Persona 3 Reload has new voice cast, no FES content, no FemC

Burn my Hype

Without a shadow of a doubt, one of the biggest and most exciting announcements of Summer Game Fest has been Atlus’ reveal of Persona 3 Reload, a full remake of the classic 2006 PS2 RPG and a title for which fans have been pleading for the longest time — Unfortunately, however, the reveal came with some caveats that have left some in the community a tad disappointed.

First and foremost, Persona 3 Reload is a remake of the vanilla Persona 3 release. As such, it will not contain any of the updated edition content — such as story expansion The Answer, or the additional difficulty options. Reload will also not feature the content of Persona 3 Portable, which means no playable female protagonist, lovingly referred to by the community as “FemC”. In addition, Persona 3 Reload will also have a re-recorded English voice track, featuring some very notable and talented VAs such as Allegra Clark, Aleks Le, Heather Gonzalez, and Zeno Robinson.

Producer Ryota Niitsuma and Director Kazuhisa Wada confirmed the above in comments to IGN.

“First I’d like to mention that since the basic concept of the Persona 3 remake was to remake the Persona 3, we don’t have the FES and Portable contents included,” said Niitsuma. “We wanted to really genuinely work on recreating the Persona 3 experience […] So we have newly recorded voices, we have new scenes and events. We also have both new and arranged music. We’ll be kind of releasing that information, following everything. So please look forward to that.”

The news has put a damper on the project for some fans in the community, who took to social media to express their displeasure. The general consensus for aggrieved parties runs along the lines of “If it’s not The Definitive Edition, then what’s the point even remaking it?” — A stance that is, quite honestly, difficult to oppose. The loss of the epilogue, a much-loved player protagonist, and the voices that the player has become accustomed to somewhat undercut the initial excitement that greeted the original reveal.

Added to this is the fact that people are assuming Atlus is preparing to simply release a Persona 3 re-remake somewhere down the line, with the original content added. A Re-Reload, so to speak. It should be noted that this is pure guesswork on the players’ part, but Atlus has never been shy about courting the big bucks of expanded editions, DLC content, and other post-release add-ons. Ultimately, Persona 3 Reload does look like a great remake, and remains an exciting release, but these revelations have, undeniably, cast a bit of a shadow over one of the summer’s biggest announcements.

Persona 3 Reload launches early 2024 on Xbox and PC. More platform announcements are expected.