Persona 3 Reload shows that classic games in the franchise can be brought up to date effectively while remaining faithful to their roots.
Persona 3 Reload is the first remake in the much-beloved franchise. When Persona 5 launched outside of Japan, it immediately captured the hearts of gamers all around the world and launched the once-niche franchise into the mainstream. Each game in the series stands alone, but fans wanted more, and suddenly, there was a huge demand for access to older games in the series. P3Portable and Persona 4Golden were released for modern platforms but lacked the groundbreaking presentation of P5. Now that Persona 3 Reload has solved that problem for the third entry and has provided the most modern Persona experience to date, fans are left to wonder what a potential remake of Persona 4 could look like.
Persona 5 is responsible for the franchise’s meteoric rise as one of the defining staples of the JRPG genre, but its success was built on the shoulders of the third and fourth Persona games. P3 established many of the franchise’s fundamental mechanics, and P4 cemented the series’ iconic balance between cozy slice-of-life activities and high-risk dungeon-crawling action. The PS Vita is remembered partly because of Persona 4 Golden, the standout title on the platform, which garnered plenty of attention and set the stage for P5‘s success. P1 and P2 remakes have been heavily demanded since they are currently hard to play, but P3 Reload‘s success does a lot more to set the stage for a Persona 4 remake.
Persona 3 Reload Faithfully Reimagines a Classic
On top of Persona 3 Reload‘s new voice cast and graphical overhaul, there are a ton of big and small changes. Social Links have been reworked, and certain male characters have been given side-story content to account for the lack of Social Links with them in the original. On top of this, the combat system has been updated to include Theurgy attacks, a unique new addition to the series, and Shift, which is known as Baton Pass in P5R. These additions join changes to Tartarus, which now has a wider variety of room layouts across its procedurally generated landscape, greater visual variation, and breakable objects.
P3 Reload takes Persona 3‘s story and faithfully recreates it with all the modern convenience and flair of P5. The menus of Persona 3 Reload ooze style and match what is happening visually elsewhere in the game. P5‘s most significant innovation for the series was, debatably, the degree of cohesion and seamlessness that it introduced to all of its elements, and with P3R, Atlus has successfully retrofitted it for the game that kicked off the modern era of Persona titles. Given that the series’ third and fourth entries share many elements, the excellence of P3 Reload makes it hard not to imagine what a Persona 4 remake would be like.
The Case for a Persona 4 Remake
Persona 4 Golden still holds up next to P5, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t deserving of a remake. The third, fourth, and fifth Persona games form something of a trilogy, with P5 Royal serving as a culmination of the mechanics developed and lessons learned across their collective development. The launch of P3 Reload means that P4 is now the only modern Persona story that isn’t available with all the enhancements found in P5R. The director behind P3, P4, and P5, Katsura Hashino, has departed from P-Studio, so bringing P4 up to the standard of P3R and P5 would be a great way to pay homage to the games he helped create and bring Persona 4 to a whole new audience.
Persona 6 Will be a Departure
Given the fact that Katsura Hashino has moved on to Metaphor: ReFantazio, it is likely that Persona 6 will be the start of another new chapter for the series. While this is an exciting prospect, Persona leaks have also indicated that more remakes could be on the way, and no game is more deserving of the treatment than Persona 4, which helped to set the stage for P5, and the series’ rise to fame. A Persona 4 remake could borrow from Persona 3 Reload‘s improvements to be the ultimate homage to the series’ last two decades while P-Studio forges a new path forward with its next original entry.
