There won’t be a Persona 5 Royal-style expanded edition for Persona 3 Reload, Atlus promise

Persona developers Atlus have promised there are no plans to follow up Persona 3 remake Reload with an expanded re-release like Persona 5 Royal, giving us all a welcome break from the tyranny of the letter R.

Persona 3 Reload is out today, overhauling the 2006 PlayStation 2 game with a style much closer to Persona 5’s flashy visuals, along with changes to the original game’s story and dialogue. There are a number of general quality-of-life improvements too, alongside new gameplay aspects such as additional social activities away from your dungeon-crawling in Tartarus.

While Reload is in many respects an expansion of the original Persona 3, it leaves out some of the previous additions seen in expanded PS2 release Persona 3 FES and most notably past PSP remaster Persona 3 Portable - the first version of the game to come to PC - which introduced a second, female protagonist absent from Reload.

That means there’s more than a bit on the cutting floor that Atlus could conceivably bundle up and reintroduce in a hypothetical future Reload: Reloaded or such, similar to Persona 5 Royal’s mixing and expansion of the series’ most recent mainline game. But it seems that Atlus aren’t interested, at least for now.

“We are not considering a revision like with Persona 5 to Persona 5 Royal, which involved significant changes and additions to the original title,” production manager Kazuhisa Wada told Gamerwk (via Persona Central). “Fans can rest assured knowing that Persona 3 Reload offers a complete experience.”

Part of that reason may also be down to Persona 3 Reload’s development, which took over four years and apparently cost more than Wada was expecting, partly due to releasing on multiple platforms this time around. That then fed into decisions around what to keep and what to cut, with the team seemingly very sensitive to changing the beloved original.

“It's very difficult to try to improve a game without having to change elements of the original and elements that have been very well received,” Wada said. “There were certain parts that were a bit contentious at the time regarding this series, but [with] this one there was more of an effort to deal with the uncertainty and push the game in an appropriate way.”

Matt wasn’t wholly convinced by the changes in our review, finding Reload’s combat tedious and its storytelling mired in anime cliché. Still, he was “sure existing fans will be pleased with the modernisations, and newcomers who want cheesy anime, low stakes conversations, and dungeon crawling will find plenty to love here”, so your mileage may vary.