the PS2 game that was officially announced at yesterday’s Xbox showcase. Instead, for some puzzling reason, it chose not to, opting instead to go the route of just making the original version of the game, and not including anything from FES or Portable. Persona 3 Reload producer Ryota Niitsuma and general director Kazuhisa Wada confirmed this in a recent interview with IGN, in which they explained why they made this decision.
“So first I would like to mention that since the basic concept of Persona 3 Remake is to remake Persona 3, we didn’t include the FES and portable content,” Niitsuma explained. “We want to really, really work on recreating the Persona 3 experience.”
Niitsuma went on to say that they “can’t really go into details right now, but we basically remade everything from the original version of Persona 3 from scratch. So we have newly recorded voices, we have new scenes and events. We There’s new and adapted music too. We’ll post that and keep track of everything. So stay tuned.”
Wada also explained that the main update that Atlus focused on was making it more in line with Persona 5, but staying true to the original in terms of story. Much to the dismay of fans, many were hoping to play the heroine introduced in Persona 3 Pocket Edition, leaving much of the fan base feeling very alienated from the remake.
Atlus does have a history of releasing new versions of its games, obviously Persona 3 was one of them, Persona 4 later got the Gold Edition, and Persona 5 got the Royal Edition. It’s always possible that Atlus is planning something similar to Persona 3 Reload, but it honestly doesn’t seem like there’s much reason not to.
Persona 3 will launch on PlayStation, Xbox, PC, and Nintendo Switch early next year.