Post by Rune Lai on Jun 13, 2023 22:29:58 GMT -5
So Persona 3 Reload was announced this weekend along with a bunch of other things, and it's the sort of thing that immediately goes on my buy list (despite the fact that purchasing it would make it the fourth version of Persona 3 I own, yikes...). But more information dropped since the initial announcement, one of which I figured would be the case and the other I'm disappointed in.
Persona 3 is a little unusual in that it never had what people consider a definitive version. P4 was followed by Golden and P5 by Royal, which both of which were mostly the original game + more. P3 had Fes, which was composed of The Journey (original game + more) and The Answer (new extra hard dungeon serving as an epilogue to The Journey and explaining what happened at the end of P3). P3 also had Portable, which introduced the female version of the MC and all new social links.
P3 Reload is not going to have The Answer or the FeMC side of Portable. While I can understand dropping The Answer since it's more of a dungeon crawler with occasional bits of story, and has none of the life sim aspects of the main game, I'm much more disappointed about dropping the FeMC since she has a dedicated fan base and Atlus even included her in a lot of their 25th anniversary promo art, which made it seem like they finally stopped pretending she doesn't exist! They even gave her a significant role in Persona Q2, where she was the highlight of my team.
Now she's back to being ignored again. I mean, I know it was a lot of work redoing all the social links for the FeMC playthrough, and that would be even more pricey with the graphical upgrades and the addition of new scenes, but it's still going to feel incomplete and be another version rather than the definitive version.
Edit:
And I completely forgot to add that they're recasting all the voices for the English version! I expected Junpei to get recast since his original VA is now persona non grata, but I didn't think they'd recast everyone. I suppose a newer cast is probably going to be cheaper since the originals are all veterans now and can probably command better rates (sort of like how Rise from P4 got a new VA while her original one still does VA work, but now for AAA titles), but they did use the original P3 cast as recently as the Persona 3 Dancing in Moonlight (which was 5 years ago, but still).
Since Atlus USA seems to be allowing games to ship with Japanese VO options now I think I might use the JP voices for Reload rather than spend my time critiquing whether I like the old or new cast better.
Persona 3 is a little unusual in that it never had what people consider a definitive version. P4 was followed by Golden and P5 by Royal, which both of which were mostly the original game + more. P3 had Fes, which was composed of The Journey (original game + more) and The Answer (new extra hard dungeon serving as an epilogue to The Journey and explaining what happened at the end of P3). P3 also had Portable, which introduced the female version of the MC and all new social links.
P3 Reload is not going to have The Answer or the FeMC side of Portable. While I can understand dropping The Answer since it's more of a dungeon crawler with occasional bits of story, and has none of the life sim aspects of the main game, I'm much more disappointed about dropping the FeMC since she has a dedicated fan base and Atlus even included her in a lot of their 25th anniversary promo art, which made it seem like they finally stopped pretending she doesn't exist! They even gave her a significant role in Persona Q2, where she was the highlight of my team.
Now she's back to being ignored again. I mean, I know it was a lot of work redoing all the social links for the FeMC playthrough, and that would be even more pricey with the graphical upgrades and the addition of new scenes, but it's still going to feel incomplete and be another version rather than the definitive version.
Edit:
And I completely forgot to add that they're recasting all the voices for the English version! I expected Junpei to get recast since his original VA is now persona non grata, but I didn't think they'd recast everyone. I suppose a newer cast is probably going to be cheaper since the originals are all veterans now and can probably command better rates (sort of like how Rise from P4 got a new VA while her original one still does VA work, but now for AAA titles), but they did use the original P3 cast as recently as the Persona 3 Dancing in Moonlight (which was 5 years ago, but still).
Since Atlus USA seems to be allowing games to ship with Japanese VO options now I think I might use the JP voices for Reload rather than spend my time critiquing whether I like the old or new cast better.