Now that I finally have a PS5 I can dive into the games for that console and I started with Persona 3 Reload. I really enjoyed all of the Persona 5 games so I wanted to see if my love for the series continued beyond that. Persona 3 is all about a world where a mysterious 25th hour of the day called the dark hour happens when the clock strikes midnight. Nobody without the power of a Persona, a powerful avatar representing the wielder, remembers this hour clearly; however, shadows can be found during this time as well as a mysterious tower Tartarus. In order to save the world the members of SEES must explore, understand and make their way to the top of Tartarus and eliminate the dark hour forever.

First I’ll talk about the story which is something I liked a lot. It was much darker than what I expected and comes with an appropriate content warning before you boot up the game. This game explores death far more than what I expected and far more than what we saw in Persona 5. Tartarus remains this incredible mystery throughout most of the game and it manages to maintain my interest the entire time as I navigate the over 200 randomized floors to reach the top. You’re also introduced to characters who have such a negative view on life that they try stop your effects to destroy the dark hour. I was not expecting to go against enemies who could also use Personas but a story of Persona versus Persona conflict was one that I found really enjoyable.

The heart and soul of Persona 3 is with it’s characters. The main story shows incredible growth and maturity as our heroes are tested physically and emotionally to the point of breaking. The story being as dark as it is really sells the characters reaching those traumatic breaking points well and it makes it really easy to get invested in how they overcome their respective challenges. You also get a lot of opportunity to talk to the characters as time progresses and explore their backgrounds, motivations and their growth in detail. Plus you even get a persona wielding dog!

Now this is a game all about time management and one of the key things you manage is how you grow closer to your party members and to NPCs associated with various Arcana. You’ll have options to do one action in the day and one in the evening and you have a variety of choices. You can hang out with characters, explore Tartarus, or build your stats but you only get usually two actions per day. Most of the time you will hang out with other characters to improve your social link with them from 1 to 10. Once you hit 10 you unlock new Personas you can use in battle.

In a first playthrough it’s unlikely you’ll max out everyone (I had I think three left myself), so you need to plan out which characters you want to spend time with. Each character has their own story that you explore from start to finish as they go through some kind of struggle. The various stories are a mixed bunch. There were some that I found captivating like an elderly couple protecting a tree planted by their late son but some I didn’t like a greedy businessman who eventually finds his compassion. I think everyone will find a story to latch onto and love. However, I don’t think anyone will love all of them which I think is nice because it gives a lot where there’s something for everyone.

The story balances out time spend progressing the main story versus time where you’re free to explore the stories of the world around you. Because of this the main story progresses fairly inconsistently, and sometimes the moments are few and far between. It’s for this reason that while the main story is amazing I feel like if you don’t end up invested in the act of progressing the social links you could lose interest in the game. I loved this process but it does get repetitive when you do this for hours before seeing the next main story moment. So I ended up taking some breaks because of it. So my only real gripe here is that the pacing is sometimes hard to get invested in to play for really long periods of time. I loved the entire process I just would love the main story to not be divided up so much.

Now to move onto the gameplay. This all occurs almost exclusively inside Tartarus. You’ll navigate randomly generated floors as you battle shadows and explore while making your way to the top. Exploring is a lot of fun but because it can take awhile to get to a stopping point so I needed breaks in between. The combat with shadows is turn based where super effective moves grant you additional actions and even special attacks. However, this also works the same way for your enemies so be very careful of each character and enemies strengths and weaknesses. While the main character can recruit and use multiple personas everyone else has one. You can customize your armor, weapon, and even your personas to get a well balanced team. As you defeat shadows you’ll get the option to recruit new personas. You can even fuse them outside of combat as their are a ton of personas to find. Combat is a lot of fun and there’s a lot you can do to customize your combat experience.

Persona 3 offers a much darker experience than I expected and I think it justifiably comes with a warning before you play it. The story is very powerful, the characters are enjoyable and easy to get invested in and the gameplay is a lot of fun. As a whole I only found one thing I had any kind of issue with and that’s the pacing. Throughout massive parts of the game you end up going through the same thing for extended periods of time and while it’s fun it can be hard to do that all in one go. So in my case I ended up taking some breaks to split this up into smaller segments. It’s a minor issue though as the game proved I am indeed a fan of the Persona series as a whole.