Also, if you’re not a fan of turn-based combat and prefer real-time combat, then this game won’t change your mind as it fully embraces the former.

While the difficulty isn’t as challenging as the original Persona 3, that didn’t stop me from having a blast playing this game.

You can take your party members on individual activities, too, like gardening or cooking together to get new health items, which also lets them open up to you in ways they hadn't before. Watching a scary movie with my cheerful bestie Yukari or reviewing boxing matches with my gym bro Akihiko don’t just offer social stat points, they give a bit of insight into their personalities.

This was the first entry in the Persona series to use the school calendar system and social sim elements as a foundation to move through its story, planning activities during the day and going dungeon crawling at night.

Persona 3 was the first game in the Persona series to adopt this unorthodox gameplay formula, and sadly, some of it hasn’t aged well compared to its sequels or its PlayStation Portable counterpart, Persona 3 Portable.

This power is called a Persona, a manifestation of a person’s inner psyche that their user can command to perform devastating attacks or heal wounds. As a newly appointed member of S.E.E.S., your job is to destroy Shadows, rescue any ordinary humans who have been pulled into the Dark Hour, and explore the tower of Tartarus to discover why the Dark Hour and Shadows exist in the first place.

When all enemies on the battle screen are knocked Down as with the original game, the party is given the option to initiate an "All-Out Attack" that involves all active members performing a joint assault on any remaining enemies for significant damage. Depending on who in the party starts the command, the character will have a personalized outro and unique animation, in a similar vein to the finisher screens in Persona 5. Additional Personas and resuscitative effects for the party are still obtained primarily through the post-battle minigame Shuffle Time, but Reload instead allows the player to manually choose what specific card they want out of the randomized selection as opposed to blindly selecting one after they are shuffled, similar to Persona 4 Golden's version of the minigame.[8][11] Plot[edit]

That makes it easy for me to get caught up in the hype of Persona 3 Reload, but it also sets the bar as high as Tartarus as this remake tries to persona 3 reload gameplay recapture the magic of its original versions. But after spending 70 hours playing through it, I can no longer imagine Persona 3 without Reload. It's a shining example of seemingly small changes adding up to make a significant impact, uplifting its greatest qualities while staying true to the source material. And it more than proves why the darkest and boldest Persona yet deserved this new lease on life.

Not to mention, I didn’t have to fret about starting the entire game over again because the Fatigue system punished me for wanting to be extra prepared.

Fans of the Persona series will already be familiar with the style of gameplay that this title helped pioneer, including time management with your duties in the day, and turn-based combat that is influenced by those day-to-day social interactions.

In my playthrough that ran more than an hour, though, I didn't feel at all like Reload was covering the same ground, even if it basically is. The added gameplay elements, updated graphics, tweaked areas and social links compel me to sink another handful of months into getting to the bottom of Apathy Syndrome with the S.E.E.S. crew.

The last major gameplay component to receive a revamp in Persona 3 Reload is the turn-based combat system. For starters, it has incorporated the quality-of-life improvements from Persona 3 Portable, which allow you to directly control all of your party members instead of being driven by incompetent AI like in the PlayStation 2 version of Persona 3, making combat much less frustrating to sit through.

Dungeon crawling through Tartarus is now more rewarding. There are many interesting new activities to do during the daytime to strengthen your party before the deadline for the next full moon Shadow boss fight arrives.

Even the side characters you interact with through the game’s Social Link events get this treatment, as every major Social Link event is now fully voiced for the first time in the Persona series.