Atlus officially revealed Persona 3 Reload during the Xbox Games Showcase, confirming the remake of the 2007 PlayStation 2 RPG for next year. Of course, “2007” is the keyword because Reload doesn’t include any content from Persona 3 FES or Persona 3 Portable. Namely, you can’t choose Kotone Shiomi, the female protagonist.
IGN spoke to producer Ryota Niitsuma and chief director Kazuhisa Wada about Reload, with the former stating, “So first, I’d like to mention that since the basic concept of the Persona 3 remake was to remake the Persona 3, we don’t have the FES and Portable contents included. We wanted to really genuinely work on recreating the Persona 3 experience.”
While the team couldn’t get into the details yet, Niitsuma said, “We have remade basically everything from scratch as for Persona 3, the original version. So we have newly recorded voices, we have new scenes and events. We also have both new and arranged music. We’ll be kind of releasing that information, following everything. So please look forward to that.”
Of course, Atlus could remake or re-release Persona 3 FES. Persona 3 Portable was re-released for Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, PC and Nintendo Switch last year, after all. Time will tell. As for Persona 3 Reload, the development team wants to update the original game to bring it up to the “same level” as Persona 5.
“So the basic concept of recreating the Persona story was that we wanted to keep everything from the original version, but update everything to the modern day. So at the same level as Persona 5, basically. So we have the newest graphics. We have updated the system to the newest usability… We have the voice lines in [both Japanese and English.] We also have the text available in 13 languages. So you should be able to have similar experiences to that of Persona 5,” said Wada.
Persona 3 Reload launches in early 2024 for Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. It’s also out on day one for Game Pass.