I've been playing Persona 3 Reload on PS5. Thanks, Jeff.

The TLDR: I'm enjoying Persona 3 Reload, having enjoyed Persona 5. It's very much the same game but enough time has passed between playthroughs that I'm good for it. With that out of the way, I'll talk about some game mechanics and how much I love them or hate them.

The game has two oscillating phases:

1. Dungeon crawler with turn-based combat common to JRPGs
2. Social sim

Both formats are quite repetitive from moment to moment but change over the course of the game, enough to keep me into it.

Personas and the dark hour

The premise of the game is more or less covered in the image above - at night almost everyone turns into a coffin and only certain people are empowered to roam the streets and fight shadow demons using their supernatural alter ego (persona).


So how does one call up their persona? If you look closely at the above screenshot you might notice- hold on...


Whew, now that we have that out of the way, the mechanism by which a character summons their persona is by using an 'evoker' to prove their resolve:


I'm not sure this game could get made in the US in 2025.

'Gotta catch em all' and arcanas

The unique thing about the main character's is that while everyone else can use 0-1 personas, he can use a dozen or so. Player character personas are unlocked throughout the game as combat reward drops and a mechanism described later. Finally, personas are divided into tarot arcanas that determine their powers and align with their associated NPC.


As mentioned above, half of P3R's gameplay consists of a friendly overworld wherein the protagonist attends school and goes to the movies and such.

Things to do

Daytime activities consist of grinding social stats and friendship points by doing activities such as working at a coffee shop, singing karaoke, and going to the movies. The social stats (Charm, Courage, Academics) serve as gating critera for activities and friendships. Friendship points unlock scenes with that character and levels the protagonist's rank in his acquaintance's associated arcana.

Outlook Simulator

There are a variety of optimal paths for overworld choices and, afaict ͥ , many available activities don't/rarely figure in to any of these paths. This means most of the overworld sequences consist of repetitive clicking where most of the map and activity options can be ignored. And yet there is semi-unique dialogue everywhere, from allies to random NPCs who comment on whatever the main thing going on is (summer, tests, strange disappearances, etc.).

I don't need to 100% this game but I'd like to do a pretty good job with my playthrough. So it's mildly frustrating to not have a clear picture of, say, what social stats to focus on in order to access an important area that's gated by a skill check.

Dialogue

There's a lot of dialogue in P3R and it quickly becomes easy to determine which discussions are skippable boilerplate. But there's no shortage of entertaining dialogue, primarily in the relationship- and plot-advancement convos.

That said, one flavor of dialogue is basically a test to increase friendship status. If you choose the right things to say in these conversations you can level your friendship quickly. If you don't, you have to burn calendar time doing generic stuff with that acquaintance. Theoretically, choosing the right dialogue option comes from knowing the character's personality and, ugh, choosing the thing they would want to hear the most. In practice, the options are sometimes:


For this reason, I have no qualms about using one of the many conversation guides available on the interwebs.


The combat portion of the game is built around two flavors of hostile territory:

• Tartarus, a 200-story dungeon you visit one or more times per month.
• Full moon (boss battle) missions that occur every month and progress the story.

Tartarus

Tartarus exploration amounts to traversing a dozen-ish floors that constitute a block of the dungeon. You can also hit any of the lower floors cleared in previous visits but there isn't much reason to. Each floor is randomly arranged from a few tile options that change style from block to block. Due to the randomness and repetitiveness, the Tartarus crawl is fundamentally either running past enemies or grinding them for experience/items/money. The way it plays out is more like a casual ascent to the block's top floor, the boss battle, and then a return to earlier floors for light farming.

Each block of Tartarus has a few fixed warp points back to the lobby where you can heal, switch party members, or fuse personas (explained later). If you're really in a bad way you can look for a one-way warp point but then continue from the last two-way portal.

Upper floors add some mild twists - darkness mod, special doors with optional minibosses, etc. It's not much but it adds some variety where the game might otherwise just change graphic style and difficulty from floor 1-200.

Tartarus has a few flavors of lootables that contain items that can be equipped, used for crafting, or exchanged for money. But mostly it's full of enemies. Slashing an enemy with your sword (or being surprised by them if you're careless) initiates the transition to turn-based combat.

Combat

The battle screen with hud callouts.

90% of combat requires just a few button presses:

1. Smack the baddie in the dungeon view.
2. Knock down each enemy by hitting it with the element or physical attack type it is weak to (unless you miss the knock down always procs).
3. Perform an "All Out Attack"; basically a finishing move available when all enemies are knocked down.

Press 'X' to win.

If this sounds somewhat mindless, that's because it is. But the visuals and music are cool, it's kind of like fighting squishies in Slay the Spire or endgame Elden Ring.

Combat yields xp, items, and randomized rewards such as overworld money and personas.

Damage types and weaknesses

#2 from above comes with a caveat - to get the knockdowns you need to know each enemy's weaknesses and be able to deliver that type of attack. Helpfully, the game keeps track of what weaknesses you know and don't know, though any new enemy type starts with a '?' in each category. Once you deliver that kind of attack, the '?' changes to an icon corresponding to 'weak', 'strong', 'null', 'heal', or 'repel'. Since each new block of floors contains a new set of enemies, it means each new Tartarus run involves learning the weaknesses of the enemy set (or cheating and using a guide). It's sometimes possible to make an educated guess about unknown weaknesses based on the enemy's arcana and/or appearance - "It's an ice creature, what could it possibly be weak to?"


Elemental damage requires invocation of a character's persona which consumes stamina points. In the early game, SP puts a cap on how much of Tartarus you can explore - or really, how much leveling you can do before taking on the area boss. Later on you have more characters and ways to replenish SP.

Ailments

It's not a big part of combat but certain weapons and persona attacks can inflict ailment conditions. Ailments do things like make combatants skip turns, attack allies, or lose health over time. Since most squishies can be quickly dispatched with damage matching their weakness, ailments don't really come in to play in normal battles. Tougher enemies are almost always impossible to deliver status effects to, so it's not a big part of the offensive game.

Strong enemies love to inflict ailments on our heroes so for boss battles it's important to have resistances and remedies ready.

Similar to ailments are stat debuff actions that reduce an opponent's attack, defense, evasion, etc. These proc 100% of the time and are pretty important for bosses.

Ults

Each character has an ult attack that charges through normal combat. There's nothing remarkable here - it's just a big attack - except that they bypass resistance so timing them for boss fights is pretty helpful.

Player personas

I mentioned that the player character is unique in that he can equip multiple personas. Since he can only explore with three teammates at a time, having an inventory of personas means you can cover the attack types not in your squadmates' repertoire.

Minibosses, bosses, and full moon missions

Bosses are rarely weak to anything so the damage type mechanic is really only relevant to the flat track. Boss strategy amounts to wasting a few actions as possible on healing so that you can slowly grind down the its health. This means it's helpful to learn the boss's often-cyclical attack patterns and use guard actions when a character might get statused or knocked down.

Boss battles aren't particularly hard or frustrating but it'd be nice if personas had more offensive impact. On the other hand, bosses don't cheat and simply bypass defensive strengths - if you nullify fire damage, even a boss fire attack won't hurt. This is both nice from an equity perspective and because if the boss drops a nuke, having one character standing is infinitely better than game over.

Wtf enemies

The final stage of Persona 5 had, well, dong enemies. P3R also has some creative ones like Lustful Snake and Random BDSM Dude Chained to a Wheel. Lol.

Persona fusion

Left column: current personas (arcana, level, name) with one selected. Right column: the fusion outcome for the selected persona with another from the left-hand list. '!' indicates it's a persona I have not yet created.

Most RPGs let you choose a class and level your character(s). Persona has overworld social stats, but for the combat phase of the game personas are what determine your level and abilities. It means your main character can seamlessly switch between classes of sorts - each persona has different abilities.

The one exception to my statement about the characters not having combat stats - the main character does have a level but this is used to limit the level of personas available through fusion. The cap is only applied for fusion though, leveling a persona through combat ignores it. Additionally, when you do persona fusion it immediately gets xp based on your character's overworld relationship strength with its arcana.


Persona fusion amounts to tossing 2-3 existing personas into the proverbial cauldron and getting another (most often) higher-level persona from a different aracana. When the new persona is created, you can choose skills from the source personas to inherit - as long as the skills don't conflict with the new persona's arcana.

As personas level, they learn skills a fixed set of skills and you must decide which ones to keep and forget.

A pre-endgame Siegfried build - lots of resistances and built for physical attacks/criticals. The Auto _______ skills provide automatic stat buffs for the character or team at the start of battle.

Fit and finish

Like P5, the Reload graphic design and soundtrack are awesome. The anime models only look dated when they walk so it generally doesn't feel like a game designed two decades ago.

Story

P3R has an adult, cohesive story that somewhat dulls the edge of repetitive gameplay. I like it so far but will provide an update when I complete the game.

	There is a realm of existence so far beyond your own you cannot even imagine it. I am beyond your comprehension.	�
	From Sovereign in Mass Effect (pic unrelated)

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