Persona 3 Reload, a remake of Persona 3 in a similar visual style to Persona 5, will only include content from the original release of Persona 3. This means that content from Persona 3 FES and Persona 3 Portable will not be included in this release. Atlus says they wanted to stay true to the original release on the PlayStation 2 console. Other platforms outside of Xbox and PC have not been announced by Atlus, but there is no doubt that they will arrive eventually. Here’s what Persona 3 Reload producer Ryota Niitsuma and lead director Kazuhisa Wada told IGN:
“So, first I’d like to note that since the basic concept of the Persona 3 remake was a Persona 3 remake, we don’t have FES and portable content included,” Niitsuma said. “We wanted to really honestly work on recreating the Persona 3 experience.”
Persona 3 was originally released on the PlayStation 2 in 2006. Persona 3 FES is a 2007 bonus disc with updates to the original game, while Persona 3 Portable is a PSP edition that added features such as direct control of party members outside of the main character. The female protagonist also made her first appearance in Persona 3 Portable, but it appears that players will not have the choice to play as her in Persona 3 Reload.
“So we can’t go into details at this point, but we’ve basically redone everything from the ground up as far as Persona 3 is concerned with the original version,” Niitsuma said. “So we have newly recorded voices, we have new scenes and events. We have both new and arranged music. We will publish that information, monitor everything. So look forward to it.”
“So the basic concept of recreating the Persona story was that we wanted to keep everything from the original version, but update everything to modern times,” Wada said. “So basically on the same level as Persona 5. So we’ve got the latest graphics, we’ve updated the system to the latest usability… We’ve got the voice lines in [both Japanese and English.] We also have text available in 13 languages. So you should have experiences similar to those in Persona 5.”