When you read that a movie is being ‘remade’, you know what it means. But in games, the concept of a remake is far less concrete. Gaming remakes can run the gamut in terms of scope, ambition, and even intention. Honestly, thinking about the differences in approach between the remakes of Resident Evil 4, Final Fantasy 7, GoldenEye and Mario RPG practically gives me a headache.
Persona 3 Reload is yet another game that challenges our interpretation of that term. It’s not as lavish a remake as the attention paid to Resident Evil, and nor is it as meta and self-referential as Final Fantasy 7. But this is no ‘simple’ remake, either – it’s a ground-up effort, and in many ways delivers an experience almost as polished as an all-new main-line Persona game. Though not quite, because its PS2 origins shine through. In short, it’s complicated.
That’s the status of P3R among its peers in the industry – but the situation is complicated further still by the labyrinthine mess that is Persona 3’s past history. There’s three versions of that game: Persona 3, ‘The Journey’ as included in Persona 3 FES, and Persona 3 Portable. Each is slightly different, and Reload is an exact representation of not one of them.
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