Did It All For The Moogle

SPEAKER_1: Hello and welcome to Did It All For The Moogle, Episode 2.

SPEAKER_1: It has been a minute, but as promised, let's talk about Persona 3 Reload, shall we?

SPEAKER_2: I've been waiting for this.

SPEAKER_1: Me too, Akihiko, me too.

SPEAKER_1: So I probably overdid it by cramming Persona 3 Portable and then Persona 3 Reload back to back the way I did.

SPEAKER_1: I do not recommend anybody do that.

SPEAKER_1: I joke a lot about sort of the things I do in the way I play these games, sort of breaking my brain.

SPEAKER_1: And 99.9% of the time I'm joking, but this time I genuinely think it did break my brain.

SPEAKER_1: Don't look at the calendar for when this episode released.

SPEAKER_1: But yeah, finally talking about Persona 3 Reload, it has been a very long time coming.

SPEAKER_1: So what's this discussion gonna cover?

SPEAKER_1: I'm gonna try to attempt to be as spoiler free as possible from a story perspective, while at the same time going quite deep into the game's systems and how the whole package sort of comes together in combination.

SPEAKER_1: So if you've played Persona 3 or another game in the series, you'll know a lot of the terms that I'm throwing around.

SPEAKER_1: And if you haven't, I'll try to do my best to explain them when they come up, because they're going to come up, because this is going to get into the weeds.

SPEAKER_1: There's really no getting around that.

SPEAKER_1: Like whenever I bring up specific ability names, you know, I'm going to explain them just for the benefit of anybody listening.

SPEAKER_1: So if anybody hasn't played the game yet, and you'd like to remain completely fresh before you play a game that came out 16 years ago, and also 12 years ago, and also one year ago, and also two months ago, this probably won't be the episode for you.

SPEAKER_1: And that's fine.

SPEAKER_1: I don't want to ruin the game.

SPEAKER_1: So having said that, whenever I mention the specifics of characters or their individual arcs or design, whether that's their gameplay function or narrative function, it's probably going to be broad enough or inversely so specific, like a very specific detail about how their individual quest functions, that it won't have too much of an effect on your experience if you haven't played the game yet.

SPEAKER_1: And if you stick with me, I think you'll see what I mean.

SPEAKER_1: I basically went through this game with a fine-tooth comb while I was playing it, and that was the one benefit of playing Portable immediately before playing the remake.

SPEAKER_1: So in order to properly organize this discussion, and I say properly, very loosely, and trying to preserve my own very, very small amount of sanity remaining at this point, I've broken this whole episode down into a few sections, and those sections should remain time stamped whenever this is all said and done and edited and posted up.

SPEAKER_1: So please feel free to use those at your leisure.

SPEAKER_1: And so these sections are going to be the importance of Persona 3, the goal of Persona 3 Reload, the themes of Persona 3, the Persona 5 Factor, what's changed in Reload, sound, visuals, Tartarus, combat and game economy, difficulty, and finally the future.

SPEAKER_1: That's a lot.

SPEAKER_1: That's a lot.

SPEAKER_1: I went overboard.

SPEAKER_1: I don't know how long this is going to be.

SPEAKER_1: I'm going to be scared of a possible runtime.

SPEAKER_1: And a lot of these sort of topics have overlapped with each other, mostly because I'm very messy and this got out of hand almost immediately.

SPEAKER_1: So with all of that out of the way, can I please talk to you about Persona 3 because I've been dying to talk to you about Persona 3.

SPEAKER_1: Let's begin with the importance of Persona 3.

SPEAKER_1: So in its placement in the series, in my eyes, Persona 3 has the best front to back narrative of the whole series.

SPEAKER_1: Persona 5 combines mechanics, narrative and theme, probably the best, and that's the base version of Persona 5, not the overstuffed and bloated royal, which tack on an extra basically story that's sort of disconnected from the main narrative, but base Persona 5.

SPEAKER_1: But the original Persona 3's full story from beginning to end is the best in the series, it's up to this point.

SPEAKER_1: And I also believe that Persona 3 has the strongest core cast, because as a collective unit, it's a group that doesn't become the super best friends immediately, and it's through their combined and individual struggles that they sort of, through necessity, have to come together.

SPEAKER_1: They have conflicts amongst themselves, and they're genuine and character-driven, rather than just being plot contrivances.

SPEAKER_1: And these internal conflicts within the group are also solved through more than just the convenient, oh, that's what friends are for, or we have to do this because we're working together kind of thing.

SPEAKER_1: And sometimes characters even recognize that these conflicts are caused by their own internal struggles that they're projecting on to others.

SPEAKER_1: We like to call that character growth.

SPEAKER_1: It's a hell of a concept.

SPEAKER_1: We also have to consider what Persona 3 means for the series.

SPEAKER_1: So, Persona 3 came after a period of relative dormancy for the Persona series and it completely changed the formula.

SPEAKER_1: So, it added in the social sim elements that the series is now known for.

SPEAKER_1: And now the like half of all RPGs are trying to emulate.

SPEAKER_1: It also added a ton of staples to the series, such as the protagonist having the wild card persona ability, party members only being able to control one persona, which is in Persona 2, you can like just equip personas on anybody.

SPEAKER_1: They have specific affinities, but you can just kind of throw whatever on whoever.

SPEAKER_1: It adds proper fusion that sort of came over from the main line, because again, in like Persona 2, the fusion system is a lot different.

SPEAKER_1: It's sort of consumable based.

SPEAKER_1: Terra cards are consumables.

SPEAKER_1: That's how fusion works in Persona 2.

SPEAKER_1: Persona 3 also tweaks the press turn system into the one more system.

SPEAKER_1: And so that we see that in future installments.

SPEAKER_1: It introduced the rotating velvet room attendance, the concept of a navigator party member, procedurally generated dungeons, the introduction and also the largest appearance of Tanaka's commodities, and like a whole ton more.

SPEAKER_1: Basically, this is the game that revolutionized what we consider modern persona.

SPEAKER_1: It was also the first game on the PS2.

SPEAKER_1: It changed the series.

SPEAKER_1: Persona would not be what it is now without Persona 3.

SPEAKER_1: Persona 3 is also where the series breaks out from under the SMT umbrella and starts to become its own beast.

SPEAKER_1: And you could argue back and forth about the branding, how Atlas branded the games in the West.

SPEAKER_1: It still is at this point under Shin Megami Tensei, Persona 3, whatever.

SPEAKER_1: But the point is, is that, you know, you still have all of the demons or personas.

SPEAKER_1: The spell names are all largely the same.

SPEAKER_1: But now there's less of like this overt occult air.

SPEAKER_1: I know that sounds weird to say if you've played the game, but like now persona rituals aren't really a thing.

SPEAKER_1: There's a clear delineation between the regular world that normal people live in and sort of go about their business and the persona world where like our protagonists live.

SPEAKER_1: And there's that clear separation that sort of you see in the later games, right?

SPEAKER_1: In persona 4, you have your daytime and then you have the midnight channel.

SPEAKER_1: Persona 5, you have your daytime, you know, ordinary stuff, and then you have the metaverse.

SPEAKER_1: Persona 3 is what introduces that sort of separation.

SPEAKER_1: Because in persona 2, basically every like almost everybody can use a persona, you know, there's like devil summoners just kind of walking around, just doing their thing.

SPEAKER_1: The games are just like swarming with like this occult air around it.

SPEAKER_1: And like normal people just get like swallowed up in it constantly.

SPEAKER_1: Like persona 2, the story is a friggin fever dream with like crystal skulls and I don't even know what like because it's Hitler.

SPEAKER_1: It's not a dream version of Hitler.

SPEAKER_1: It's a manifestation of Hitler caused by belief in rumors, I guess.

SPEAKER_1: It's hard to explain.

SPEAKER_1: But yeah, like you just have this like conspiracy occult angle to it.

SPEAKER_1: And in comparison, Persona 3 has a relatively straightforward presentation where you have people turning into bloody coffins each night.

SPEAKER_1: You know, like it's like, oh, that's just kind of weird, right?

SPEAKER_1: Whereas the older games were esoteric in a way that Persona 3 tried to, I guess, simplify.

SPEAKER_1: They're also like now no longer references to the Kuznohas.

SPEAKER_1: You know, there's no longer things that like in Persona 1 and 2 would tie it to SMT like Devil Summoners.

SPEAKER_1: It feels in Persona 3 like Persona is now a separate entity within the larger franchise rather than just being another SMT RPG that sort of has its own story, but sort of plays the same as the rest of the games.

SPEAKER_1: And so if you talk about like sort of an RPG revolutionizing certain gameplay systems and like being very important narratively, it's easy to think of other games that have done that.

SPEAKER_1: Like the biggest one would be FF7 for a lot of people especially.

SPEAKER_1: And so to me personally, Persona 3 is like my Final Fantasy 7.

SPEAKER_1: It's like the game that did that for me.

SPEAKER_1: So it means a lot.

SPEAKER_1: And so I have certain expectations with a full on remake of that game, right?

SPEAKER_1: The same way that people put huge expectations on the Final Fantasy 7 remake.

SPEAKER_1: So I have a lot of questions going into this remake that I wanted to see if I could find out the answers to.

SPEAKER_1: And the biggest question was, well, what is Atlas' goal with Persona 3 Reload?

SPEAKER_1: And will it accomplish whatever Atlas set out to do?

SPEAKER_1: And so I wanted to find that out.

SPEAKER_1: I wanted to find out what did they want to accomplish?

SPEAKER_1: Did they want to make Persona 3 just playable for a new audience?

SPEAKER_1: Did they want to smooth out some of the rough edges?

SPEAKER_1: Did they want to do both of those things?

SPEAKER_1: I wanted to find out exactly what they are thinking going into this.

SPEAKER_1: But for me, I wanted to know, does Reload retain the narrative of Persona 3?

SPEAKER_1: Does it carry the same emotional weight?

SPEAKER_1: Can I still feel the same things I felt when I think of March 5th and Memories of You plays?

SPEAKER_1: Are the themes of the game intact?

SPEAKER_1: Or can Reload possibly even amplify those themes or add on to them?

SPEAKER_1: Basically, is this game still Persona 3?

SPEAKER_1: And will someone playing this game for the first time get a comparable emotional experience to somebody that played the original?

SPEAKER_1: So those are the questions I had going in.

SPEAKER_1: And it's tough to judge remakes in comparison to each other.

SPEAKER_1: And it's easy to say that a remake doesn't replace the original because the original still exists.

SPEAKER_1: But when a game is so fractured the way that Persona 3 is and a remake doesn't completely rectify that, how is an audience and how is a fan base supposed to take that?

SPEAKER_1: And what does it mean when a remake becomes the de facto way to play the game?

SPEAKER_1: And what I mean by that is, aside from owning a PS2 copy or emulating the original release of Persona 3, there is no modern way to play OG Persona 3.

SPEAKER_1: The most modern way is to buy an emulated version on the PS3.

SPEAKER_1: And I don't have a PS3, and so I don't even know what the status of their online store is.

SPEAKER_1: I know the Vita's online store got shut off within the last couple of years, so I don't know about the PS3 status, to be honest.

SPEAKER_1: So this remake is taking the original's place on digital store shelves.

SPEAKER_1: Atlus is not literally going into people's homes and breaking PS2 copies, right?

SPEAKER_1: They're not destroying the game, but it's a replacement in some sense.

SPEAKER_1: It's a modernizing, but it's also a replacement.

SPEAKER_1: And it's also replacing portable, which it somehow can't because it doesn't include the female protagonist in portable.

SPEAKER_1: It doesn't include those specific social links to her route.

SPEAKER_1: It doesn't include that content.

SPEAKER_1: So, but at the same time, why would somebody buy that sort of hastily put together port of Persona 3 Portable when there's now a fully 4K Unreal Engine remake available, you know?

SPEAKER_1: And you know which one they're pushing, right?

SPEAKER_1: It's going to be the new one, the more expensive one.

SPEAKER_1: And like, which version are you going to recommend to a friend?

SPEAKER_1: The visual novel PSP kind of upscaled one that doesn't have cutscenes, or the very shiny one?

SPEAKER_1: It's kind of a no-brainer.

SPEAKER_1: And this game is so fractured that this is now the fourth different version of Persona 3 that's been released.

SPEAKER_1: You have original Persona 3, you have Persona 3 FES, which included the answer, you had Persona 3 Portable, and now you have the remake here.

SPEAKER_1: That's four different versions, and they're all different in their own ways.

SPEAKER_1: They're all different games.

SPEAKER_1: That's crazy.

SPEAKER_1: There is still, to this day, not a complete, ultimate, in-box, like all-encompassing version of Persona 3.

SPEAKER_1: Reload does not do that.

SPEAKER_1: And so that's what I mean when I say, what is Atlas' goal with Persona 3 Reload?

SPEAKER_1: Because it can't be to have the ultimate version, the most complete version of Persona 3, because on its face it can't be.

SPEAKER_1: So what else are they trying to accomplish here?

SPEAKER_1: And I think we're going to discover that as we go through.

SPEAKER_1: I think that sets the stage.

SPEAKER_1: So when I talk about the themes of Persona 3, what do I mean?

SPEAKER_1: On one hand, we've got the heavy Greek mythology.

SPEAKER_1: We have the narrative of Orpheus' descent into the underworld.

SPEAKER_1: We have Tartarus, the land of the dead, the land of torture.

SPEAKER_1: We have Nyx, mother of night and darkness.

SPEAKER_1: We also have Tartarus as part of Gnostic cosmology, descended from that Greek.

SPEAKER_1: We have this sort of all hanging in the back, right?

SPEAKER_1: On the other hand, and these are two hands of the same body, right?

SPEAKER_1: One hand and the other hand.

SPEAKER_1: On the other hand, we've got the journey of the Tarot.

SPEAKER_1: We have Orpheus, our protagonist, as the fool, our trickster.

SPEAKER_1: He's got to make his way through the Arcana, right?

SPEAKER_1: So this is in the game's literal text.

SPEAKER_1: It's a literal narrative.

SPEAKER_1: We're literally checking off Arcana as we go through the story each month, checking off Arcana.

SPEAKER_1: You begin at the fool and end with the world.

SPEAKER_1: This is like no secret.

SPEAKER_1: This is the text of the game.

SPEAKER_1: And you could even like, don't skip the crazy nurse's, like that substitute nurse teacher guy, his dialogue because he basically explains all of this.

SPEAKER_1: In like two sessions, he explains the full tarot and he basically explains the entire, the entire symbology of the game.

SPEAKER_1: So there's a reason the FES edition was split into the journey and the answer.

SPEAKER_1: Elizabeth, every time you close out of her dialogue, she always wishes you a safe journey.

SPEAKER_1: You're going along in this journey, but that journey specifically means something.

SPEAKER_1: There's a destination in mind.

SPEAKER_1: And so when a lot of people think of Persona 3, they think of, of course, death.

SPEAKER_1: It's easy to say that this is a narrative that's about death and grieving and coming to terms with that.

SPEAKER_1: But at the same time, yeah, of course, that's there, but that's like the surface level take, right?

SPEAKER_1: That's kind of the cop-out.

SPEAKER_1: If we look at the tarot, it's there the entire time.

SPEAKER_1: Death isn't the end of life or the journey of the tarot.

SPEAKER_1: It's a transition.

SPEAKER_1: It's a midway point.

SPEAKER_1: It's a stopping ground.

SPEAKER_1: It means change.

SPEAKER_1: Something has changed now.

SPEAKER_1: There's a character that embodies the death arcana.

SPEAKER_1: That character goes through a couple physical changes to represent this, and it's done so wonderfully.

SPEAKER_1: Death is change.

SPEAKER_1: It is not an end.

SPEAKER_1: It's a reflection point on the journey.

SPEAKER_1: The game is telling you that life is a journey, right?

SPEAKER_1: Let's play some rascal flats.

SPEAKER_1: But it's a journey and a life in search of an answer.

SPEAKER_1: So the game is progressing through this journey, through the tarot, through Tartarus, through this underworld abyss, each stage, each arcana and steps in search of an answer, in search of the answer you get around the end of the game, in search of the answer to that journey, in search of the answer to the life that you live.

SPEAKER_1: It's beautiful is what I'm trying to say.

SPEAKER_1: It's beautifully orchestrated, the way it ties together.

SPEAKER_1: You roll up on a boss and Fuca says to you, oh, it's Arcana is the chariot.

SPEAKER_1: And you're like, okay, what the fuck does that matter?

SPEAKER_1: It matters.

SPEAKER_1: It matters.

SPEAKER_1: Maybe not for the actual boss fight, but for your journey, it matters.

SPEAKER_1: It's telling you where you are.

SPEAKER_1: The Arcana is the means by which all is revealed.

SPEAKER_1: I had to say it.

SPEAKER_1: And more than anything, Persona 3 is a deeply existential piece of media, right?

SPEAKER_1: It's about finding meaning in the inherently meaningless, finding meaning in the face of death, finding meaning amongst that sea of change, finding meaning in the mundane, finding meaning in that daily life, finding out what it means to live and suffer and love all within the span of less than a year.

SPEAKER_1: That is the game.

SPEAKER_1: That is the theme of the game.

SPEAKER_1: And again, sure, you could cop out and say, this is a game about death.

SPEAKER_1: Sure, sure.

SPEAKER_1: It's there.

SPEAKER_1: It's in there.

SPEAKER_1: But that is not what is all encompassing about this game.

SPEAKER_1: You could say that the game embraces death with the main cast, you know, they got to bring out their inner selves by using their evokers, their guns and pointing and pulling the trigger.

SPEAKER_1: But it's a lot more than that.

SPEAKER_1: It's more like an understanding of death more than like welcoming it.

SPEAKER_1: So much more of the story is about rejecting this oncoming, all encompassing demise.

SPEAKER_1: And the cast is like the only ones that are like, this is wrong, this is not right.

SPEAKER_1: Surrounded by people with a death wish and saying, nah, this ain't it.

SPEAKER_1: And that's tough to do whenever you're surrounded by people that are just like finding comfort in death.

SPEAKER_1: To be like, no, no, I'm good.

SPEAKER_1: I'm going to cling to this.

SPEAKER_1: Like it may suck, but I'm going to cling to it.

SPEAKER_1: That's the game.

SPEAKER_1: Using the evoker and blasting it through your head is, you're not like cosplaying death.

SPEAKER_1: It's a statement of survival.

SPEAKER_1: It's I'm going to do what I need to do to cling to this.

SPEAKER_1: That's the beauty of it.

SPEAKER_1: That's why some characters at the beginning struggle to use their evokers.

SPEAKER_1: You get those like very visceral scenes, especially cos you don't know what the hell's happened and it looks like some kids are about to blow their heads off.

SPEAKER_1: It's pretty cool.

SPEAKER_1: So I don't know how to spin out of that, cos that got pretty...

SPEAKER_1: I felt like a preacher for a second.

SPEAKER_1: It's hard not to talk about Reload without talking about Persona 5, so I've got to talk about Persona 5.

SPEAKER_1: Some of the similarities between these two games are a little hard to ignore.

SPEAKER_1: So, like, for example, the protagonist has almost all of the same animations in day-to-day walking around life that Joker does.

SPEAKER_1: Like, the idle stances are pretty similar.

SPEAKER_1: He even does the little hair twist thing that Joker does, which doesn't quite make sense because Joker has curly hair and the P3 protagonist has very straight emo hair.

SPEAKER_1: It just sort of, like...

SPEAKER_1: The P3 protagonist doesn't feel distinct enough from Joker.

SPEAKER_1: The way they present themselves is just a little...

SPEAKER_1: It's a little too similar for me.

SPEAKER_1: So I had some issue with that.

SPEAKER_1: And in a way, though, a lot of this stuff does feel similar to the relationship between Persona 3 and Persona 4, where, like, a lot of the graphical assets and sound effects were shared.

SPEAKER_1: So while Reload's in a different engine than Persona 5, it's impossible not to see the differences in, like, the cell shading, the way background characters just sort of fade in and out.

SPEAKER_1: It can be walked through.

SPEAKER_1: The design of the dialogue portraits, the way they have the blue accent on their...

SPEAKER_1: on the side, the way that in Persona 5, that would just be red.

SPEAKER_1: And those are just, like, visual similarities.

SPEAKER_1: There's a retooled version of Baton Pass, which is a combat mechanic from Persona 5.

SPEAKER_1: And so that's reworked and put into Reload, despite the game's overall combat system being much closer to Persona 3 Portable and Persona 4.

SPEAKER_1: So, like, you just kind of feel Persona 5's influence all over Reload, but thankfully it's a lot less than I was anticipating.

SPEAKER_1: I was really just sort of being, like, expecting this to just be like, oh, it's just going to be more Persona 5.

SPEAKER_1: I was really worried that was going to be the case.

SPEAKER_1: And I was explaining this to a friend, and if you listen to The Dead and Road Show, you will know who that is.

SPEAKER_1: I was, he struggles to play Persona games, and so I was explaining whether he would have any interest in Reload.

SPEAKER_1: And in that conversation, I basically explained that Reload is the Persona 5-ification of Persona 3.

SPEAKER_1: And while that's basically true for somebody that hasn't played Persona 3 before, like if you put these two games side by side, you know, they're the same picture meme.

SPEAKER_1: But for somebody that, like, is familiar, there are differences there.

SPEAKER_1: Like, you know, he's not gonna know the difference between enemies being knocked down and dizzy and what that does to combat, right?

SPEAKER_1: You have to, like, really, you know, have the same kind of disease I do, you know?

SPEAKER_1: So I think it's less true for a committed fan of the series that's already played the games in their various states that 5 and Reload are similar.

SPEAKER_1: And maybe if somebody, like, played the original Persona 3 and hasn't touched it since and hasn't touched another Persona since, then they might be, like, you know, really blown away by Persona 3 Reload.

SPEAKER_1: And so what it boils down to is that this is Persona 3, but now it has the graphical fidelity of Persona 5, for the most part.

SPEAKER_1: And throughout the rest of this discussion, I will bring up Persona 5 because it's kind of impossible to ignore the context.

SPEAKER_1: Like, this is a game that came afterwards, so it's like impossible to pretend that Persona 5 doesn't exist.

SPEAKER_1: Like the same way there's not really death of the author, there's no death of Persona 5.

SPEAKER_1: I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_1: So this next section is going to be incredibly, incredibly in the weeds.

SPEAKER_1: And it may not even serve a point, but you know what?

SPEAKER_1: I'm going to do it anyway.

SPEAKER_1: So what's changed exactly between the original Persona 3 and Reload?

SPEAKER_1: And these are the changes that I thought were worth writing down.

SPEAKER_1: These are basically the changes that didn't fit into the other sections that I couldn't organize.

SPEAKER_1: So our monthly shadow extermination events, which are our main plot thrusts, this is how the story progresses for the most part.

SPEAKER_1: These are the same.

SPEAKER_1: They're largely unchanged aside from a couple of combat tweaks.

SPEAKER_1: But presentation-wise, setup-wise, they're the same as in Persona 3, the original.

SPEAKER_1: They're just basically boss fights with a little bit of prelude.

SPEAKER_1: This is probably going to be disappointing for Persona 5 only players, because these are not like the handcrafted dungeons in Persona 5.

SPEAKER_1: These are mostly just like walking in a straight line for a minute at the most in a scenario that just sort of sets up the boss fight.

SPEAKER_1: And because in Persona 3, Tartarus is the only dungeon, and it's the combination of Tartarus progress and these monthly shadow events that propel the story forward.

SPEAKER_1: There are now a lot more activities to rank up social stats, especially at night.

SPEAKER_1: So now the strip mall is open at night.

SPEAKER_1: Previously, only Polonia Mall was open at night, and it was pretty much the only thing you could do other than dungeon crawl at night.

SPEAKER_1: So this has the effect of making the environment feel like an actual lived in place other than like just being one or two backdrops, because nighttime is really restricted in the original.

SPEAKER_1: You could just basically go to the mall and that was it.

SPEAKER_1: And once you had finished those mall activities, you were either going to Tartarus or you were sleeping.

SPEAKER_1: And that's about it.

SPEAKER_1: So the fact that there's this variety improves ranking up social stats, because previously the best way to rank up social stats was to utilize the arcade machine at the mall.

SPEAKER_1: But if the stat you wanted wasn't available that day, you were kind of out of luck.

SPEAKER_1: So you'd either waste your money on a stat you didn't need, or you could just go home and study.

SPEAKER_1: And then once your academics was maxed, again, you would just kind of go to bed.

SPEAKER_1: Like there really wasn't a lot to do at night.

SPEAKER_1: So now while you're still ranking up the same three stats, it feels like you're experiencing a lot more because those activities are different.

SPEAKER_1: You know, you could be buying software for the Dorm PC, you know, eating these different foods at these different restaurants now, just seeing these different backdrops.

SPEAKER_1: It just feels like there's more variety, even though you're still kind of doing the same thing.

SPEAKER_1: It's just not back and forth between the mall every night.

SPEAKER_1: And late game, there's also a method for gaining social link points at night that works in a similar fashion to the way that drawing a fortune at the shrine does.

SPEAKER_1: And so this is very handy for one, and it's also a much better alternative than just going to bed and wasting that nighttime period, which is really nice.

SPEAKER_1: And so in that vein, there's just a lot of little quality of life tweaks like that to help you spend your time better.

SPEAKER_1: Like, for example, the Hermit social link no longer takes up a full day, instead only takes up the afternoon time slot instead.

SPEAKER_1: And friends now text you rather than call you to make plans.

SPEAKER_1: So now you can actually see who all wants to hang out rather than just like declining a bunch of people and then realizing that you said no to everybody.

SPEAKER_1: And so this maybe like will break the immersion of it being 2009 a little bit because like texting with T9 in 2009 was ass.

SPEAKER_1: It was ass.

SPEAKER_1: And so they're sending like lengthy text messages.

SPEAKER_1: It's like, it's a little iffy, but like it's fine.

SPEAKER_1: It's fine for the quality of life.

SPEAKER_1: It's fine.

SPEAKER_1: Otherwise, I think they do do a really nice job of sticking to like the 2006 to 2009 aesthetics that the original possessed and not like modernizing it for kind of no reason.

SPEAKER_1: It's like all the phones are flip phones.

SPEAKER_1: Junpei is still playing a PSP.

SPEAKER_1: I think I think it's still PSP.

SPEAKER_1: So like, you know, they didn't like, you know, modernize it for just for the sake of it.

SPEAKER_1: The big one is you can now accept more than three of Elizabeth's requests at a time.

SPEAKER_1: You could basically just accept all the ones that are available to you, which is really nice.

SPEAKER_1: And requests that require a specific item from party members no longer have to be acquired on a specific date.

SPEAKER_1: There's still a time limit attached to them.

SPEAKER_1: So like, if you don't hand it in by that time, you fail it.

SPEAKER_1: But it's basically impossible to miss them now because you don't have to like go talk to them at a specific date, which meant that they would only be available at a specific time because you couldn't talk to them during their social links if they were a social link character.

SPEAKER_1: And your requests also have markers associated with them when they require talking to an NPC, like if they have an item.

SPEAKER_1: And you could see that on the map as well.

SPEAKER_1: And almost all of them can be completed immediately whenever you accept the request.

SPEAKER_1: So I'm a little mixed on how I feel about this because it basically makes it so you no longer have to factor these requests into your schedule, like remembering the dates or where anybody is located and when they'll be available.

SPEAKER_1: So they're just basically these fetch quests that you can kind of just do immediately.

SPEAKER_1: At the same time, there are so many goddamn requests that it doesn't really hurt if these are made stupidly easy.

SPEAKER_1: So it's fine.

SPEAKER_1: It's not that big of a deal.

SPEAKER_1: But the other time saver is you can now walk in and out of the dorm without causing time to pass.

SPEAKER_1: So if you realized you needed to do something in the dorm or you bought something that can be used in the dorm, it no longer requires you to waste time or do something outside instead and vice versa.

SPEAKER_1: So like if you realized that you went home, but then you're like, oh, there's nothing to do in the dorm today and I need to go back outside, you don't lose that time.

SPEAKER_1: It doesn't move time forward for you.

SPEAKER_1: There's now a vendor at the club at the mall who now sell links to websites.

SPEAKER_1: He's like a hacker guy.

SPEAKER_1: These open up additional items and small interactions.

SPEAKER_1: They kind of very lightly, just a little bit, feel like Persona 2's rumor system, just a super, super simplified version.

SPEAKER_1: This is just basically unlocking additional items and interactions.

SPEAKER_1: And it is possible to miss them, because if you don't buy them, then you don't get them.

SPEAKER_1: But I thought it was a nice touch, just more ways to interact with the world.

SPEAKER_1: I think one of them is also how you start a social link, if I remember correctly, but it may not be.

SPEAKER_1: Don't quote me on that.

SPEAKER_1: There's all new classroom and exam questions and keeping guide makers in business until AI destroys them all.

SPEAKER_1: This is a nice touch I noticed that characters will remark when you've hit a roadblock in Tartarus.

SPEAKER_1: So instead of them just saying like, oh, Tartarus, Tartarus tonight, Queen, please, please Tartarus.

SPEAKER_1: Eventually they'll still do it anyway.

SPEAKER_1: But like whenever you hit the roadblock the first couple of times, they're like, we should go Tartarus.

SPEAKER_1: Oh, right.

SPEAKER_1: We're at the roadblock.

SPEAKER_1: So we probably shouldn't go, which I thought was funny just because normally they're just like Tartarus, Tartarus, please, please, please, Tartarus, Tartarus, please.

SPEAKER_1: I'll give you my son, please, Tartarus.

SPEAKER_1: So some big changes.

SPEAKER_1: Rather than adopting Persona 3 Portable's female protagonist social links for the male party members and like sort of reverse engineering them to work with the dude or just allowing the male romance options, whatever, or just creating new ones, Reload introduces what it calls link episodes, and they're basically social links.

SPEAKER_1: They're side stories with party members that lead into one another, so they're like serialized like that.

SPEAKER_1: They're kind of like the velvet attendant episodes from, you know, the other games, especially Royal, I guess, is the closest analog.

SPEAKER_1: The only difference here is that these do take up a time slot, whereas in spending time with the twins in Royal, that was just sort of like a freebie.

SPEAKER_1: Same with like Elizabeth here.

SPEAKER_1: That doesn't take up your time.

SPEAKER_1: And so I got the same thing.

SPEAKER_1: Like your dialogue choices don't matter.

SPEAKER_1: It's just sort of like spending time, right?

SPEAKER_1: And these party members do get bonuses.

SPEAKER_1: If you complete these, they get passives and stuff like that.

SPEAKER_1: Reload no longer has a fatigue system.

SPEAKER_1: That's a big one.

SPEAKER_1: And I'll get more into that in the combat section.

SPEAKER_1: But you can still only visit the school nurse a day after you've been in Tartarus.

SPEAKER_1: Previously, you could only visit the school nurse if you were tired or under the sick status.

SPEAKER_1: So now you can only go a day after you've been in Tartarus.

SPEAKER_1: So this is something in the game knows that like, you know, this is the next day after Tartarus, but it's not like it doesn't say tired or fatigued in the bar.

SPEAKER_1: So pre-exams, there will be optional study sessions with party members of the dorm.

SPEAKER_1: I like these because these are the fully voiced additional scenes that increase academics gain, like more than you would get studying on your own.

SPEAKER_1: And so it's just a welcome addition to sprucing up an activity that you'd be doing anyway.

SPEAKER_1: I'm not going to say no to additional voiced scenes.

SPEAKER_1: There's also new activities with party members in the dorm in that same vein.

SPEAKER_1: But it unfortunately takes a while to unlock these.

SPEAKER_1: It was like months and months into the game where it was like just adding this new feature.

SPEAKER_1: And I was like, oh, we could have been doing this earlier.

SPEAKER_1: But I'll see how there's like you can cook or watch DVDs.

SPEAKER_1: Sometimes like whenever you rank up this activity with a party member, they might give you a consumable or they can unlock combat passives.

SPEAKER_1: And these passives function in a similar way to passives from social links in Persona 5, but they're just character specific.

SPEAKER_1: They're a nice addition.

SPEAKER_1: And it's just another way that they expanded on like the nighttime portion of gameplay, which was lacking in the originals.

SPEAKER_1: And so they also do have like a little story and some character growth attached.

SPEAKER_1: They kind of feel like mini social links, I would say.

SPEAKER_1: The only thing I don't like about this system is that it's hard to track your progress.

SPEAKER_1: So like with social links, you have a really nice UI element in the main menu that tells you how far you are numerically within the social link.

SPEAKER_1: Like, OK, here we go.

SPEAKER_1: Magician, I'm five out of ten.

SPEAKER_1: So I know where I am.

SPEAKER_1: And even if you hit on that, it'll even give you a small synopsis of like what your last event was with that person.

SPEAKER_1: So like if you hadn't talked to them in a while, you can refresh yourself.

SPEAKER_1: Like, yep, that's where I was.

SPEAKER_1: OK, cool.

SPEAKER_1: For this, you're kind of just on your own, and it's hard to chart your progress to the next like perk point.

SPEAKER_1: And like the wording whenever you finished off a link episode, but can still access that character's activity is vague enough to be confusing because it's the same unhelpfully vague language that's used whenever you progress a social link, but it's not going to rank up.

SPEAKER_1: But in the case of the social link, you're still making progress on that social link.

SPEAKER_1: But in the link episodes, you're wasting time because you've unlocked all that you can from that character's little story.

SPEAKER_1: But it's phrased the same way.

SPEAKER_1: It's confusing, and it could have really just used an additional, even just simple UI element to just say, yep, you've got that perk, and now you're done with that character's, you know, events.

SPEAKER_1: And it's also hard to remember which activities you finish with each character, because again, you don't have a way to track that.

SPEAKER_1: So it's like, oh, well, I think I finished Mitsuru's cooking episodes, but I may or may not have finished her reading episodes.

SPEAKER_1: But she'll be available anyway, because that's just the way her schedule works.

SPEAKER_1: And it'll give you that thing where it's like, oh, you're not going to make any progress towards this link episode character.

SPEAKER_1: It's like, OK, does that mean I got the perk or can I make progress?

SPEAKER_1: Like, it's not it's not helpful at all.

SPEAKER_1: It just really isn't.

SPEAKER_1: So there might be times where you like accidentally redo events with a character, because it doesn't it doesn't really tell you that you're like completely done, done with that character.

SPEAKER_1: The protagonist also has passives, but he unlocks his by fusing personas and hitting certain fusion milestones.

SPEAKER_1: And I don't remember what they are.

SPEAKER_1: They might be at the same point where you also get discounts on summoning from the compendium.

SPEAKER_1: So that's like at 50, 75, and it's either 90 or 100 percent.

SPEAKER_1: I forget what the break points are for that.

SPEAKER_1: And again, I will talk a bit more about social links and link episodes in a few more sections.

SPEAKER_1: So Operation Babe Hunt at the Beach has been changed, so it's not completely just transphobic now.

SPEAKER_1: So that's that's a big win.

SPEAKER_1: The whole scene is still cringey as fuck, but at least now it's not like just openly hateful.

SPEAKER_1: So that's that's cool.

SPEAKER_1: There's new all new anime cut scenes that are largely drop in replacements for the original anime cut scenes.

SPEAKER_1: Just I would just say higher quality.

SPEAKER_1: They're mostly the same, like some are entirely new and are in new places in the script where they didn't exist before.

SPEAKER_1: I found this odd, though, that I guess is reveal is the in engine cut scene from the game's reveal trailer.

SPEAKER_1: And that serves as a replacement for its anime cut scene counterpart in the original.

SPEAKER_1: And aside from Orpheus' awakening and I guess is reveal moment, there are largely just a few other in engine cut scenes, which I thought was weird because it was just like the stylistic clash.

SPEAKER_1: You didn't know when a cut scene was going to be animated or fully in engine.

SPEAKER_1: But like the in engine ones were high quality.

SPEAKER_1: And pretty damn effective at conveying like the emotions that needed to be conveyed, especially in some very key scenes.

SPEAKER_1: And also making it clear, like literally what is happening in a scene, which is something that was an issue for Persona 3 Portable because that game does not have cut scenes.

SPEAKER_1: So you could just go from one thing where it would kind of explain like what your character does or reacts to dialogue, and then it would just sort of move on.

SPEAKER_1: And it would be quite confusing if a player does not know that there are supposed to be cut scenes there.

SPEAKER_1: Fortunately, on PC at least, there are mods that can restore the cut scenes.

SPEAKER_1: And then you could also, of course, just, you know, go on YouTube and follow along with the cut scene breakdown.

SPEAKER_1: If you don't know, you don't know, right?

SPEAKER_1: Also, while we're at the beach, I guess, the last day at the beach has an added scene.

SPEAKER_1: And this does make the trip feel a lot less weird as if nothing but meeting Igus happens, because that's sort of the whole point of going to the beach.

SPEAKER_1: But yeah, it's basically Operation Babe Hunt and Igus.

SPEAKER_1: It's like the two things that happened at the beach, and that's kind of it.

SPEAKER_1: Now there's an additional scene, and it's sort of like, okay, this was an actual event that things happened at, and it gives us some more context, and it's good.

SPEAKER_1: Yes, nice.

SPEAKER_1: They changed the Megiddo, Megidola, Megidoleon joke, and I'm very upset about it.

SPEAKER_1: It's a tragedy.

SPEAKER_1: They should not have changed it, because there's no reason to change it.

SPEAKER_1: Because the whole point of it was that somebody was saying the spell names, and I think they just turned it into like a calculus joke.

SPEAKER_1: So I don't know what the deal with that is.

SPEAKER_1: I don't like it, hate it actually.

SPEAKER_1: This is another big one.

SPEAKER_1: So there's new scenes giving more detail and background to Strega, who are like your adversaries for a majority of the game.

SPEAKER_1: And thankfully, P-Studio didn't do anything like insert a bunch of flashbacks to, you know, their childhood or like long expository monologues or just like info dump at you just to tell you what each member of Strega's deal is.

SPEAKER_1: But no, like I thought these were like pretty tastefully done.

SPEAKER_1: They just kind of provide color and a touch more contrast and shine a little light on what were sort of intentionally vague and like hinted at personal histories.

SPEAKER_1: And so what this does is it like this approach leaves the original text completely intact because it's not like retconning anything.

SPEAKER_1: It's not adding something that's just like overshadowing the original text.

SPEAKER_1: It's just sort of like a little more detail, right?

SPEAKER_1: A little more context, a little more motivation, and just adding more to make these more well-rounded antagonists.

SPEAKER_1: It's well done.

SPEAKER_1: I like it a lot.

SPEAKER_1: Ryoji's characterization, which is mostly done through additional dialogue and his link episodes has been adjusted.

SPEAKER_1: So he's no longer just the flirty playboy who sort of comes out of nowhere.

SPEAKER_1: He's now portrayed as more foreign, almost alien in nature.

SPEAKER_1: And so this is not only less uncomfortable, it also makes a lot more sense.

SPEAKER_1: So he's unintentionally asking out all the girls in school because he doesn't understand the etiquette rather than just being a fucking pervert.

SPEAKER_1: But there are a couple of times where this new characterization doesn't gel with the untouched script from Portable, where he is just kind of a pervert.

SPEAKER_1: So since they didn't really change anything from Portable, which is the script they're using, there's this there's this tonal clash between like within this character specifically.

SPEAKER_1: And his characterization in these added scenes leads me to believe the writers were really, really influenced by the Evangelion rebuilds, specifically the relationship between Shinji and Kaoru, because it's really overt.

SPEAKER_1: It's really obvious, but I did appreciate it.

SPEAKER_1: There are new scenes during the work experience week, which also gets changed to like they change the language of this to internship partway through.

SPEAKER_1: And hey, I'll take again, I'll take more new voiced scenes, because this was previously just an event that just like burned your week, and it would like fast forward through.

SPEAKER_1: So yeah, and you can kind of say that there's commentary here about having to do an internship that's literally just working at McDonald's for no pay for a week.

SPEAKER_1: But I guess it kind of writes itself, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_1: You still do lose a few days off of your schedule for like no additional benefit, which is a bummer because this does happen fairly late into the game.

SPEAKER_1: But I guess you get some new scenes.

SPEAKER_1: And it does allow for some additional Rioji characterization.

SPEAKER_1: And adding this sort of makes them feel like less of a late game plot device that just sort of shows up to like usher in the very end of the game and more like, you know, a character that's part of the game.

SPEAKER_1: And the kind of unmarked quest that Junpei is involved in is now way easier to complete or even know that exists because it's now part of his Link episodes.

SPEAKER_1: And so I'm not going to go into detail here because it's significant.

SPEAKER_1: But it's still missable because like you can, I guess, not do it.

SPEAKER_1: But it's no longer hidden like it was in the original, where you would have to specifically seek him out on certain days to talk to him without being guided to at all.

SPEAKER_1: And again, it's just another quality of life thing.

SPEAKER_1: And in this case, it's amplifying a potential story beat that was almost relegated to an Easter egg.

SPEAKER_1: And now making that a more noticeable path you could take.

SPEAKER_1: You know, like it's an RPG or something.

SPEAKER_1: So that's good.

SPEAKER_1: Moving on to the sound portion here.

SPEAKER_1: So for me, the new soundtrack is quite hit or miss.

SPEAKER_1: Overall feels more like a remix album rather than like a natural game EGM.

SPEAKER_1: So songs changing between scenes can be jarring because they don't have a common instrumentation the way the originals did.

SPEAKER_1: Some feel like scrapped Persona 5 ideas, mostly any song that includes synth organ and jazz bass, which were both staples of the Persona 5 soundtrack.

SPEAKER_1: The new version of Mass Destruction is objectively worse and again feels like a version for a remix album.

SPEAKER_1: I almost feel like they made Mass Destruction worse just to make the new battle theme, It's Going Down Now sound better because it is a better song than this butchered version of Mass Destruction.

SPEAKER_1: It's Going Down Now would have been fine on its own.

SPEAKER_1: There was no need to like completely nerf and destroy Mass Destruction the way that they did.

SPEAKER_1: I don't know.

SPEAKER_1: Yeah, it's disappointing.

SPEAKER_1: It's disappointing because Mass Destruction is so iconic.

SPEAKER_1: Part of me wonders if like what unified the original soundtrack was just the fact that it was like compressed to hell and back when I heard it, you know, like through PSP compression for portable, you know, when I played it on the Vita, right?

SPEAKER_1: But then I also like think back to listening to the lossless copies of the songs that I have and never feeling like there was this issue at all.

SPEAKER_1: So I don't know.

SPEAKER_1: I'm really iffy on the new stuff and the one song that has the boop in it.

SPEAKER_1: I don't know how to describe it.

SPEAKER_1: It's boop is also very jarring.

SPEAKER_1: I don't know.

SPEAKER_1: And I want to talk about the voice acting here.

SPEAKER_1: I'm not going to name any of the new voice actors as I'm giving some criticism, mostly because I didn't dig deep enough to find out who they were.

SPEAKER_1: But also because that's easily accessible to people who do research like me.

SPEAKER_1: But I felt like if I get mean, I don't want to be mean to a person.

SPEAKER_1: I don't know, it feels weird.

SPEAKER_1: Anyway, I mostly have positive things to say, though, so we'll see.

SPEAKER_1: But the voice acting is a little uneven.

SPEAKER_1: But overall, I do think it sounds much more natural than the, you know, like stilted 2000s anime style delivery that the original had going for it.

SPEAKER_1: And so this is a credit to the voice directing and the performances, because the script is basically the same as Persona 3 Portable, other than like, you know, the new additions and the new scenes and everything.

SPEAKER_1: So the fact that it does sound much more natural, being the same exact dialogue is a testament to the performance.

SPEAKER_1: Because like characters sound like they're talking to each other like real people and talking to you like real people, rather than listening to an overacted anime dub, is how I would describe it.

SPEAKER_1: And so this is great for just playing the game, but immersing yourself into the world and the role in this role playing game.

SPEAKER_1: But specifically, I think Yukari's voice is the one that sticks out the most to me, is like, it's not out of place at all, but it's odd.

SPEAKER_1: From like one line to the next, she sounds like different people.

SPEAKER_1: Sometimes she sounds like Futaba from Persona 5, other times she sounds like An from Persona 5.

SPEAKER_1: Sometimes she has a higher pitch, sometimes she has a lower pitch to her voice.

SPEAKER_1: She's kind of all over the place, and especially early on.

SPEAKER_1: And this sort of makes it hard to pin down her character.

SPEAKER_1: But at the same time, this doesn't feel like it's out of place.

SPEAKER_1: It's intentional.

SPEAKER_1: Like, as I was listening to it, it almost feels like the actress was just sort of like set adrift and sort of cast out with like not the proper direction of where to take her.

SPEAKER_1: And she just sort of like had to make do with the script on her own.

SPEAKER_1: And then later on, she sort of figures out what she wants to do with Yukari.

SPEAKER_1: That's how it came across, because I do feel like later on, Yukari sort of evens out.

SPEAKER_1: And she finds this like middle of the road to her voice as the game comes on.

SPEAKER_1: But at the same time, that would only make sense if the game script was recorded chronologically.

SPEAKER_1: And I'm not an expert.

SPEAKER_1: I don't know how video game voice acting is typically done.

SPEAKER_1: But I doubt that that's how they handle it, because I know movies aren't usually shot chronologically.

SPEAKER_1: So why would voice acting be done chronologically?

SPEAKER_1: What I think is genuinely happening here is that I got more used to the way that she was delivering her lines, whereas I was just not used to it at the beginning, and then I just got used to it.

SPEAKER_1: So I think this is what I'm trying to say is this is a me problem more than anything else.

SPEAKER_1: Also, there's like a weird audio bug, I guess, with Yukari.

SPEAKER_1: So whenever there's a dialogue that will trigger her sigh sound effect, the sigh is way louder than literally any other audio that's in the game.

SPEAKER_1: Like it's louder than music, it's louder than whatever, and it's especially louder than any dialogue audio.

SPEAKER_1: And so you'll just get blasted by her sighing whenever you just sort of walk up to her like in the dorm.

SPEAKER_1: And it's the only sound effect that I encountered that happening for where it's just super fucking loud out of nowhere.

SPEAKER_1: And there's no way to predict when it's going to happen because it's contextual to whatever her non-recorded dialogue is going to be about because there's just like, it's basically more sound effect than dialogue.

SPEAKER_1: So whenever she doesn't have dialogue, depending on that context, she might just sigh and it might just blow your eardrums out.

SPEAKER_1: I don't know if that's been patched since I have not paid attention since I finished the game.

SPEAKER_1: So please forgive.

SPEAKER_1: Ikutsuki, he also has a much more natural performance, but a lot of the times comes across as too mysterious and I feel like this basically gives away his entire arc.

SPEAKER_1: So Fuuka's new VA probably fits her character in a more cohesive way.

SPEAKER_1: But for me, there was always something charming about Fuuka's originally probably objectively poor line reads because Fuuka always stood out and sounded like an old woman hanging out with a bunch of teenagers.

SPEAKER_1: But it kind of worked because she was entirely sheltered and felt at odds with people her age.

SPEAKER_1: And that's what part of her social link was about.

SPEAKER_1: And I didn't know this before, but because I usually don't look into voice actresses, you know, in general.

SPEAKER_1: But her original voice actress is up for debate because for the original game, the English cast wasn't credited in the game's credit and no voice actor ever stepped forward to take credit for the role.

SPEAKER_1: Probably because of how much dogpiling the performance gets, which is crazy to me.

SPEAKER_1: So we don't know who the original voice actress for Fuca is.

SPEAKER_1: But I don't know.

SPEAKER_1: I kind of miss like the grandmotherly way she would say like, Hi, how was your day?

SPEAKER_1: Like, I don't know.

SPEAKER_1: I don't know.

SPEAKER_1: There's something missing.

SPEAKER_1: The new one's fine.

SPEAKER_1: The new one's fine.

SPEAKER_1: I have no issues with the new one, but something's missing.

SPEAKER_1: Mitsuru's good.

SPEAKER_1: No notes.

SPEAKER_1: This is one of my favorite characters.

SPEAKER_1: And yeah, no notes, no issues.

SPEAKER_1: His interpretation's fine.

SPEAKER_1: Akihiko also fine.

SPEAKER_1: No issues that I really have.

SPEAKER_1: Sometimes he sounds a little too adult, especially if you compare it to the older performance and to the rest of the cast, but it's fine.

SPEAKER_1: Junpei, again, is fine.

SPEAKER_1: He's very close to the original, I would say.

SPEAKER_1: Junpei, probably the closest.

SPEAKER_1: But here we have an instance of where they had to change the voice actor because the original was a creep.

SPEAKER_1: And I have no knowledge of this whatsoever, because I'm just a fucking dude.

SPEAKER_1: But my suspicion is that Atlas' localization team figured that since they had to change Junpei's actor anyway, and now that social links were going to be fully voiced, that this presented an opportunity to just have a whole new cast.

SPEAKER_1: Because why not, you know?

SPEAKER_1: New game, younger talents, you know, makes sense.

SPEAKER_1: But again, I have no fucking clue.

SPEAKER_1: If you told me Takaya was the same voice actor as the original, I believe it.

SPEAKER_1: But as far as I know, that Elizabeth is the only one to retain their voice actor.

SPEAKER_1: I probably would have rioted if they changed Elizabeth and the voice actor butchered that performance because you can't screw up Elizabeth.

SPEAKER_1: That would be an actual genuine tragedy.

SPEAKER_1: So, uh, Faros, much creepier.

SPEAKER_1: And rather than just being sort of awkward.

SPEAKER_1: So that's an improvement because he should be creepy.

SPEAKER_1: That was sort of the vibe they were going for in the original and it didn't land.

SPEAKER_1: So, um, Ken sounds less like a muppet, which might be a downer if you want to hear a little boy talk like a muppet.

SPEAKER_1: But if you want to hear that, you can just listen to this show, I guess.

SPEAKER_1: Uh, I'd say it's another improvement.

SPEAKER_1: The real positive here is that I no longer mockingly go, hello, in Ken's voice, every single time his returning to the dorm line activates, because that's what I would do in portable.

SPEAKER_1: Because I think his would trigger an inordinate number of times and it was so fucking goofy.

SPEAKER_1: Um, here's where we got some issues.

SPEAKER_1: I really hate to say it, but I really prefer OG.

SPEAKER_1: Igus.

SPEAKER_1: OG.

SPEAKER_1: Igus sounded robotic.

SPEAKER_1: And whether that was like on the performance side, or that was like a vocal effect they added in post-production, I don't know.

SPEAKER_1: But OG.

SPEAKER_1: Igus actually sounded like a robot.

SPEAKER_1: Whether that was like the stilted way of talking, again, the vocal effect, or even just being like a bit crushed being on an old ass system.

SPEAKER_1: I don't know.

SPEAKER_1: But new Igus sort of sounds like the TikTok text-to-speech, but like an actual person.

SPEAKER_1: And so much of Igus' character growth can be charted through her beginning to talk more and more like a human.

SPEAKER_1: And this gets conveyed through her diction, where she uses like very long-winded and, again, like alien ways of speaking, and then becomes more human, starts talking like the others, gets more like playful.

SPEAKER_1: And you can see this change throughout when you first meet her.

SPEAKER_1: And then, of course, at the end of the game, there's a gigantic difference.

SPEAKER_1: But here, she already starts off close to like fully actualized Igus in terms of both tone, which like undercuts what is probably like the most important character in Persona 3.

SPEAKER_1: And so it also like the scenes where she's then supposed to be fully like fully realizing her, you know, potential towards the end are just like really hollow because it's like you haven't you haven't really changed.

SPEAKER_1: You just still seem like the same Igus that I've been with for all these months now.

SPEAKER_1: And so it feels like Igus is sort of trapped in limbo where everybody else isn't.

SPEAKER_1: And that wasn't the case for the original.

SPEAKER_1: So like Mitsuru even has a voice line.

SPEAKER_1: And this wasn't the original too, but it's again here where she like calls this out and says that Igus has started to talk like a human.

SPEAKER_1: And it just doesn't gel now.

SPEAKER_1: Everyone talks about how Igus has changed and feels like a real human and like there's even a quote like a whole new person.

SPEAKER_1: And I just don't see it now.

SPEAKER_1: It doesn't feel like she's changed based on the way she acts, her mannerisms.

SPEAKER_1: It's a weird way that she's presented where she feels more like the group's toy, even more so than the fucking dog is.

SPEAKER_1: It's a very weird energy and vibe.

SPEAKER_1: And I never got this feeling in the original when I guess sounded more like an actual robot.

SPEAKER_1: And maybe it's weird because it just sounds like this group of teenagers was treating what was ostensibly from looks and sounds.

SPEAKER_1: Another teenage girl like like she's an oddity when she wasn't portrayed that way.

SPEAKER_1: It's explained like I don't remember this from the original.

SPEAKER_1: So like, I don't know.

SPEAKER_1: It's explained that she like now has emotions like in the late game and like a throwaway line because I don't remember this in the original at all.

SPEAKER_1: And so this is why it stuck out to me.

SPEAKER_1: So she now has emotions and like that's just not true.

SPEAKER_1: She had emotions the entire time, which was why she was able to have a persona in the first place.

SPEAKER_1: She had a psyche.

SPEAKER_1: That was the whole point was that she was a robot with a persona.

SPEAKER_1: So like the more I think about this, the less I like it.

SPEAKER_1: Like the way that I guess gets handled in Reload.

SPEAKER_1: I just don't like it.

SPEAKER_1: Which is really weird because she's like sort of the oddly, she's the emotional core of this game.

SPEAKER_1: And so for them to like fuck with it, maybe not intentionally, maybe not intentionally, but like in result is off.

SPEAKER_1: Koremaru sounds like a person mimicking a dog.

SPEAKER_1: So it sounds goofy as hell.

SPEAKER_1: It's also really loud in combat for some reason.

SPEAKER_1: And it just sounds like a dude just like barking and woofing.

SPEAKER_1: And now, you know, don't sue me, but like I don't like dogs to begin with.

SPEAKER_1: And so this just sort of amplified how annoyed I was.

SPEAKER_1: The worst part, the worst part is the painting, by far, by far.

SPEAKER_1: Listening to a dude pant like a dog is really rough.

SPEAKER_1: Again, I think the original sounded more like a dog.

SPEAKER_1: I don't know if they recorded actual dog barks or if it was just compressed.

SPEAKER_1: And the guy doing the dog bark sounded more like a dog.

SPEAKER_1: Whatever they did here, it just sounds like a dude.

SPEAKER_1: It sounds like a dude whenever it's supposed to be an actual dog.

SPEAKER_1: Like, this is not a dog mascot, it's a mascot dog.

SPEAKER_1: You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_1: Or do I have that backwards?

SPEAKER_1: Like, it's an actual dog, or like in Persona 5, Morgana does the mascot cat thing.

SPEAKER_1: Persona 4, Teddy is the mascot bear.

SPEAKER_1: Here, it's literally supposed to be an actual fucking dog, and it sounds like a dude.

SPEAKER_1: I really want to stress how much it sounds like just a guy.

SPEAKER_1: That's the one voice actor I should have looked up, is who plays the dog, you know?

SPEAKER_1: I really want to stress that.

SPEAKER_1: If you take away nothing else from this episode, take away the fact that the dog sounds like a dude making dog noises.

SPEAKER_1: Much like Fuuka, Chidori too no longer sounds like an old lady, so Jupe gets the goth girl of his dreams.

SPEAKER_1: The guy that voices Hayase, who's the star social link, is some YouTuber.

SPEAKER_1: He got a bunch of harassment for his performance in the last Yakuza game, or maybe it was two Yakuza games ago, I don't know.

SPEAKER_1: I haven't played those yet, since he was taking over the main role in that.

SPEAKER_1: And so, since Hayase wasn't voiced in any other Persona 3, there's not really a direct comparison.

SPEAKER_1: But I have to say that this performance was probably one of the weaker ones, because all of his line reads are pretty generic, just like he's anybody.

SPEAKER_1: And he has this weird tendency to breathe out each line.

SPEAKER_1: It's weird and doesn't make a lot of sense, why he's just like, breathing out each word he says.

SPEAKER_1: It's like off-putting.

SPEAKER_1: I don't know this guy or what kind of content he makes or why he's suddenly getting VA roles, but it's like such a minor role that it doesn't matter.

SPEAKER_1: Akinari's VA fixes a lingering issue I had with The Sun's social link from the original, which was that the text always referred to him as a young man, but his gray hair and like the gaunt appearance in his face always gave the impression that he was much older, yet he was called young in the text and makes references to being around the same age as the protagonist.

SPEAKER_1: And so now that it's a voiced character, that can be properly conveyed.

SPEAKER_1: And to me, this makes what was already like the most outwardly, emotionally affecting Social Link that much more impactful, because you get a fully realized character now.

SPEAKER_1: You did before, like in his entire arc, but now you get like a complete picture with the inclusion of voice acting.

SPEAKER_1: I feel like this is what they were trying to go for by upping the presentation by including voice acting now.

SPEAKER_1: And so I think Akinari, the Sun Social Link, is what does that the best.

SPEAKER_1: And then the Antique Shop VA is the same as Kawakami from P5.

SPEAKER_1: I had to note that because it sounded the same.

SPEAKER_1: Same.

SPEAKER_2: Man, this is a tough case, even for Junpei Iori, Ace Detective.

SPEAKER_2: Ace Detective?

SPEAKER_2: More like Stupae, Ace Defective.

SPEAKER_1: Okay, everybody still with me?

SPEAKER_1: Moving on to the visuals.

SPEAKER_1: So overall, the game looks fantastic.

SPEAKER_1: You can see it from any trailers or any gameplay.

SPEAKER_1: The cell shading looks quite good.

SPEAKER_1: There are some lighting issues.

SPEAKER_1: The interior of the dorm in particular is way too bright.

SPEAKER_1: This can be sort of remedied by turning down the brightness in the config menu, surprise, surprise.

SPEAKER_1: But this unfortunately makes the rest of the game, which otherwise, like on the whole, has an appropriate light level and shadow detail, I would say.

SPEAKER_1: Now far too dark.

SPEAKER_1: This is the kind of thing that could probably be patched in, but Atlas usually doesn't patch their games post-release for that kind of thing.

SPEAKER_1: Like what the game shipped as is usually how it lives.

SPEAKER_1: So oddly enough, the dorm actually looks more like how I envision it should whenever January, which is the final month of the game, rolls around.

SPEAKER_1: Because on January 1st, like due to the story events, the game's atmosphere and even the background music changes.

SPEAKER_1: And so the way that the dorm was presented in January with these much more muted colors and it's less overexposed due to the lighting is more in line with how it used to look in the original.

SPEAKER_1: Similar to the lighting, this is the first Persona game to have ray tracing.

SPEAKER_1: You might not know that it has ray tracing because they don't call it ray tracing in the config menu.

SPEAKER_1: It's called like lighting detail or reflections or something like that.

SPEAKER_1: But that's ray tracing.

SPEAKER_1: And it's the only setting is a simple toggle on or off.

SPEAKER_1: And if you don't have a graphics card or a system like a PlayStation that can actually run ray tracing, then it won't do anything except tank your performance.

SPEAKER_1: So like the steam deck, if you turn that on, it's just going to tank your performance for no reason.

SPEAKER_1: Sometimes character models also have too much lighting on them when they're in the overworld.

SPEAKER_1: The school is a like really notorious location for this.

SPEAKER_1: Like the outdoor sections and basically any place that is meant to have sunlight can look like the brightness is just turned up way too high.

SPEAKER_1: So like especially in the like the courtyard area, it's just like sort of sort of jarring, especially because most locations of the game look really good.

SPEAKER_1: So these stand out to me.

SPEAKER_1: And again, like if you just try to adjust this yourself in the config menu by like sliding the brightness around, it's going to make another part of the game look off.

SPEAKER_1: You can't really.

SPEAKER_1: There's no sweet spot, really.

SPEAKER_1: Pre-release, I was initially confused about like all the water influenced imagery, and I was trying to like rack my brain and figure out what was going on until I had like this eureka moment and I was like, oh, it's the Sea of Souls.

SPEAKER_1: That's what it is.

SPEAKER_1: And so you can hear that on whatever Dead End Roadshow episode I did when the reload announcement happened because it just like clicked in my head.

SPEAKER_1: And so as a result, like it goes beyond just the UI.

SPEAKER_1: It's also like personas themselves are coated in this like shimmering water effect.

SPEAKER_1: And it gives you the impression that they're like still in another plane of existence and you're just evoking a part of yourself out of the Sea of Souls.

SPEAKER_1: It's really fucking cool.

SPEAKER_1: The Velvet Room has this water surface effect too.

SPEAKER_1: And so it's like when you're in the Velvet Room, you're able to tap into this other plane.

SPEAKER_1: You're like able to access the Collective Unconscious this way.

SPEAKER_1: And that's conveyed through this water effect, which I really fucking like.

SPEAKER_1: And so, like I said, this theme extends from the UI, the main menu showing the main character diving headfirst into water, just plunging into the Collective Unconscious.

SPEAKER_1: He's the wielder of the wild card.

SPEAKER_1: He's the fool, just the one that's able to go through that journey, just plunging straight ahead, literally.

SPEAKER_1: And then this goes to even like Fuka's Theurgy ability, which we'll talk about in a minute, probably longer than a minute, but we'll get there, which heals or buffs the party in these bursts and like fountain spurts of water.

SPEAKER_1: And so like it evokes, you know, water being essential to life, but also like the water surface then being sort of the edge or balance between life and death and that like dividing line, right?

SPEAKER_1: And so there are lines in the game about water being a guiding force to the afterlife.

SPEAKER_1: You think of like river sticks and things like that.

SPEAKER_1: And, you know, so then it's like a guiding force to the afterlife, but also just generally like guiding you towards death, towards that transition, towards that point in the journey.

SPEAKER_1: The clock or I guess the clocks now no longer break during the transition to the dark room, which I'm not a fan of because now they just tick and it seems like it's midnight rather than like space time is getting ruptured and becoming this hour that shouldn't exist and is supposed to be imperceptible to most people.

SPEAKER_1: So like, it just seems like it's midnight rather than the dark hour, the special thing.

SPEAKER_1: Because that was the whole effect of the dark hour before like in this transition would be, oh, the clock strikes midnight and then they just get destroyed.

SPEAKER_1: And you're like, okay, what the fuck happened?

SPEAKER_1: And now it's just like it got late.

SPEAKER_1: So I think that's kind of a swing and a miss because otherwise the clocks look cool themselves.

SPEAKER_1: Like there's the analog, the digital, there's all these different clocks.

SPEAKER_1: But it's just like it's midnight, like, you know, so it's a little confusing.

SPEAKER_1: It doesn't like hammer home the point that the dark hour is something different.

SPEAKER_1: It's just like it's late at night.

SPEAKER_1: P Studio didn't change the absolutely wonderful rainbow eyesore aesthetic.

SPEAKER_1: That is the Haraba floors in Tartarus.

SPEAKER_1: These are like just rainbow sketched out acid trip section of floors.

SPEAKER_1: And so if you're playing on like high refresh rates and if you have motion blur turned on, it's probably even harder to look at than it was in the original games.

SPEAKER_1: And there's even a couple of lines that characters say about how disorienting it is to look at.

SPEAKER_1: I appreciated that they didn't change it.

SPEAKER_1: But on the same, like on the flip side, how hard it is to look at it.

SPEAKER_1: Like I can see somebody just being like getting there and be like, I literally can't see where I'm going.

SPEAKER_1: This is hard or impossible to see and navigate through.

SPEAKER_1: I might just stop here.

SPEAKER_1: Like this is actually a real physical barrier for me to get past this.

SPEAKER_1: Because it's really severe, especially compared to all the other sets of floors.

SPEAKER_1: It sticks out as like the rainbow nightmare floors.

SPEAKER_1: So you'll know it when you get there.

SPEAKER_1: There's no mistaking that set of floors.

SPEAKER_1: But like, yeah, like on the whole, the game looks great.

SPEAKER_1: Character models look great.

SPEAKER_1: Battle effects look great.

SPEAKER_1: I don't even need to say the UI.

SPEAKER_1: Like the UI is fucking fantastic.

SPEAKER_1: I'll talk a bit about this later, like in a general sense.

SPEAKER_1: But like, I'm worried that we're not going to see Persona 6 for such a long time because they're going to get hung up on trying to like innovate and make a great looking, flashy, smooth, fluid UI.

SPEAKER_1: So like they'll have the perfect idea for the game.

SPEAKER_1: They'll have the systems in place.

SPEAKER_1: They'll have the characters, narrative, everything.

SPEAKER_1: But they're stuck because they can't figure out how to make a cool looking UI.

SPEAKER_1: But yeah, the game looks fantastic, especially on PC if you can just max out all the settings and run it at a high frame rate.

SPEAKER_1: It looks unreal, especially whenever you use like theergy attacks and all the effects look great.

SPEAKER_1: So let's move into some game play and some narrative stuff now.

SPEAKER_1: So social links.

SPEAKER_1: So more characters in the world will just have ancillary dialogue that will lead to other social links.

SPEAKER_1: And so this makes it easy like easy to find the other social links like the unfortunate Gourmet King who's easier to track down because there were some social links that were kind of missable.

SPEAKER_1: And so it's basically like an improved way to run into every social link is what I would say.

SPEAKER_1: In addition, social links are available on more days.

SPEAKER_1: Sometimes this can be overwhelming, but it also allows for like a good bit of decision making on a day to day basis, I would say.

SPEAKER_1: But then there are some days where it's like, oh, like everybody wants to hang out, everybody's available.

SPEAKER_1: What do I do here?

SPEAKER_1: But like that's kind of that's a better decision than like I have nothing to do.

SPEAKER_1: I have to decide if I either want to go to bed or like waste time ranking up a stat I no longer need.

SPEAKER_1: So social links will no longer reverse if you ignore someone for too long.

SPEAKER_1: This is this is fine.

SPEAKER_1: I think it was similar in Portal or like it was very hard to reverse a social link.

SPEAKER_1: If not outright impossible, I can't remember.

SPEAKER_1: There's still a couple of forced reverses in the storylines of social links.

SPEAKER_1: And in those instances, it's kind of silly how quickly that the social link will reverse and then 180 back to normal, but it's fine.

SPEAKER_1: And it also is like kind of jarring because now that there are no longer gameplay reverses, it getting reversed is sort of like, well, what does that mean?

SPEAKER_1: The player might not understand the ramifications of the social link and the tarot reversing because they haven't experienced it in gameplay.

SPEAKER_1: But again, it's not that big of a deal.

SPEAKER_1: This is my problem is that I have these little just like nitpicky things all along the way and they don't even necessarily add up to anything.

SPEAKER_1: It's just things that I noticed.

SPEAKER_1: As we mentioned in the voice acting section, all social link rank up events are now voiced.

SPEAKER_1: This is just fantastic for presentation of the game.

SPEAKER_1: This wasn't the case in even Persona 5.

SPEAKER_1: I think that will be the standard going forward.

SPEAKER_1: It's very welcome.

SPEAKER_1: It makes the game feel much more alive.

SPEAKER_1: You get to know these characters a lot better, especially whenever the voice acting is of this quality.

SPEAKER_1: I watch anime with subtitles and hear it in the native language, but for games, for whatever reason, I always play with English voices.

SPEAKER_1: I'm not sure if I want to avoid information overload or it's just easier.

SPEAKER_1: In the case of the Persona games, they make it really easy to stick to that because the English voices are on the whole so well done.

SPEAKER_1: I would say that Reload is the high bar now for that, especially with the inclusion of all social rank up events now being voiced.

SPEAKER_1: It'll be hard to go back to silent social links.

SPEAKER_1: This also means that social links that were never voiced previously have voice acting for the first time.

SPEAKER_1: These are characters that we never heard before.

SPEAKER_1: So like Tanaka and Mutsuko, we get to hear them for the very first time, which is awesome.

SPEAKER_1: One that sticks out to me though is Kenji.

SPEAKER_1: So his voice actor gives a performance that sort of makes him sound like a full adult, like rather than the sort of naive high schooler that the original texts sort of made him out to be.

SPEAKER_1: On the one hand, this sort of dials down his creepiness by several notches, but it also lessens the impact that the end of his social link story has.

SPEAKER_1: And in my head, I'd like keep reminding myself that this wasn't like a full blown adult going through this, but a literal child because he didn't sound like, you know, a 16 year old or however old he's supposed to be.

SPEAKER_1: But the latter portion of his social link is also like changed ever so slightly.

SPEAKER_1: And this, like, does imply his naivete.

SPEAKER_1: And this is a much appreciated change because otherwise it's just sort of like this adult man going through some problems is the best non-spoiler way I can explain it.

SPEAKER_1: Just an adult man going through problems.

SPEAKER_1: Raise your hand.

SPEAKER_1: But the way that they...

SPEAKER_1: It's like such a minor change to the line that is spoken.

SPEAKER_1: And it's so minor in execution, but it like borders on genius the way it changes the way his social link gets framed from the original.

SPEAKER_1: And I think it's genius.

SPEAKER_1: I think it's so well done how that was handled because it's just such a small tweak of the line that the words themselves are basically the same.

SPEAKER_1: I wish I could just explain what it is, but then I'd have to explain the entire social link.

SPEAKER_1: So I'm not going to do that.

SPEAKER_1: But like it's a tweak of the basically the same words, but just tweaks the way that it comes across.

SPEAKER_1: And again, the voice acting helps this.

SPEAKER_1: And it completely does like a 180 on the way that it's presented from the original to reload.

SPEAKER_1: And you get a new perspective on this character, like the way that it's supposed to come across.

SPEAKER_1: Rather than him just kind of being a dipshit, you now have empathy for him.

SPEAKER_1: And I know those are two like polar opposite things, but like that's the magic of this like a little move that they managed to pull off.

SPEAKER_1: So another social link that had like a small adjustment was the start of Chihiro's social link.

SPEAKER_1: And again, is now far less creepy because the dialogue option needed to advance her social link is changed from the very forward and like out of the blue line, go out with me to we should hang out.

SPEAKER_1: It's just it's just better.

SPEAKER_1: It's just better because the line was it comes out of nowhere.

SPEAKER_1: You're just like talking to this girl.

SPEAKER_1: And then you're just like, go out with me, please go out with me.

SPEAKER_1: You don't know her.

SPEAKER_1: And it's like, oh, we should hang out like, you know, like a person says.

SPEAKER_1: So it's just yeah, this is way better.

SPEAKER_1: Another one is Otagiri Social Link.

SPEAKER_1: So they they changed his backstory and therefore this sort of adjusts his motivation.

SPEAKER_1: It seems like a move to have his personality make sense, but he's still kind of a hard character for me to empathize with and is also in my eyes, one of two social links that stick out as the most like say anything to get you to like them in Persona 3.

SPEAKER_1: Him and the unfortunate.

SPEAKER_1: I'm just going to call it keep calling it the unfortunate moon social link.

SPEAKER_1: The fortune social link removes the choice between the art club and the photography club and is now just the art club.

SPEAKER_1: This is like again a non issue because it was mostly superficial choice.

SPEAKER_1: The story doesn't change based on the choice.

SPEAKER_1: It's the same social link.

SPEAKER_1: And so now that rank up events are voiced, this would also just make it easier to only need to record one set of dialogue instead of having to record what would ostensibly be the same lines just changed for the other club.

SPEAKER_1: So they made the smart call and just decided to make it the art club instead of having to do two clubs for the same exact storyline, same exact dialogue, but just like swap in any time they'd mention art for photography and vice versa.

SPEAKER_1: And the unfortunate moon, Social Link.

SPEAKER_1: This is by far the worst one in the game.

SPEAKER_1: They adjust it, they try to make Nizomi less grating and also to introduce his brother and the cult a little earlier.

SPEAKER_1: And of course, if you haven't played the game and don't know the Social Link, that's like, oh, is it called?

SPEAKER_1: It's.

SPEAKER_1: It doesn't make a lot of sense.

SPEAKER_1: It's not a very good storyline.

SPEAKER_1: They try to now introduce some like plot threads of the Social Link earlier to make it seem like it comes out of absolutely nowhere.

SPEAKER_1: Because before it was sort of like the last three steps of the Social Link was whenever all of this dude's like actual issues come into light.

SPEAKER_1: They kind of it kind of works, but it's still not good or compelling and the character is still very annoying.

SPEAKER_1: So it's still unfortunately by far the worst Social Link.

SPEAKER_1: But yeah, it's still there.

SPEAKER_1: Like, I don't know what you could do with it other than like just scrapping it and making it a different Social Link.

SPEAKER_1: But I guess they stayed true to the originals in that sense.

SPEAKER_1: So Tanaka gets a conclusion at the very end of the game.

SPEAKER_1: And this changes a little bit to make it more related to Social Link.

SPEAKER_1: And again, this is just like a small tweak for the for the better.

SPEAKER_1: It makes it feel like you had an impact in the overall world, which I like.

SPEAKER_1: Another small detail.

SPEAKER_1: If you enter into a relationship with somebody, the stars that denote the Social Link change are now hearts, which is a cute little detail.

SPEAKER_1: But more importantly, you can finally get all the Social Links to max rank without entering into a relationship with everyone.

SPEAKER_1: This means that maxing all of them removes the forced harem nonsense and in doing so fixes probably the biggest flaw with the original Social Link system.

SPEAKER_1: Because the theme of the game, as we discussed, is finding out how to make the most of your time, the most of this one life that you've got.

SPEAKER_1: And so if you min-max the game and are following the game's mechanics to their logical conclusion, the game then tells you that making the most of your life means that you're just cheating on a bunch of high school girls.

SPEAKER_1: So it sort of flies in the face of like that poignant message to me.

SPEAKER_1: So that's finally, finally been rectified.

SPEAKER_1: And so as a result of this, there are now new social link max rank events for remaining friends with your friends, which is good.

SPEAKER_1: Can you believe that we're halfway through my notes?

SPEAKER_1: Halfway through and we haven't even gotten to combat yet.

SPEAKER_1: Isn't that something?

SPEAKER_1: Oh boy.

SPEAKER_1: Now you can maybe see why this took me so long, but this is actually not why this took me so long.

SPEAKER_1: So I've had these notes for months.

SPEAKER_1: The sad thing is I was ready to record in March, but the best laid plans of sundowning 30 year olds let's talk about Tartarus, because this is probably the biggest change in Reload is the dungeon crawling aspect.

SPEAKER_1: So Tartarus is the game's dungeon.

SPEAKER_1: It is where you will spend most of your time.

SPEAKER_1: It's the tower of 264 floors.

SPEAKER_1: It still has that same number.

SPEAKER_1: It is still a procedurally generated labyrinth, right?

SPEAKER_1: However, unlike in the originals, the tile sets that are procedurally generated are much more varied.

SPEAKER_1: It feels a bit less like going down the exact same hallways that you would in Persona 3 and 4 and even in Persona 5's Momento's dungeon.

SPEAKER_1: But at the same time, these tile sets still are limited and especially in the late game, will start to blend together after a while.

SPEAKER_1: But in Reload, after a story portion opens up the next segment of Tartarus, the environment changes.

SPEAKER_1: And in the original, this was basically just a palette swap.

SPEAKER_1: So the same tile sets were used.

SPEAKER_1: They were just a different color basically, like for all intents and purposes.

SPEAKER_1: Maybe a little darker, you know, then you get to the rainbow floors.

SPEAKER_1: But the the hallways and the boxes you were moving through were basically shaped the same.

SPEAKER_1: Here they have a completely different look and feel and feel like a different dungeon each set of floors.

SPEAKER_1: So, for example, the first set of floors mimic the some of the tiles from the original with like these raised staircases that sort of go up to nowhere.

SPEAKER_1: And it's like this very blue and dark and shadowy and actually feels quite claustrophobic.

SPEAKER_1: And it's sometimes kind of hard to control the camera, especially if you're running and using the sprint, which is now function.

SPEAKER_1: But the second set, after you leave that area, is markedly different.

SPEAKER_1: So there's no more stairs that don't go anywhere.

SPEAKER_1: Everything's now purple.

SPEAKER_1: And they're like these faces on the walls, and the walls are a lot more cave like, but also have like this organic looking I don't want to say like HR Giger, because it's not like techno like his work, but imagine that like sort of like fleshy blended with a cave aesthetic is how that second set looks.

SPEAKER_1: So completely different from the first set, which was like trying to be almost like a haunted, haunted school kind of thing.

SPEAKER_1: Haunted castle school, right?

SPEAKER_1: So very different, very different tilesets, very different aesthetic.

SPEAKER_1: Makes you feel like you're in a completely different place.

SPEAKER_1: Like hallway structures, longer hallways, all these kinds of different things.

SPEAKER_1: They feel like different dungeons.

SPEAKER_1: So Tartarus, like it's 264 floors.

SPEAKER_1: It still like is meant to be a grueling climb, right?

SPEAKER_1: It's meant to be the part of the Greek underworld where souls are tortured for all eternity.

SPEAKER_1: You know, it's not gonna be sunshine and rainbows except for the rainbow floor.

SPEAKER_1: It's just not gonna let go.

SPEAKER_1: But like it's not a trek through the same like four or five rooms that are just slightly rearranged over and over.

SPEAKER_1: So it's a lot better.

SPEAKER_1: I still feel like Persona 5 players only are not going to enjoy the dungeon crawling aspect as much because Persona 5 feels less like a dungeon crawler because of the handcrafted nature of its individual dungeons.

SPEAKER_1: Here, there's no, you know, grappling hook.

SPEAKER_1: There's no sneaking.

SPEAKER_1: It's just straightforward, clearing out hallways, dungeon crawling.

SPEAKER_1: It is improved a lot from the original.

SPEAKER_1: There are reasons to explore, you know, the nooks and crannies, whereas in Persona 3, you were just kind of like just looking for the staircase to the next floor for the most part.

SPEAKER_1: Here, there are more reasons to search around, and we'll get to some of those in a bit.

SPEAKER_1: But it is not like the tailor made Persona 5 dungeons where you're like puzzle solving.

SPEAKER_1: And, you know, there are hard story stops for specific things.

SPEAKER_1: It's a different experience, right?

SPEAKER_1: This is like dungeon, dungeon, dungeon crawling, you know?

SPEAKER_1: This is like zone out combat dungeon shit.

SPEAKER_1: And one other thing I want to mention is so if a party member dies in combat, but you finish the encounter and you don't get wiped out with a game over, the party members that died will be revived with one HP rather than remaining dead on the ground where you left them, which was the case in previous versions.

SPEAKER_1: So Elizabeth will still give you a range of floors whenever there's a missing person in Tartarus.

SPEAKER_1: But whenever you get to that floor range, Fuca will basically just tell you what floor that they're on.

SPEAKER_1: And so this makes overshooting floors via the floor teleporter a lot less likely happen, which could happen sometimes.

SPEAKER_1: Yeah, you didn't want to go through the range of floors because the teleporter was not specific.

SPEAKER_1: It would just give you a range of floors also.

SPEAKER_1: And that range of floors didn't always line up with the range that Elizabeth gave you.

SPEAKER_1: So you were just kind of hunting through extra floors that you didn't really need to.

SPEAKER_1: Now Fuca will be like, oh, yeah, they're on floor 84.

SPEAKER_1: And you're like, cool.

SPEAKER_1: We can just blast through to get to that floor.

SPEAKER_1: And when you find that missing person, you can now have one of your standby party members who is not in your active party escort them back to the entrance.

SPEAKER_1: So now you no longer have to take the mandatory teleport back to the entrance and then go back to whatever it is you were doing.

SPEAKER_1: So another big quality of life improvement.

SPEAKER_1: You can just keep dungeon blasting basically.

SPEAKER_1: The fortune teller at the nightclub now has a purpose other than giving you like incredibly vague hints about the narrative with her cards.

SPEAKER_1: You can now purchase certain buffs for that specific night's Tartarus expedition, such as increased chance of rare shadow spawns or increased theurgy gauge.

SPEAKER_1: And again, we'll be getting to theurgy in a bit.

SPEAKER_1: You just have to remember to leave the dorm and go to the club and then go back to the dorm on Tartarus nights to make use of this, because I forgot that this was a thing like 70% of the time.

SPEAKER_1: And since I finished Tartarus sections, like in one night, basically, I didn't make as much use of this as I could have, but it's there.

SPEAKER_1: So monad changes.

SPEAKER_1: This is a big one.

SPEAKER_1: So previously, if you defeated the Reaper for Elizabeth's request, a new door would open at the entrance to Tartarus.

SPEAKER_1: And this was the monad dungeon.

SPEAKER_1: And it was a series of 10 floors of high level enemies.

SPEAKER_1: And then if you reached the top of that, you got to fight Elizabeth.

SPEAKER_1: And you would have to get to the top in one run.

SPEAKER_1: And so if you'd go back or you died or whatever, your progress through those floors would reset.

SPEAKER_1: You always had to go through all 10 each time.

SPEAKER_1: In Reload, the Monad Dungeon is not a thing.

SPEAKER_1: Instead, there are Monad Doors and Monad Passages.

SPEAKER_1: It's a little it's a little confusing the way they set this up.

SPEAKER_1: But once you play it, it makes sense.

SPEAKER_1: But like their terminology here is is kind of whacked.

SPEAKER_1: So Monad Doors have a random chance of appearing on a floor and they just have like a mini boss fight.

SPEAKER_1: So you beat that boss and you can get some gems and weapon materials.

SPEAKER_1: But if you leave the door and go to a different floor or just like ignore the door entirely and go to a different floor or go back to the entrance, that door disappears and you don't get to fight that boss and get the rewards.

SPEAKER_1: Monad Passages are different, but the idea is basically the same thing.

SPEAKER_1: So passages occur on specific floors after boss fights whenever a section of Tartarus has been completed.

SPEAKER_1: The passages, rather than just having one boss fight or a series of boss fights, you can leave and regroup and your progress through the passage counts still.

SPEAKER_1: And now, instead of going through the Monad dungeon, all those ten floors to fight Elizabeth, I think you only need to kill the Reaper and then complete the very last Monad passage.

SPEAKER_1: But I'm not sure if you need to complete all the Monad passages in order to get to that last one.

SPEAKER_1: So you might need to do all them anyway.

SPEAKER_1: There's not that many.

SPEAKER_1: These are fine from a gameplay perspective.

SPEAKER_1: Eventually, if you go into like every Monad door that you encounter, you're going to see all the bosses that you've already seen, which can trivialize things a bit because you already know their weaknesses.

SPEAKER_1: And that's sort of the tricky thing with these bosses is that they have a wide range of weaknesses.

SPEAKER_1: They're more meant to be like puzzle fights than anything else.

SPEAKER_1: And once you know the puzzle, you can just sort of nuke them immediately.

SPEAKER_1: Another issue, though, is that they're meant to be like these big chunks of experience points.

SPEAKER_1: And early in the game, they are.

SPEAKER_1: But by the late game, it doesn't scale as well.

SPEAKER_1: And they're generally not worth your time unless you get lucky and get one that's just weak to physical attacks, because then you could just sort of wail on it for like two seconds and then you're done.

SPEAKER_1: Another odd wrinkle I found that's related to this is that it was actually difficult to grind, especially in the late game, because now that there's no monad dungeon and has been replaced by these boss fights, the monad dungeon previously in the older games had a ton of high level enemies and they gave a shit ton of experience.

SPEAKER_1: And so that's being replaced by these doors, but at higher levels, the boss fights don't give like a scaling number of experience the same way that the monad dungeon did in the earlier games.

SPEAKER_1: So I was sort of like scrounging around for the card that lets you fuse five levels higher than you, just so I could finish like my final fusions and fuse messiah to get the trophy, like at the end of the game.

SPEAKER_1: And we'll talk about card effects in a second.

SPEAKER_1: Also, there's a lot we still got to get through.

SPEAKER_1: Bear with me.

SPEAKER_1: So speaking of the cards, shuffle time is back.

SPEAKER_1: It's been changed to the pick a card version.

SPEAKER_1: And this system is similar to the one in Persona 4, but it's not exactly the same.

SPEAKER_1: So unlike Persona 4, there's no sweet bonus for being able to grab all the cards after a single battle.

SPEAKER_1: In one shuffle time, you can only pick one card.

SPEAKER_1: Card effects themselves have changed slightly.

SPEAKER_1: Wands still give experience, increase from the battle you just finished.

SPEAKER_1: Cups restore health, but swords no longer give weapons.

SPEAKER_1: They give skill cards instead.

SPEAKER_1: And that's a change for the economy, which again, again, we'll get to.

SPEAKER_1: I have a lot to say about the in-game economy.

SPEAKER_1: So as you progress through Tartarus and the story, you will unlock major Arcana cards that will then show up in shuffle time.

SPEAKER_1: And selecting one of these will add its effects to your current knight in Tartarus.

SPEAKER_1: So for example, the Fool increases XP from every battle until you leave for the night.

SPEAKER_1: And so this gives each knight in Tartarus a kind of rogue-like feel to it, especially in the mid to late game where you're like, you have all these cards that can be added, but you have a limited number of slots that you can add them to.

SPEAKER_1: So let's like say you have, I don't know, I don't remember the numbers, you know.

SPEAKER_1: So let's say you have six available cards, but you only have three slots.

SPEAKER_1: I don't think that's correct, but like that's, there's a decision to make, right?

SPEAKER_1: So you might want a certain card to appear, but it's the luck of the draw really, and you might not see it, or you're just like going through battles and you're just like, you're waiting for that card to pop up.

SPEAKER_1: Early on, when you have like a few cards, chances are you're going to like see all the cards that you have access to, and you'll see them probably pretty quick.

SPEAKER_1: And so there's a limited number of major Arcana cards that you can hold on a single night.

SPEAKER_1: And once you've hit that limit, whatever it is, and that limit does increase as the game progresses, you trigger Arcana Burst.

SPEAKER_1: In P-Studio, it seems like can never decide what they want to use this term for.

SPEAKER_1: Previously, Arcana Burst was the name for bonus experience from Social Links that was used during Persona Fusion.

SPEAKER_1: And now it ranks up all the minor Arcana cards.

SPEAKER_1: So your wands, cups and swords for the rest of the run.

SPEAKER_1: And then you also get an additional shuffle time whenever you initiate the burst.

SPEAKER_1: So overall, this is I would say a big improvement to the dungeon crawling experience because the older shuffle time in Persona 3 would get old really fast because you would basically just want to pick the experience card.

SPEAKER_1: And then after that, like the weapon card for weapons to sell, which we'll get to again.

SPEAKER_1: And just having the ability to pick whatever card you want is a lot better than just doing the merry-go-round card, shenanigans, shit from the originals or whatever.

SPEAKER_1: Is it three card Monty?

SPEAKER_1: Whatever, like pick a card, any card sort of thing.

SPEAKER_1: It's like that got old really fast.

SPEAKER_1: So this is a much better system.

SPEAKER_1: And like the slight roguelike elements are are nice, even if you know, there's not like a ton of choice in the late game.

SPEAKER_1: Your choices increase.

SPEAKER_1: So I think it's like this version of Shuffle Time is probably one that they can carry forward.

SPEAKER_1: I know they didn't use Shuffle Time in any capacity in Persona 5, but if they wanted to, this would be a version to definitely iterate on.

SPEAKER_1: I would say it's probably the best version we've seen yet.

SPEAKER_1: Well, we finally made it to combat and only took two hours of recording time, but here we are.

SPEAKER_1: So I was fully bracing myself for Reload to feel exactly like Persona 5 in combat, but it mostly keeps the battle system of portable.

SPEAKER_1: And so what does that mean?

SPEAKER_1: That means direct party control and the knockdown system from Persona 4.

SPEAKER_1: Hit a weakness or hit a crit, the enemy gets knocked down, hit them again, and there's a chance that they'll become dizzy and they skip their turn.

SPEAKER_1: That's basically Persona 4's battle system.

SPEAKER_1: One change, though, is that they semi-swapped how freeze and shock status works.

SPEAKER_1: So before freeze would have a higher chance of allowing crits, and shock would guarantee crits and then persist until the enemy's next turn.

SPEAKER_1: But now freeze guarantees one crit, just one, and shock has a higher chance of crit, but skips the enemy's next turn.

SPEAKER_1: And that might have been jumbled, but I think the reason that they did this is to avoid crit farming with skills like thunder rain and also to improve Mitsuru's kit, which I have issues with.

SPEAKER_1: She was always good.

SPEAKER_1: The Maren, Karen memes are like played out and lame and are only for people that didn't know about weakness scanning in the original release.

SPEAKER_1: So the way the system worked when you didn't have direct party control in the original Persona 3 was that party members were on autopilot.

SPEAKER_1: They would do what they wanted to do with you had specific tactics, though.

SPEAKER_1: You could tell them to focus on healing, focus on getting weakness, focus on damage.

SPEAKER_1: I forget what the specific ones are, but you get my point.

SPEAKER_1: There's like just specific general profiles that you would give them.

SPEAKER_1: And Mitsuru would get shit for using her charm skill on things that would never land and things that would always be immune to charm.

SPEAKER_1: But if you scan for enemy weaknesses, that then informs your party of what weaknesses are.

SPEAKER_1: And then they will try to hit those weaknesses.

SPEAKER_1: So if you properly scan, she stops using Marenkaren.

SPEAKER_1: She does that because she doesn't know what to hit.

SPEAKER_1: And that's her signature skill.

SPEAKER_1: So she uses it.

SPEAKER_1: So what I'm trying to say is this is a skill issue, if I can make that clear.

SPEAKER_1: But anyway, you put concentrate plus a tier three spell, that's always going to be good.

SPEAKER_1: And now she has freeze amp plus freeze boost.

SPEAKER_1: I'm sorry, freeze boost plus ice amp.

SPEAKER_1: That's a lot of damage.

SPEAKER_1: Before we even get into her theurgy, which we're coming up.

SPEAKER_1: It's getting close.

SPEAKER_1: It's getting close.

SPEAKER_1: But yes, but with thunder rain, you could just throw thunder rain at somebody and they'd be shocked.

SPEAKER_1: And then you could just whale critical hits on them to infinity.

SPEAKER_1: So I think they wanted to curb that.

SPEAKER_1: I think that's why they swapped shock and freeze.

SPEAKER_1: But it seems a little counterintuitive to me.

SPEAKER_1: But on the flip side, it makes freeze kind of ridiculous because you guarantee a crit.

SPEAKER_1: Like it's guaranteed to hit.

SPEAKER_1: Three versions of physical attacks are still here, so you still have your slash, pierce and strike.

SPEAKER_1: You also now manually select party member skills when they level up.

SPEAKER_1: This kind of feels unnecessary because most of the selections are fairly obvious.

SPEAKER_1: Like you're gonna replace Garu with Garula, you know.

SPEAKER_1: Everybody knows that, right?

SPEAKER_1: I'm talking, I'm talking to well-educated people here.

SPEAKER_1: You all know that, right?

SPEAKER_1: But there are like some changes to each member's kit.

SPEAKER_1: So like, I guess, I guess the freedom is nice to have.

SPEAKER_1: But on the whole, you're just sort of upgrading skills and replacing the lower tiered ones.

SPEAKER_1: And then also replacing AoE skills with, or I'm sorry, replacing single target skills with AoE skills.

SPEAKER_1: So it kind of just works itself out.

SPEAKER_1: It's now way easier to stack passives and make skills like completely broken.

SPEAKER_1: And this is on like personas because you now have manual skill inheritance, which you didn't in the original or in portable.

SPEAKER_1: So you can do shit like God Hand with strike boost plus strike amp plus app pupil to give it crit chance increase.

SPEAKER_1: Shit like that can get out of hand upon kind of intended pretty quickly.

SPEAKER_1: Like who's the, is it Chiyo is the persona?

SPEAKER_1: You can, you can, yeah, you can do stupid stuff with some personas.

SPEAKER_1: The way that you can stack passives that they've like sort of started on this trend is you can just pump out ridiculous damage.

SPEAKER_1: And finally, here we are.

SPEAKER_1: So the new mechanic that did not exist in any version previous is Theergy.

SPEAKER_1: These are gauge based abilities that each party member, including Fuka has.

SPEAKER_1: And the Theergy gauge for each character increases whenever they perform any action during their turn.

SPEAKER_1: But each character has like a specific condition that will increase their gauge faster.

SPEAKER_1: So, for example, Yukari goes up faster when she heals.

SPEAKER_1: Akihiko goes up faster from using strike attacks.

SPEAKER_1: To put it bluntly, these are basically limit breaks from Final Fantasy.

SPEAKER_1: In fact, they even gave Mitsuru Shiva's Diamond Dust.

SPEAKER_1: It's pretty blatant because it's again called Diamond Dust.

SPEAKER_1: And she does the snap and everything.

SPEAKER_1: So it's it's it's Diamond Dust.

SPEAKER_1: And for the third time in a row, Atlas changed how they wanted Fusion Spells to work in an attempt to have them not completely break the game.

SPEAKER_1: So the protagonist's theology consists of Fusion Spells that were in the previous versions of Persona 3.

SPEAKER_1: And in order to understand how that works now, we need to talk about how it worked previously.

SPEAKER_1: In the original Persona 3, Fusion Spells were unlocked by using the correct Personas back to back on the same turn, and they were just broken.

SPEAKER_1: Like the good ones, they were just flat out broken.

SPEAKER_1: They were really good.

SPEAKER_1: In Persona 3 Portable, they attempted to scale this back by turning Fusion Spells into consumable items that could be purchased at the antique shop with gems.

SPEAKER_1: And so the broken ones had a really high cost and you needed to grind out.

SPEAKER_1: And in order to get the best one, which is Armageddon, you basically had to do these Vision Quests, which is like side fights, challenge fights basically, in order to get the like number of currency quickly enough.

SPEAKER_1: In Reload, you unlock new Theorgy Fusion Spells for the protagonists whenever the corresponding personas have been registered to the compendium.

SPEAKER_1: So you basically get Cadenza from free, because you'll probably already have those two personas, and then you go from there.

SPEAKER_1: So you like start out with a 50% party heal, and then you go from there, you got to start fusing and collecting personas.

SPEAKER_1: They made the Jack Brothers Fusion Spell like actually useful and probably too useful.

SPEAKER_1: So in previous versions, it had a chance to knock down all enemies and it never landed.

SPEAKER_1: It just never landed.

SPEAKER_1: In Reload, it does medium almighty damage with a chance to knock down all enemies.

SPEAKER_1: And so the almighty damage is guaranteed to hit.

SPEAKER_1: And in my experience, it was rare that the down status didn't go through.

SPEAKER_1: So you're doing medium almighty, which is a good chunk of damage, and you're knocking in most cases, the whole enemy squad down.

SPEAKER_1: It's very good and is pretty much the only main character of Theorgy you need.

SPEAKER_1: They just get more stupid from there, basically.

SPEAKER_1: So Theorgy attacks on the whole, not just the fusion ones.

SPEAKER_1: They never miss.

SPEAKER_1: They ignore affinity, meaning they won't get resisted, nulled or reflected.

SPEAKER_1: And they also still count against affinity if it applies.

SPEAKER_1: So let's say you use Akihiko's Theorgy against an enemy that's weak to lightning, it will still down that enemy.

SPEAKER_1: To go along with that, they're also affected by status conditions.

SPEAKER_1: So if you lower the enemy's defense and or buff your attack, the Theorgy will do more damage.

SPEAKER_1: Physical Theorgy can also crit with all the rules and bonuses that apply to crits functioning for those attacks.

SPEAKER_1: Now, you might be thinking, well, that sounds pretty damn good.

SPEAKER_1: And you'd be right.

SPEAKER_1: Their one weakness is that they can't be activated if the character has a status effect on them.

SPEAKER_1: It doesn't matter what it is, charm, even poison.

SPEAKER_1: If they have something that can be cleansed, they cannot use Theorgy.

SPEAKER_1: So Fuca has her Theorgy as well.

SPEAKER_1: And this takes the place of her randomly providing buffs to the party, which never happened when you wanted it to.

SPEAKER_1: This places strategy back into the player's hands and also makes the navigator role feel like more of an active participant in battle and with her teammates rather than just somebody that's just like constantly yapping at you.

SPEAKER_1: So her Theorgy will either give the whole party Lustre candy or Heat Riser, depending on which side of SMT you come from because they're the same thing.

SPEAKER_1: And that means that attack and defense and evasion go up for the whole party.

SPEAKER_1: She can either do that or heal the whole party or restore the party's SP.

SPEAKER_1: I only got the SP restore to trigger once and it's almost always Heat Riser that triggers.

SPEAKER_1: Something weird that I experienced and I'm not sure if it's a bug or if it's just the conditions for this are weird, but I earned the achievement for use all of your teammates' Theorgy abilities before I had everyone have their persona evolution and access their second Theorgy, specifically Aegis.

SPEAKER_1: So I had used everyone else's like, you know, way before by the time she got Athena in her second Theorgy.

SPEAKER_1: And so I'm not sure if they just don't consider Aegis' abilities Theorgy, even though it's the same gauge and functions the same way, because hers is technically Orgea mode from the original games.

SPEAKER_1: But her second ability is very similar to everyone else's Theorgy attacks, and that it's a strong single targeted attack.

SPEAKER_1: So I don't know what the deal is there.

SPEAKER_1: It was just like a weird quirk.

SPEAKER_1: Like by the time you get her persona evolution, there's still plenty of time for you to use that second Theorgy.

SPEAKER_1: Like otherwise, why would you even get it?

SPEAKER_1: So if this was to make sure that you can't miss the achievement, you can already miss it by completely refusing to use party members.

SPEAKER_1: So I'm not sure what happened here, but I just want to point it out.

SPEAKER_1: In my head, it's like another way that like it feels like, I guess, is sort of like placed on the side.

SPEAKER_1: But again, I don't know if this is just like a bug or or what.

SPEAKER_1: But so Theorgy as a concept to me is fine.

SPEAKER_1: I don't have an issue with like ultimate limit break like attacks.

SPEAKER_1: I really like the Magatsuhi abilities in SMT5, but I like how that was handled there a lot better.

SPEAKER_1: So in SMT5, the Nahobino, the protagonist, and your party of demons had a shared gauge.

SPEAKER_1: And depending on the demon's race or whatever you had equipped to the protagonist, the ability differs.

SPEAKER_1: And I think the one that you like start out with is the party gets guaranteed criticals for a turn or like however many press turns you have whenever you activate it.

SPEAKER_1: The difference between the Magatsuhi attacks and Theorgy is that in SMT5, the enemy can use Magatsuhi too.

SPEAKER_1: And so, like I said in the first show however many months ago now, that's what I find is so great about SMT games and that's Persona's lineage.

SPEAKER_1: So anything you can do, they can do.

SPEAKER_1: The only disappointing thing in SMT5 that's a little disappointing is I think the enemy can only use that guaranteed critical one.

SPEAKER_1: But even so, it's still something that you need to like be ready to face because it's an ability the enemy is in their repertoire that you also have access to.

SPEAKER_1: It's that mirrored chest like feel that I really like.

SPEAKER_1: We'll see what happens with SMT5 Vengeance or SMT Vengeance.

SPEAKER_1: However, you're supposed to say the re-release of that game if they change how Magatsuhi works.

SPEAKER_1: Because, would you believe it or not, at the time of recording this, that game's out in a week.

SPEAKER_1: Holy fuck.

SPEAKER_1: I don't know what happened.

SPEAKER_1: In Reload, the enemy can't use theurgies.

SPEAKER_1: And thematically, it makes sense that they can't, because theurgy is explained as this surge of strong emotion like psychological adrenaline.

SPEAKER_1: And so it thematically fits that shadows, which are the hidden parts of the self, can't access it.

SPEAKER_1: There is one instance of an enemy being able to use theurgy.

SPEAKER_1: It happens once.

SPEAKER_1: And when it happens, it also thematically makes sense.

SPEAKER_1: And when it does, I felt such a disappointment because I realized that that's what I didn't like about the theurgy system.

SPEAKER_1: The fact that it's so one-sided.

SPEAKER_1: You can just completely blast enemies with these straight up nukes with frequency.

SPEAKER_1: And when that happened, I knew I wouldn't see another enemy theurgy in the rest of the game.

SPEAKER_1: Then you get into the fact that theurgy charges probably way too quickly, that it's easy to just sort of like turtle up and defend and heal and wait for theurgies to charge.

SPEAKER_1: And then you get to unleash these unblockable, unmissable, high damage skills that are then affected by damage modifiers.

SPEAKER_1: Then throw in the fact that you can go to the fortune teller, pay like 5,000 yen, and then have your theurgy charge even faster for that night.

SPEAKER_1: It gets a little ridiculous.

SPEAKER_1: I think I would have less of an issue with this system if it was nerfed just a little, just a little bit.

SPEAKER_1: Have it recharge slower, have it play by affinity rules.

SPEAKER_1: If an enemy is weak to that element, it'll be weak to that element.

SPEAKER_1: If they resist it, the attack can't go through.

SPEAKER_1: Let's play by some rules here.

SPEAKER_1: The fact that these are unmissable and unblockable is pretty nuts.

SPEAKER_1: Then the fact that they already do heavy and severe levels of damage and are completely unblockable, then you can just throw in fucking concentrate and heat riser buffs on them.

SPEAKER_1: They do shit tons of damage.

SPEAKER_1: It feels like they want to avoid a situation like in Royal where Baton Pass was like completely busted and broke the game.

SPEAKER_1: So they changed how Baton Pass works for reload, but then they added another system entirely that changes the push-pull dynamic of combat anyway.

SPEAKER_1: So Baton Pass is now called Shift and it functions largely the same as in Persona 5, where if you crit or hit an enemy weakness, you can then pass over to another party member.

SPEAKER_1: The difference here is that the party member on the receiving end of the shift does not receive an attack boost.

SPEAKER_1: Shift can essentially act as an additional turn out of the normal turn order and can allow someone to act twice if their turn would have been next.

SPEAKER_1: So you can kind of play with this and you have to sort of be paying attention because in Persona there is no visible turn order.

SPEAKER_1: There are some skills that interact with Shift and will restore some of the functionality from Royal, but they require investment in the form of Persona skill slots rather than passives obtained elsewhere.

SPEAKER_1: So Shift is not as broken as the Taunt Pass was where you would just sort of keep passing to your teammates and each pass would increase the damage of each subsequent attack.

SPEAKER_1: Here, since if you wanted to do that, you would need to invest in specific traits and perks.

SPEAKER_1: So, on specific personas, and then you'd be losing out on other persona abilities.

SPEAKER_1: So, I think it's fine.

SPEAKER_1: One thing that came out of nowhere for me, they gave the Hanged Man boss, as well as another boss that I won't mention for spoiler reasons, they gave them fucking Dragon Eye.

SPEAKER_1: They called it something else.

SPEAKER_1: I don't remember what they called it, but they gave it fucking Dragon Eye.

SPEAKER_1: And the fight almost turned into a Mott from Nocturne.

SPEAKER_1: If you know, you know.

SPEAKER_1: So, basically, it's an ability that grants more turns when used.

SPEAKER_1: In the original release of SMT Nocturne, there was a boss, Mott, who's a demon in Persona in the games you might recognize, that had Dragon Eye, and it would use Dragon Eye into Dragon Eye and keep giving itself turns until it would kill you.

SPEAKER_1: It would keep using attacks in Dragon Eye until you were dead and you didn't get to play the game.

SPEAKER_1: It was down to dumb luck, whether it would just do this cycle and kill you, because there was just a chance that you would never get to do anything.

SPEAKER_1: It would just kill you because it would keep giving itself turns.

SPEAKER_1: They fixed this in the remaster and other versions of Dragon Eye in later entries kind of ensure that it can't be used more than once per cycle and it can't be used back to back like that.

SPEAKER_1: Here, the Hanged Man boss, and at least on hard difficulty, which is what I was playing on, and probably Merciless, which is a step up, it can use its version of Dragon Eye in the same set of actions.

SPEAKER_1: And so since this is basically press turn system, if it hits a crit, it gets an additional turn.

SPEAKER_1: Thankfully on my run, it didn't get out of hands, but there's a good chance that that fight can get absolutely dumb if you get unlucky because it also has Dekunda, which can cleanse buffs, debuffs on itself.

SPEAKER_1: And so the fact that it can just like, nope, I don't have any debuffs.

SPEAKER_1: I'm going to give myself more turns.

SPEAKER_1: Here we go.

SPEAKER_1: It really came out of nowhere.

SPEAKER_1: I was not expecting a persona boss to have Dragon Eye at all.

SPEAKER_1: So I just mentioned difficulty.

SPEAKER_1: And now that I'm going to be talking about the game economy because I have a lot to say about this because this is actually dramatically changes how the game is played.

SPEAKER_1: But I do want to stress that this, I don't know how much of this is tied to difficulty.

SPEAKER_1: So you have to keep in mind that this is, this game economy discussion is all under the pretext of me playing the game on hard.

SPEAKER_1: So I don't know how this changes depending on difficulty.

SPEAKER_1: So modern persona and SMT games are mostly about managing resources.

SPEAKER_1: Persona in particular is about managing your resources in combination with managing your time and time slots themselves are a resource.

SPEAKER_1: Persona 3 had these constraints and also had a fatigue system in place.

SPEAKER_1: While dungeon crawling, you and your party members would get tired.

SPEAKER_1: If they got too tired, they might even leave mid battle.

SPEAKER_1: And if they would get more tired than that, they might even leave the dungeon for the night.

SPEAKER_1: Being tired also meant that they were more susceptible to critical hits and status ailments.

SPEAKER_1: And when you left Tartarus for the night, you would always be tired the next day.

SPEAKER_1: This was a way to limit dungeon progress as well as influence other game mechanics, including your time management.

SPEAKER_1: So you could relieve fatigue by going to bed early for the night and not engaging in any other activities, but that would be at the cost of not being able to do anything else.

SPEAKER_1: You had a chance of relieving fatigue by literally relieving yourself in the bathroom.

SPEAKER_1: There were energy drinks.

SPEAKER_1: You can go to the Weirdo Holistic Shop, but there was also a chance that your fatigue could progress into sickness, where you develop a cold if you didn't manage your tired status.

SPEAKER_1: On top of fatigue, you would also need to gauge your SP, your spirit points, your resource for magic, which is recovered via semi-uncommon items and also via the clock at the base of Tartarus for straight up cash.

SPEAKER_1: The price depending on how low everyone's health and SP was, and also the number of times you used the clock, with it incrementally raising its price for each use.

SPEAKER_1: In portable, while fatigue still existed, it was virtually impossible to lower it while in the dungeon.

SPEAKER_1: And in fact, might as well have been a removed mechanic because it never happened to me.

SPEAKER_1: Instead, you would always just be tired the next day, like in the original release.

SPEAKER_1: Here, the limiting factor for dungeon crawling is SP management and the clock function the same.

SPEAKER_1: So then, the limiting factor is actually money rather than SP.

SPEAKER_1: And the issue and why in Portable, in particular, you can clear each block of Tartarus in one night, is money is not an issue, like just in general, ever.

SPEAKER_1: You will always have enough money to heal at the clock and for all the fusions you could ever possibly need to do.

SPEAKER_1: Like, you are going to be so flush with cash because enemies drop money, you can receive extra money from selecting the coin card and shuffle time.

SPEAKER_1: And most importantly, you can sell the insane amount of equipment drops.

SPEAKER_1: And in most cases, you shouldn't ever select coins in shuffle time because you will always get more money from selling the weapons that you get via the sword card.

SPEAKER_1: You get weapons from sword cards, weapons from weapons and gear from chests.

SPEAKER_1: Like you're drowning gear in that game and you'll get sick of selling it.

SPEAKER_1: Like money is so not a problem in Portable.

SPEAKER_1: So Reload seeks to fix the in-game economy.

SPEAKER_1: The clock still exists and still heals your team to full HP SP.

SPEAKER_1: However, it no longer takes cash.

SPEAKER_1: It uses a new item called Twilight Fragments, and these are found semi infrequently in Tartarus.

SPEAKER_1: Some are in the overworld during daily activities, and these are like find once only.

SPEAKER_1: But most of them you're going to get from Elizabeth, either through completing requests or as rewards for advancing social links.

SPEAKER_1: Basically, every time you talk to Elizabeth, she's going to hand you some of these.

SPEAKER_1: It takes seven Twilight Fragments to heal.

SPEAKER_1: That number doesn't change, but I don't know if the number changes based on difficulty.

SPEAKER_1: I didn't feel like testing it.

SPEAKER_1: You can also find clocks randomly in the dungeon if you desperately need a full heal and are willing to spend the fragments in the moment.

SPEAKER_1: But here's the interesting thing.

SPEAKER_1: The clock isn't the only place you can use those fragments because throughout Tartarus there are chests that can only be opened with Twilight Fragments between one to three of them.

SPEAKER_1: And so since I can't pass up loot, I can't resist going for the chests.

SPEAKER_1: There are also locked chests after every Tartarus boss encounter.

SPEAKER_1: And items in these range from gear to SP items and gems.

SPEAKER_1: So if you can stick it out and not use the clock, you can use those fragments on potentially SP items for when you might really need them.

SPEAKER_1: So you can have loot that will help you in the long run or spend it on a heal that you need now.

SPEAKER_1: This is the balance that is meant to replace the fatigue system.

SPEAKER_1: For the most part, I think this works.

SPEAKER_1: Again, on hard difficulty, managing SP was a task on its own in the early game.

SPEAKER_1: In my head, I was still trying to complete each Tartarus section in one night because that's how I was used to playing Persona 3.

SPEAKER_1: And early on, there were a couple of instances where I just couldn't do that.

SPEAKER_1: I just didn't have the resources.

SPEAKER_1: I couldn't fully heal or I couldn't keep going without just getting wiped out.

SPEAKER_1: It's that risk reward that makes dungeon crawling gameplay interesting.

SPEAKER_1: It's can you keep pushing forward?

SPEAKER_1: Or do you have to hang back and regroup?

SPEAKER_1: That is the that kind of push pull that that is fun.

SPEAKER_1: It's that friction that's fun.

SPEAKER_1: So on the whole, I think the Twilight Fragment system works.

SPEAKER_1: I think the way that you acquire them is a little goofy, because, like I said, basically, each time you talk to Elizabeth, she's like, oh, hey, here's some more of these.

SPEAKER_1: But you pretty much need and you did work for them.

SPEAKER_1: You like advance your social links or whatever.

SPEAKER_1: But it's just kind of like, oh, the game knows you need your cookies.

SPEAKER_1: So here's your cookies.

SPEAKER_1: So I think I'm not sure what the correct solution would be in order to, you know, like how a player should be given Twilight Fragments and in what increments, but it just felt a little silly to be like, oh, like just trying to see what requests Elizabeth had and her being like, oh, hey, here's some more things that you need.

SPEAKER_1: Here's your SP items, basically.

SPEAKER_1: So shop changes are pretty significant.

SPEAKER_1: So the antique shop will now sell like cards like Arms Master and Spell Master.

SPEAKER_1: So you now no longer have to farm them off of high level Persona heart items.

SPEAKER_1: That's a sentence that I just had to point out as being incomprehensible to 99.9% of the world's population and Persona heart items in general have changed.

SPEAKER_1: Mostly the drops.

SPEAKER_1: So the way Persona heart items work is that some Personas will have a little heart icon in their status info.

SPEAKER_1: If you level them up to a certain level, they will give you the specified item.

SPEAKER_1: In reload, that item is actually like it will actually tell you the item before you can get it.

SPEAKER_1: In previous games, it was like a mystery what they were going to give you.

SPEAKER_1: Armor and accessories can also now be fused to the antique shop in addition to weapons.

SPEAKER_1: Previously, this was the way to get each party member's like best weapon.

SPEAKER_1: Meanwhile, like previously, you would need specific Persona heart items, which were the best armor and accessories.

SPEAKER_1: And armor items were essentially RNG from a very small pool of heart items.

SPEAKER_1: They were very annoying to farm.

SPEAKER_1: Ask me how I know.

SPEAKER_1: It's because I did that shit.

SPEAKER_1: It sucked.

SPEAKER_1: However, the new system for getting best in slot gear might be more of a pain in the ass than before, just purely based on the fact that you actually need more items to get the same gear.

SPEAKER_1: So before, if you needed a bunch of a Persona's heart item, you would level up that Persona until it was just about to reach the level to gain its heart item.

SPEAKER_1: Save it in the compendium in that state.

SPEAKER_1: Level it up, get the item, discard the Persona.

SPEAKER_1: Resummon it from the compendium for cash.

SPEAKER_1: Level it up to that level to get the item again and repeat.

SPEAKER_1: If a Persona had multiple potential drops in its heart item, you better hope to God that you got the one you wanted.

SPEAKER_1: Otherwise, you have to keep doing it again and again and again.

SPEAKER_1: It was incredibly tedious.

SPEAKER_1: You would get duplicates.

SPEAKER_1: It sucked.

SPEAKER_1: Now, you still need the Persona's heart item, potentially multiple, if it can make armor and legs, a specific weapon slash armor material, and also the corresponding gems.

SPEAKER_1: So the weapon material is not a big deal.

SPEAKER_1: You're probably drowning in that shit by the end of the game.

SPEAKER_1: You get way more than you could actually possibly use, especially if you're doing all the monad doors, or at least a lot of them that you see.

SPEAKER_1: If you don't have the gems, though, you're either grinding them out, hoping that you get the drops in Tartarus or spending cash at the new gem shop.

SPEAKER_1: And these cost buckets and buckets of cash.

SPEAKER_1: And money isn't as easy to come by as it was in Portable because now you don't have weapon cards that you could just sell to the store for tons of money.

SPEAKER_1: It's not super difficult to obtain money, but it's not like you're hitting max cash like in Portable.

SPEAKER_1: So you could farm the Reaper for money, but then you have to wait like five minutes for it to spawn and go through the whole fight.

SPEAKER_1: In my case, I was out of homunculi, so if I got bad luck and he used instakill on me on the one turn I swapped to something, like I didn't null darkness, I would have had to just redo that shit.

SPEAKER_1: The fact that you need all of that shit, I think if you were farming for the best in slot for your whole team, it would actually be more miserable than the process for Portable.

SPEAKER_1: The good news is, is that since there's not a Margaret fight, you really only need best in slot for the protagonist if you're even bothering with the Elizabeth fight.

SPEAKER_1: The other annoying thing is that you can only visit the gem shop at night, which is also when you go to Tartarus.

SPEAKER_1: So if you don't have enough cash or gems, but you're making your stuff in the daytime, which is when the antique shop is open, like say the or you're like time restricted, like on say the final day of the game, you're out of luck, because if you needed to go get more cash in Tartarus, you couldn't visit the gem shop, because you'd have to go the next day.

SPEAKER_1: And what if you didn't have another day, like at the end of the game?

SPEAKER_1: So I found this new system to be more inconvenient.

SPEAKER_1: And I was basically glad when I realized that like, oh, I don't need a new party.

SPEAKER_1: Like I don't need to equip the party with best in slot.

SPEAKER_1: There's no reason for me to do that.

SPEAKER_1: Thank God.

SPEAKER_1: Luckily, there's no waiting period for weapon and item fusions at the shop.

SPEAKER_1: It's a very welcome change.

SPEAKER_1: It was pretty unnecessary.

SPEAKER_1: And it became a time crunch in January, like basically the like absolute final calendar days of the game.

SPEAKER_1: And this was when you would need the antique shop most.

SPEAKER_1: And it was also the most difficult time to use it.

SPEAKER_1: So I mentioned the difficulty and let's talk more about that.

SPEAKER_1: After how fucking easy Persona 5 Royal was, I was absolutely concerned that Atlas will be trying to make Persona series much more casual and newcomer friendly and sort of leave options for like series veterans that appreciate the combat system for the challenge it provides like in the dust.

SPEAKER_1: In Persona 5 Royal, the highest difficulty actually ends up being the easiest because while you could take more damage, you also dealt more damage, and this meant that if you already knew enemy weaknesses, you could basically one shot everything and never get touched.

SPEAKER_1: It was really awful and unfulfilling.

SPEAKER_1: Original Persona 5 offered a much more balanced combat experience that felt a lot better to play, like even on normal, like regular Persona 5 normal difficulty feels better than max difficulty Persona 5 Royal.

SPEAKER_1: That's a long wave saying that I played Persona 3 Reload on hard because I was afraid of trying Merciless, the highest difficulty, for fear of running into the Royal problem.

SPEAKER_1: And I also hate difficulty settings that don't allow you to change them after you start the game.

SPEAKER_1: I think it's stupid.

SPEAKER_1: If there's no achievement tied to completing the game on a set difficulty, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to change any of the difficulties as you please.

SPEAKER_1: And so, for example, by the mid game here, I started to feel that hard was too easy, especially after the introduction of Theorgy and then character perks that you would start to acquire.

SPEAKER_1: You start dealing a lot of damage at very little cost.

SPEAKER_1: Yukari's perks, in particular, basically make healing free, and I just would have loved to bump up the difficulty to Merciless and see if I could do it, see what the challenge was, see how much harder was than hard.

SPEAKER_1: But I was locked out of that choice because I didn't select Merciless at the beginning of the game.

SPEAKER_1: I could make the game easier and flip-flop between all these lower difficulties as much as I wanted, but I couldn't raise the difficulty any higher even though I felt like I had outpaced the challenge that the game was providing.

SPEAKER_1: And again, there's no achievement for completing the game on any specific difficulty.

SPEAKER_1: And this is not an online game, you know?

SPEAKER_1: So why can't I pick what difficulty I actually want to play on when I want to play on it?

SPEAKER_1: Especially because the rest of the difficulties can be freely chosen at any point.

SPEAKER_1: Why is the hardest one the one that's locked out?

SPEAKER_1: Why is it if you select that one, you can't back out of it even?

SPEAKER_1: You only do that whenever there's like the achievement tied to it, when there's supposed to be like the bragging rights of it.

SPEAKER_1: It's just very frustrating.

SPEAKER_1: And don't get me wrong, I think it's great that the lower difficulties can be changed.

SPEAKER_1: I don't think anybody should be locked into easy.

SPEAKER_1: And then they're like, oh, hey, you know what?

SPEAKER_1: I think this is too easy.

SPEAKER_1: Let me challenge myself.

SPEAKER_1: I think that too should be the case where they should be able to bump up the difficulty.

SPEAKER_1: People should play on whatever speed and challenge gets them the most enjoyment out of the game.

SPEAKER_1: But in my case, I felt like I was being deprived of something for basically no reason.

SPEAKER_1: And again, if like there was an achievement and they wanted to prevent me from cheesing it by flipping it on at the end of the game, I could see that.

SPEAKER_1: But that's not a thing in this game.

SPEAKER_1: So there's a mod that actually fixes this on PC.

SPEAKER_1: But by the time I was curious enough to start looking at what modders were doing for the game, I basically had finished the game already.

SPEAKER_1: So I was like, it's whatever.

SPEAKER_1: But speaking of achievements, like Royal, all the achievements can be obtained in one playthrough.

SPEAKER_1: You do not need to finish the Persona Compendium, so you don't need a second playthrough.

SPEAKER_1: The most difficult achievement on the list is maxing out all the social links.

SPEAKER_1: Other than that, all the achievements are fairly straightforward.

SPEAKER_1: And the only reason why I bring this up is because I'm a crazy person, and I like to get all the achievements and trophies in Persona games.

SPEAKER_1: I started doing this with Persona 4 Golden, and I've done it since, just because I like to say that I've completed the game.

SPEAKER_1: But it's becoming less necessary starting in Royal, now that they've sort of made them so straightforward and less all-encompassing, where now you don't need to complete the compendium, you don't need to see all the endings, even though there aren't that many in these games.

SPEAKER_1: But certain things like that, they're just very straightforward in the fact that you only need the one playthrough.

SPEAKER_1: For my well-being, it's best that you only need to do one playthrough.

SPEAKER_1: If I had to play it again, what I usually do is I wait a very long time to play it again.

SPEAKER_1: And by that point, there's usually a re-release.

SPEAKER_1: And then I hate myself.

SPEAKER_1: And then I play these games back to back, which is what happened in this case.

SPEAKER_1: It's what happened with Persona 5.

SPEAKER_1: This is the reason why I bring up the achievement angle.

SPEAKER_1: But the difficulty for the achievements is quite low, I would say.

SPEAKER_1: The hardest one, again, being maxing out all the social links.

SPEAKER_1: The next hardest, I guess, would be defeating the reaper.

SPEAKER_1: The reaper is not very tough in this one.

SPEAKER_1: As long as you have a stack of homunculi, which I really didn't.

SPEAKER_1: I blew them on stupid enemies that I should have just insta-killed myself.

SPEAKER_1: And I also forgot to just buy them from the gem shop before going back.

SPEAKER_1: I was like, oh, shit, I forgot something.

SPEAKER_1: I forgot to buy homunculi.

SPEAKER_1: Put that on the tin.

SPEAKER_1: If I didn't already have a title for this episode, that would be a title.

SPEAKER_1: So the difficulty in maxing out all the social links doesn't actually come from getting enough points to rank the social links up, because Reload now gives you more opportunities to do so.

SPEAKER_1: I mentioned this a few hours ago, where at night there's, you know, you can gain social link points through an extra avenue like the shrine fortune system.

SPEAKER_1: Instead, the hard part here is squeezing in the time with all these characters that are all available on the same days.

SPEAKER_1: So late in the game, it was looking dicey whether or not I would actually finish all the social links.

SPEAKER_1: And this is due to a combination of late game social links being added, late game link episodes that aren't unlocked until fairly late into the game, and also story events that force you to lose time slots that would otherwise go to social links.

SPEAKER_1: And keep in mind, I wouldn't say I was playing optimally, especially in the early game.

SPEAKER_1: Like, I wouldn't always have a persona of the same where Kana is the social link I needed on me.

SPEAKER_1: But again, social link points aren't really the issue.

SPEAKER_1: It was more these all these social links are ready to rank up, but I need the time slot in order to rank them up and see the story events.

SPEAKER_1: And I just don't have enough time slots.

SPEAKER_1: This is mostly an issue with people from school because they'll all only be available during school hours.

SPEAKER_1: And then there's also a lot of story events that were taking place during the school hours.

SPEAKER_1: And then there are also link episodes that were available during the school hours.

SPEAKER_1: It was very tricky to balance that.

SPEAKER_1: And I don't, you know, unless I'm like actually going for a trophy run, I don't like using guides for that kind of thing.

SPEAKER_1: I think it sort of sucks the fun out of it whenever you're like looking at somebody else's schedule in order to play this kind of game.

SPEAKER_1: I think especially for a first playthrough, that's the biggest thing I tell anybody whenever they're going to play a persona game is please, for the love of God, don't use a guide.

SPEAKER_1: Just like schedule your time.

SPEAKER_1: Just, just play, right?

SPEAKER_1: You just need to experience it.

SPEAKER_1: Me, I'm a nutcase, so I try to, you know, fit in everything I can.

SPEAKER_1: Like I would have been upset if that was the only trophy I couldn't have gotten.

SPEAKER_1: I would have lived, you know, but it was looking dicey there for a minute.

SPEAKER_1: I did manage to finish it though.

SPEAKER_1: Another thing, like in terms of difficulty, like I said, you do have to kill the Reaper for a trophy, but you don't have to defeat Elizabeth.

SPEAKER_1: I think it's a little odd that you don't have to battle Elizabeth at all for a trophy, because the only prerequisite to unlocking the Elizabeth fight is killing the Reaper.

SPEAKER_1: So logically, you would take the next step and finish that off.

SPEAKER_1: Another standby that's in most of these trophy lists for these games is witnessing a fusion accident.

SPEAKER_1: Usually that's just a trophy they always throw in, and it wasn't here.

SPEAKER_1: And I don't think I saw one either.

SPEAKER_1: No, I don't remember, because I would have remembered the animation for it, and I don't remember what it was.

SPEAKER_1: I didn't finish the compendium since I didn't need to.

SPEAKER_1: I wound up with like 85% or so completion.

SPEAKER_1: And in that time span of like all that fusion, I didn't see an accident.

SPEAKER_1: I genuinely don't know if they're actually in the game to this point, because I didn't see it.

SPEAKER_1: So the main reason I think that you don't have to complete the compendium in Reload is actually related to the difficulty in doing so.

SPEAKER_1: In Reload, like the other games in the series, the ultimate form of an Arcana's persona is locked until you finish that specific social link.

SPEAKER_1: You know, this is just the way it goes.

SPEAKER_1: But they also locked personas that were previously available to fuse behind link episodes.

SPEAKER_1: Then there are some that are also locked behind Elizabeth requests.

SPEAKER_1: So you essentially need to 100% the game, like maybe not complete, like maybe like 98% the game in order to finish the compendium.

SPEAKER_1: And finishing both all social links and all the link episodes makes the schedule a lot harder.

SPEAKER_1: So like I said, I finished all the social links, but I did not finish all the link episodes.

SPEAKER_1: Or at least I don't think I did.

SPEAKER_1: Like I said early on, they were hard to track, like your progress in them.

SPEAKER_1: And I didn't realize that until like the first one I completed gave me a persona fusion.

SPEAKER_1: That like I link episodes even locked personas.

SPEAKER_1: I just didn't realize that.

SPEAKER_1: So like it's such a weird balancing act where the schedule gets screwy because you increase link episodes at night, but a majority of their events happen during the day.

SPEAKER_1: And that's when the majority of your social links, particularly your school friends are available.

SPEAKER_1: So these two clash.

SPEAKER_1: And since this is a new system, this throws things kind of out of order.

SPEAKER_1: So then you throw in the fact that they're all 22 and then plus one major arcana are already like accounted for.

SPEAKER_1: And then it's not hard to see why they didn't include or simply create new social links for the characters that didn't have one.

SPEAKER_1: And could they have done this?

SPEAKER_1: They could have made up a handful of new major arcana since it wouldn't be the first time they've done that.

SPEAKER_1: But I really don't think they would have fit into the schedule unless they were made available at night.

SPEAKER_1: And then you might run into issues actually ranking up your social stats because that's generally the time for that.

SPEAKER_1: So I think this compromise is fine generally.

SPEAKER_1: The link episodes just needed a better UI to track them.

SPEAKER_1: They really did.

SPEAKER_1: It just made a lot of things a lot harder.

SPEAKER_1: And like I said, the Reaper fight is not very difficult.

SPEAKER_1: Maybe one of the easier versions.

SPEAKER_1: Mostly because it doesn't resist any elements.

SPEAKER_1: And so it's susceptible to critical hits.

SPEAKER_1: And normally you can't get all that attacks on the Reaper because of its resistances.

SPEAKER_1: Like I didn't get a lot of crits.

SPEAKER_1: I think I only actually landed one.

SPEAKER_1: But at the same time, the Reaper fight is sort of a microcosm of like the entire game's difficulty and combat flow.

SPEAKER_1: Where you can just sort of wait around for theorgies to build.

SPEAKER_1: You buff and debuff and then just like unleash all of them.

SPEAKER_1: It's just a little trickier to line up on the Reaper because it uses Dekaja and Heat Riser and so you have to keep applying buffs and debuffs.

SPEAKER_1: And so instead of resistances, it just has a shit ton of HP.

SPEAKER_1: So you just kind of wail on it for a while, cleanse your debuffs, and then you hit it with theorgie.

SPEAKER_1: And that's kind of it.

SPEAKER_1: So overall, harder than Persona 5 Royal, at least on this difficulty.

SPEAKER_1: I cannot speak to Merciless.

SPEAKER_1: I cannot speak to the lower difficulties.

SPEAKER_1: It's really theorgie that sends things out of balance.

SPEAKER_1: I think tweaks to theorgie could have made it fine.

SPEAKER_1: I just think it's generally just completely overpowered.

SPEAKER_1: And it breaks the balance of the game.

SPEAKER_1: Not only can enemies not use it, but it breaks normal combat rules in that they can't even resist it.

SPEAKER_1: So it either needed to...

SPEAKER_1: the gauge needs to fill up incredibly slowly and be super powerful, or it needs to play by resistance rules.

SPEAKER_1: Ideally both, to be honest, because it's still busted to hell and back.

SPEAKER_1: Those are the kinds of things that proper difficulty tuning would actually allow and like change.

SPEAKER_1: Like say maybe on easy, this is the way theology would work.

SPEAKER_1: And on hard, theology would be super slow and play by resistance, you know?

SPEAKER_1: But Atlas doesn't seem to do that with their difficulties.

SPEAKER_1: They just sort of change how much damage is done and call it a day.

SPEAKER_1: And that's their idea of difficulty tuning.

SPEAKER_1: And we saw with Royal how it was just completely screwed up.

SPEAKER_1: So at least it improved here, I will say.

SPEAKER_1: And again, I don't have an issue with easier difficulties.

SPEAKER_1: I have an issue with an entire game being made trivial due to poor balance decisions.

SPEAKER_1: Like spectacle wise, theologies look great.

SPEAKER_1: Thematically, they make sense.

SPEAKER_1: Sure, fine, whatever.

SPEAKER_1: But they just kind of shit on the combat system.

SPEAKER_1: And it's one of those things where I just get going.

SPEAKER_1: And the more I think about it, the less I like it.

SPEAKER_1: But as a concept, I don't hate the idea of each character having an individualized limit break like ultimate attack that's tied to their own affinity, tied to their own persona.

SPEAKER_1: I don't hate that at all.

SPEAKER_1: I just don't like the implementation here due to the way that it trivializes combat.

SPEAKER_1: Just like one balance pass is all I'm asking.

SPEAKER_1: One balance pass, especially for the harder difficulties.

SPEAKER_1: And again, is this an issue where on the lower difficulties, maybe they don't even do this much damage.

SPEAKER_1: I have a feeling they do.

SPEAKER_1: But again, it might be a royal thing where the higher difficulties, you deal more damage for whatever goddamn reason.

SPEAKER_1: Again, so the difficulty disappointment, especially compared to original game, but improved from royal is how I'll summarize that.

SPEAKER_1: Our final section.

SPEAKER_1: We've made it.

SPEAKER_1: Well, almost.

SPEAKER_1: We've almost made it.

SPEAKER_1: I had these notes written in like February, March, and some of some of Atlas's moves have made this a little irrelevant, but I still want to talk about some of it.

SPEAKER_1: So Atlas says they are, quote, not considering a re-release of Persona 3 Reload in the style of Persona 4 Golden or Persona 5 Royal, though they only specifically mentioned royal as an example.

SPEAKER_1: And I would like to remind everyone that Persona 3 also had a re-release in the form of Persona 3 FES.

SPEAKER_1: Again, this is the fourth iteration of Persona 3.

SPEAKER_1: Every single mainline game in the series has had a substantial re-release after Persona 3.

SPEAKER_1: Persona 3 Reload released without its epilogue, the answer, as well as without the female protagonist and her associated content, specifically the social links.

SPEAKER_1: And unless I'm misremembering this, I believe the story around Royal's press cycle was that the Persona team held meetings in the immediate aftermath of the release of Persona 5 to discuss what their next project would be.

SPEAKER_1: And it was overwhelming that the team had all these ideas for more Persona 5 content and storylines, and so it was decided that the direction they would take would be Royal, and they just really had to do it and then release it for another $60.

SPEAKER_1: So what exactly is stopping P-Studio from doing the same thing again, but for the missing content we still don't have for 3?

SPEAKER_1: It's just hard to take them at their word when Atlas and Re-Release is next to each other in the dictionary.

SPEAKER_1: And of course, what this game in particular needs, like a hole in the head, is another re-release with disparate content.

SPEAKER_1: Pun kind of intended.

SPEAKER_1: I had a whole thing here about the potential reasons why and why not Atlas might not release the answer, but that became meaningless on the same day after I finished the game.

SPEAKER_1: Atlas announced episode August the answer for release this coming September.

SPEAKER_1: And so they finally did it.

SPEAKER_1: They released additional content without charging full price for another version of a game.

SPEAKER_1: So they not only announced this expansion with a trailer, they also released a video from Wada, P3R's producer, and also the head developer of P-Studio to explain that they originally planned to include the answer.

SPEAKER_1: There were some kind of difficulties, and so they at first abandoned it.

SPEAKER_1: And he claimed that the overwhelming response of everyone asking, well, where's the answer?

SPEAKER_1: When Reload was announced, sort of forced their hand.

SPEAKER_1: The project apparently had many setbacks, but then could move into development.

SPEAKER_1: Wada himself says that Persona 3 Reload would not be complete without the answer.

SPEAKER_1: The conclusion of Persona 3.

SPEAKER_1: And with the answer, Reload will be complete, which means no female protagonist.

SPEAKER_1: So, Persona 3 will remain scattered.

SPEAKER_1: I did suspect that they would do this, and I said as much whenever Reload got announced.

SPEAKER_1: This was the whole point of re-releasing Portable a year ago, so when the female protagonist wasn't included, they could go and say that at least they weren't leaving her stuck on a handheld system from 2004.

SPEAKER_1: Having said all of that, and knowing that the answer is coming in a few months, did this game need to be made?

SPEAKER_1: If we look at Reload as it is, and what it will be when it's accompanied by the answer, we are left with Persona 3, a game that already existed.

SPEAKER_1: Yes, there's lots of quality of life.

SPEAKER_1: Yes, there's a little bit of new content in the link episodes.

SPEAKER_1: Aside from that, this is just Persona 3 again.

SPEAKER_1: The biggest issue with Persona 3 was chiefly that you couldn't play it on modern hardware.

SPEAKER_1: The next biggest issue was direct party member control.

SPEAKER_1: Portable solved both of these issues.

SPEAKER_1: Is that a perfect solution?

SPEAKER_1: No, absolutely not.

SPEAKER_1: So it's rumored that there were issues with the source code or that the source code was missing or corrupted, and that's why they couldn't just add party control to FES and slap on some HD textures like they did for Persona 4 Golden.

SPEAKER_1: I don't know about any of that.

SPEAKER_1: I really don't.

SPEAKER_1: But from a gameplay perspective, ignoring availability, we're talking about how the games play feel control.

SPEAKER_1: And mostly, look, there's little difference between Persona 3 and Persona 4 Golden.

SPEAKER_1: A game whose release on Steam did so well, it convinced Atlus to start putting basically all their games on PC from that point on.

SPEAKER_1: Atlus is now publishing everything on PC, including SMT games that were never on PC, day and date with the rest of the consoles.

SPEAKER_1: They are now multi-platform completely.

SPEAKER_1: Nintendo exclusives are now on PC because of Persona 4 Golden and how well it did on Steam.

SPEAKER_1: My point being, Persona 4 Golden is incredibly playable despite its age and despite the fact that it started as a PS2 game.

SPEAKER_1: So this leads to another unfortunate, at least in my view, question.

SPEAKER_1: What game is next?

SPEAKER_1: Because if Persona 3 needed it and the solution is Reload, why doesn't Persona 4 need it?

SPEAKER_1: What's the difference here?

SPEAKER_1: Meanwhile, you have Persona 1, a PS1 game that got ported to PSP to fix the broke ass localization where they changed characters whole races.

SPEAKER_1: A game that is basically a door opening simulator.

SPEAKER_1: And you've got Persona 2.

SPEAKER_1: Poor fucking Persona 2.

SPEAKER_1: A duology, a game so large it had to be two games.

SPEAKER_1: A duology so fragmented you can't play it properly on the same system.

SPEAKER_1: Innocent Sin, the first game, was never released on the PS1 in English.

SPEAKER_1: The West only got the second half because that's not confusing or anything.

SPEAKER_1: Innocent Sin eventually gets a PSP remaster that makes the menu usable.

SPEAKER_1: Eternal Punishment, the second game, is only released in the West on PS1.

SPEAKER_1: It's incredibly janky on PS1 even for the era.

SPEAKER_1: The menus are some of the worst I've experienced, which impacts the battle system.

SPEAKER_1: It's somehow worse than FF9's janky ATB system, which I fucking hate.

SPEAKER_1: Eternal Punishment got a PSP remaster, but they didn't localize that one.

SPEAKER_1: It took years and years for a fan translation to come out for that.

SPEAKER_1: The PSP remaster of Eternal Punishment has a whole new scenario no one could play unless they could read Japanese.

SPEAKER_1: Those are the Persona games that need attention.

SPEAKER_1: I'm a very simple guy to please.

SPEAKER_1: I'll play that old shit.

SPEAKER_1: I'll play that old shit most days of the week.

SPEAKER_1: In fact, I have.

SPEAKER_1: I love the PS1 era sprites.

SPEAKER_1: I love the polygonal FMV.

SPEAKER_1: I'll take ports of the PSP games on PC with higher resolution.

SPEAKER_1: I don't need ground up remakes.

SPEAKER_1: I don't need P1 and 2 to have Link episodes shoehorned in.

SPEAKER_1: My fear is that P-Studio is going to get stuck in this remake cycle now rather than moving forward.

SPEAKER_1: Like, I'm sure there are plans for P6, but the amount of work that went into Reload means that it's so far off and even further if they're going to remake more Persona games.

SPEAKER_1: Just due to a vocal group that wants games remade.

SPEAKER_1: My main point here is I think it would be a mistake to remake Persona 4.

SPEAKER_1: It's really what I'm driving home.

SPEAKER_1: It does not need it, but I'm concerned they're going to do it.

SPEAKER_1: I can hear it now.

SPEAKER_1: You remade their favorite Persona game.

SPEAKER_1: Why won't you remake mine?

SPEAKER_1: Why don't I get to see Inaba in 4K?

SPEAKER_1: I can hear it now.

SPEAKER_1: I'm hoping Reload will be this cycle's Catherine-like diversion, but again, I'm worried because of how closely tied in gameplay 3 and 4 are to each other, along with the shared assets the originals had between each other.

SPEAKER_1: Sound effects, enemy models, items, like the nuts and bolts and DNA that the two of those games share, that they'll just forge on ahead and just go ahead and do 4 also.

SPEAKER_1: I'm hoping that because of the importance of Persona 3 to the series and RPGs, but to the series specifically, the team wanted to look back before they look forward.

SPEAKER_1: That's like about as optimistic as I can be about this uneasiness, I feel.

SPEAKER_1: And it might be starting to sound like I'm saying that they shouldn't have bothered making Reload, but I still cried like a baby at the end of the game.

SPEAKER_1: Like my issues with IGES and the soundtrack and the theology, all of that just washed away, like immediately.

SPEAKER_1: It's still got to me, despite the fact that I had just played this game the month before.

SPEAKER_1: The same damn game.

SPEAKER_1: It's still got to me.

SPEAKER_1: Because it's still Persona 3.

SPEAKER_1: And I think that's the important part.

SPEAKER_1: Well.

SPEAKER_1: I don't have anything else.

SPEAKER_1: This really got out of hand, didn't it?

SPEAKER_1: Every time I sat down to edit or condense the notes that I had, I realized that I had more to say.

SPEAKER_1: And so I had 25 pages of notes just full of nonsense about a video game.

SPEAKER_1: So really, thank you if you managed to stick around and listen to listen to me go over very minute details about a game you may or may not have played.

SPEAKER_1: I really do appreciate it.

SPEAKER_1: Even though this is just the second episode of the show, this is not going to be the format at all.

SPEAKER_1: This was special just because it's persona and I wanted to do it justice.

SPEAKER_1: And hopefully, hopefully I did that.

SPEAKER_1: Next up will be, I guess, a normal episode.

SPEAKER_1: I want to talk about Final Fantasy VII Rebirth because in the months between episodes I've played that, it will not be nearly as in-depth as this.

SPEAKER_1: I've got a lot of other things I want to talk about, some anime as well.

SPEAKER_1: And I mentioned it, but now that it took so long for me to release this, SMT Vengeance is like basically out, especially by the time this episode is actually live.

SPEAKER_1: So the notes I had prepared for the quote next episode have stuff about that game's announcement.

SPEAKER_1: So yeah, I struggled in a few times.

SPEAKER_1: But if you like any part of this critical process, check out the Dead End Road show where I talk about media, culture, how the Internet's dying, basically everything else that interests me and isn't 100 hour Japanese video games.

SPEAKER_1: I do apologize for this taking so long.

SPEAKER_1: I did finish the game on March 5th.

SPEAKER_1: And a week later, I started having some health issues that I'm still dealing with.

SPEAKER_1: And it's been very stressful.

SPEAKER_1: But I wanted to give this episode the time it deserved.

SPEAKER_1: So thank you for bearing with me.

SPEAKER_1: But this was also like a load on my shoulders, and I couldn't really do any other episode before I did this one, just for me personally.

SPEAKER_1: So now that I have Persona 3 off my shoulders, I can now start putting out more episodes.

SPEAKER_1: I already have notes for two more, and that's before SMT5, and that's before the new Final Fantasy expansion.

SPEAKER_1: And I've been watching a shit ton of anime, so there's a lot of stuff to talk about.

SPEAKER_1: Nothing will be as insane as this, however, whatever this runtime ends up being.

SPEAKER_1: But yeah, thank you so much for listening.

SPEAKER_1: I genuinely appreciate it.

SPEAKER_1: See you in the next one.