Recent reviews by an unnamed human

This game is an improvement over the original persona 3, fes and portable in almost every single way. Better and more interesting combat, though it does remain largely unchanged (which is good). Direct control over your party which 3 and fes did not have. A more fleshed out story, slight adjustment to some of the social links, full voice acting for all social links in Japanese and English and not to mention the 'link' hangouts with your teammates which are basically just social links that don't actually level up.
As a remake I think it succeeds on every level besides some very minor things like some goofy looking 3d animation in cutscenes. But in a 80 hour game that's an extremely minor nitpick.

However I do think that persona 3 has some inherent issues that are pretty much engraved in its core so they were never going to be resolved with a remake. As opposed to persona 4 and 5 I think the world can feel quite empty. There often isn't much reason to go out and try many different ways of increasing your social stats for example. Once you have found the optimal ways to get the most points per time slot, there isn´t much of a reason to diverge. This is also true for other persona titles, however in persona 3 you get way less to experiment with and not many new things get added during your playthrough.

This repetitive emptiness is also reflected in the dungeon design. While I am also not the biggest fan of persona 5 dungeons I do think tartarus is a bit too reliant on the (admittedly very solid) turn based combat. If you do not enjoy the turn based combat you will not like tartarus. This is also an issue in persona 4 but that game does a lot to make dungeons feel more distinct. Tartarus has a change up every block but otherwise it´s basically the most basic way to make a player grind. As a result the game is not very difficult. Even on the highest difficulty, merciless, most people who are familiar with smt games would not struggle much. This makes sense because of the inherent ´grindy´ design but it is still true. Surprisingly the addition of 'theurgy' which initially seemed to me like it would be way too strong ended up being quite well integrated and overall pretty balanced and enjoyable to use.

The social links in persona 3 have always been a topic of debate among fans. As long as I have been a persona fan the general consensus among fans has always been that persona 3 has the better story while persona 4 has the better characters. Ofcourse ever since the introduction of p5 which achieved success beyond any previous persona entries combined this discourse has become more skewed towards p5 but I still think that the comparison of p3 and p4 makes more sense. Back to the social links themselves I think that some are absolutely fantastic while others leave something to be desired. I do enjoy the darker tone of most of them. I like that persona 3 is willing to have character's that are morally grey or that have problems that aren't resolved. However this is somewhat offset by the clunkiness with which some of these plotlines are written.

Something I realised when playing reload is that I actually quite like the way the antagonists are written in this game. While I do not think it's always entirely intentional, the way they are portrayed leaves it up to the player to decide on where they stand. While over the top they are sympathetic figures, for the most part. Whenever they say things I am never fully convinced of their faults and while actions speak louder than words, I do think that their words could make up for it given the situation, narratively speaking that is.

As for the story, I think it is conceptually very strong, but I have always felt that there was a lack of engagement. For me it never really felt gradual and I am glad to say that I do not find this as prevalent in reload. At helps that the world feels more lively purely because of the higher graphical fidelity.

I understand criticism from people that wanted the femc option back from portable and I do think it should have been there, but as a persona 3 remake I can also understand the decision to not include it as some of the links are questionable at best and translating something that purely exist in a psp game would likely be quite a different task from looking at a PS2 title.

Overall I would say that as a remake this game is near perfect, I haven´t even really mentioned it but I also really enjoyed the nnew soundtrack for this game. As a game I think persona 3 is great but not quite on the level of persona 4 and 5 though I do think those games feel a bit too goofy or cartoony at times. but that´s a different can of worms.

Fantastic game. The level of polish this game has is pretty crazy considering just how small the dev team was. The main gameplay loop is just so much fun. It's quite complex but very intuitive at the same time. The characters have well written and properly developed story lines and which flow so well that you really only notice just how crazy some of the reveals are afterwards. The timelooping in this game is pretty much perfectly implemented. The off-chance that something weird happens on one of your loops is just high enough that you can reasonable keep an eye out every time for something new, and up till the end will be discovering most events organically (with the use of the even finder which you unlock by finishing a loop with Setsu alive and on the crew side). The art is fantastic and the soundtrack is also realy good. Just wish it was longer but only because what is here is just so good.

Pretty fun. Would have been a masterpiece if it had some more polish but hugely impressive how they made a 10 minute gameplay loop work for so long without getting old regardless. Also before I played it I saw some people complain about the ending, but I found it to solve everything really well. Really smart way to explain everything that happens.