(My Review of Persona 3: Reload proper can be found by clicking HERE!)
I don’t normally dedicate a separate review for DLC expansions, the one exception so far being the Yuffie DLC for Final Fantasy VII: Remake, but “Episode Aigis: The Answer” took me roughly 20 hours to complete, making it just as if not longer than a lot of games featured on the site. Plus there are some things I want to say about both the game and story that can’t really fit into Persona 3: Reload’s DLC section, so this seemed like the best choice! Let’s take a look.
Background:
Aigis sneak attacks an enemy… by shooting the hell out of it. At least that’s a bit different from the main game!
Persona 3: Reload was released worldwide on February 2nd 2024 for PS4, PS5, XBOX One, XBOX Series and PC. The “Episode Aigis” DLC add-on was released on September 10th 2024 and is an adaptation of “The Answer”, a special epilogue attached to the re-release of Persona 3 subtitled “FES”. Not having ever really looked into it I thought it was just an extra month of so of gameplay to wrap things up, but boy, I was wrong there…
Gameplay:
Get ready to be very familiar with this endless desert of doors…
As the gameplay is essentially the same as Persona 3: Reload (right down to the main character you play as having the “wildcard” ability to have multiple Personas and fuse them) I’ll be cheeky and just repost what I said about the combat from the main review:
The action is turn based so you can take your time to pick your move without fear of the enemy attacking. On your turn you can physically attack, attack with magic or special physical attacks based on your Persona, block to reduce damage or use an item. While everyone has a specific Persona with one element normally tied too them (Fire, Ice, Electric, Wind, Dark and Holy) as usual the lead character can switch between any number of Personas that he can “fuse” while in the special Velvet Room location, which honestly has a very Pokémon-y “must collect them all” vibe, complete with a Persona compendium, so… it is hard to resist spending an awful lot of time in there… Anyway, your Personas and your enemies both have strengths and weaknesses (until you get to the really high levels, then its just strengths and things that do normal damage…) and if for example you hit something weak to ice with an ice attack it will be “downed”, and if all your enemies are down then you can launch a snazzy “All Out Attack” for major damage.
The physical damage is broken down into melee and piercing damage as well, which things can be weak too, so it can take a little time to find the weaknesses but when you do a lot of the game’s encounters become easy peasy, just hit them with the right element / strike, All Out Attack them and there you go, you can even “Shift” between party members when you knock your enemy down (like the “baton pass” from P5) so you can get to the next required element attack straight away. Each character has a traditional health bar and “magic meter”, though in this case it’s “SP”, and everyone (apart from bosses) can suffer status ailments ranging from traditional poison and sleep to fear and anger, plus a couple of instant-kill moves, and all of these can be cured, filled back up or revived from by items and spells, including being KO’d except if the main protagonist is knocked out, then it’s automatically game over. This was kind of annoying because I think if I can revive any other party member from being knocked out during the course of battle, why not him? I know he’s the “leader” but I’m pretty sure the remaining party members would be able to think “I should revive him” by themselves…
New and exclusive to Reload is the “Theurgy Attack” system, where each party member has a gauge that fills up over the course of battle and when it reaches max you can unleash a fancy and powerful special attack. How the Theurgy meter builds is dependant on each character’s personality, which makes it a fun to figure out strategies to build it faster… well, apart from Yukari whose way to build her Theurgy gauge is healing people, which is what I primarily used her for anyway so she was pretty much just constantly with her Theurgy attack ready to go!
This is how you enter a boss fight well prepared!
So yeah, all that is still the same. The thing about “Episode Aigis” is that the rest of review, talking about the social sim aspect, creating bonds and upping social stats and links etc. are all out of the window as you just essentially play through another 19 and a half hours of just Tartarus exploration under a different name with your characters mysteriously de-powered (so you don’t even unlock any new moves or abilities!) and then get good stuff right at the end. On that Tartarus-related note:
It’s a long dungeon you explore, including encountering enemies (that you can get an advantage on if you sneak up behind them), looting chests, breaking objects to get items, and fighting special more difficult opponents behind “Monad Doors” for even better loot. Randomly or whenever you win a battle with an All Out Attack you get to draw special cards which can grant you a temporary buff, give you more XP, more money or unlock new Personas, plus a few special Arcana cards unlocked as you go that will give most interesting buffs like more XP from Persona fusions or even the ability to pick more than one card each draw.
So this was my main complaint about the DLC, it started off with me thinking “oh this is great, I love the gameplay of Persona 3 so just getting to do more of that with some new interactions between one of my favourite casts of characters sounds good to me!” (as evidenced by the comment about having started the DLC in my Top 10 2024 Games article…) but by hour 10 it started to wear me down, and by hour 18 I just wanted it to end so I can move on to something a bit more stimulating. There aren’t any special bosses, they’re all just the same Shadow enemies from the base game, and this time there are four or so visual styles of dungeon and they just switch between them for the whole game, so by the end everything just looked so samey… because it was literally the same dungeon design your saw for the first time 10 hours ago. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the cutscenes at the start, and after completing each major “door” you get flashback for each character that are fun (though don’t reveal anything we didn’t already know) and the actual ending has a string of really tough 2-on-2 encounters and a less challenging but still enjoyable final boss leading to a satisfying conclusion to the Persona 3 story, but my word the hours of dungeon crawling with no sense of reward in between is not very fun.
Graphics and Sound:
Metis stylishly takes out an enemy… as if there’s any other way to take out an enemy in a Persona game!
Same as the base game, obviously!:
Presentation-wise it’s hard to fault the game anywhere. It’s learned from Persona 5 in terms of creating menus and HUDs with amazing flair, the character models and enemy / Persona models are great and well stylised. Everything is just smooth as butter no matter what menu or action you’re doing.
Sound is hard to fault too, with great voice acting no matter which language you go with and a fantastic and extremely catchy OST, with some songs remixed from P3 and some entirely new. I still say the P5 soundtrack tops it, but not by much!
Story:
True, but when you’re faced with this much endless dungeon crawling…
Again, if want the full breakdown of the story of the original game check out my review linked at the top of the page (I’m not going to copy and paste all that!) but basically at the end of the story our technically unnamed protagonist sacrifices his life to stop Nyx, the incarnation of Death in the Persona universe, dying on the lap of android-with-feelings Aigis. Now the credits rolled before any other member of the cast knew what happened and we pick up the story a month or so later and as the school year is coming to a close everyone is starting to head down different paths; SEES leader Mitsuru wishes to collect all the Persona Evokers to put that phase of their lives to rest before she begins to focus on her father’s company, Yukari, Junpei, Fuuka, and Amada are all getting ready for their next school year, Akihiko is looking towards his own post-school plans, and Koromaru the dog is… just going to hang around still. Everyone is surprised when Aigis reveals that she won’t be returning to school and instead join Mitsuru’s lab as she only went to school to be closer to “him”.
Things take a strange turn soon though as at the stroke of midnight on March 31st it becomes March 31st again and they’re stuck repeating the same day but are the only ones aware of this fact, Groundhog Day style. Then to add on top of everything another Aigis-like android appears called Metis who tries to kill them all to protect “her sister” until Aigis awakens the core game protagonist’s Persona and fends her off. A set of stairs appears in the dorm and once Metis has agreed to accompany them rather than kill them they visit the “Abyss of Time”, a vast desert dimension with loads of doors, each door leading to a Tartarus-like dungeon. With no other choice they begin to tackle each door one by one despite having lost a good chunk of their powers for “reasons”, occasionally experiencing memories of a group member’s past together and frequently seeing a shadowy image of someone running away from them that looks mysteriously like the P3 protagonist…
As they go on Metis realises that each memory is the event that gave each member the resolve to “conquer their shadows” and turn them into Personas, revealing that every person has a Shadow its just Persona users literally conquer their demons and take on their hardships as part of themselves and then literally use them as weapons to fight back against life. The Abyss of Time is connected to the realm of Shadows and due to everyone’s resolve being shaken by the protagonist’s death it the time loop was created. This causes the shadowy version of the Protagonist that had been running around to appear and be revealed as the personification of their combined sense of loss and guilt over what happened, and upon defeating it everyone but Metis suddenly gets a key appear in their hand…
Spoilers from now until the next bolded sentence!
Metis reveals that the keys can be merged to form the key to leave the time loop, but there are two exits: one to the present day April 1st, and the other to a month or so before Nyx’s appearance. The party becomes split as Yukari and Mitsuru wish to go back to the past and save the protagonist, Akihiko and Ken want to honour his sacrifice, and Junpei and Koromaru are worried about an even worse future being made if they go back in time and face Nyx again. Aigis doesn’t know what to do, but the break up is real enough that Metis sets up a series of two-on-two fights at an arena to see who gets the right to use the final key. Aigis takes down all three pairs (eventually, with many re-tries if its anything like my experience!) and reveals to the cast that before she makes a decision she wants to know what exactly happened on that day fighting Nyx. Her wish is manifested in a new door that takes them to another plain of existence where Nyx is trapped behind a massive seal with the image of the protagonist on it.
If you asked me to “draw the personification of humanity’s wish to die” I don’t think this is what I’d end up with… (um, spoiler for the next paragraph of the spoiler section, I guess?)
Metis once again lays out all the exposition through mysterious means, revealing that the protagonist wasn’t killed destroying Nyx, instead he gave up his life to create a barrier between Nyx and the manifestation of people’s desire for death, stopping “The Fall” from happening again. At this moment a monster called Erebus appears, the literal personification of humanity’s desire for death instead struggling on with the hardship of life, and our group watch is it fails to break through the barrier and reach Nyx to get their wish granted. Erebus then turns its attention to the group, leading to the final boss fight. Once Erebus is defeated Yukari, the one who has shown the most emotion about wanting the protagonist back, admits that humanity will never stop secretly wishing for the quick way out and therefore the protagonist’s sacrifice must happen to stop humanity from giving in, summoning Nyx and creating another “Fall”. Aigis agrees and when they return she uses the key to return everyone to the present day… though before that everyone ends up in the Velvet Room where its revealed that Metis is actually Aigis’s human emotions she developed that she subconsciously rejected because they were too painful to bare. Aigis accepts them back into herself, causing Metis to vanish. Aigis now sees that the protagonist’s death was a good thing overall and her mission to protect him hasn’t changed, it’s just that to protect him she needs to try and stop as much despair in the world as possible so she can stop Erebus from being spawned and attacking the barrier that holds his soul.
After a brief scare that Aigis, in finding “The Answer” to what makes life worth living and then not immediately waking up just like the Protagonist meant she was also dead, they all reunite happily on April 1st. A short while later Mitsuru tells everyone to keep their Evokers and Aigis wishes to go to school with everyone again, locking the door of the dorm on the way out with a smile that her life now has meaning again as she can move on past painful loss, the key theme of Persona 3 as a whole.
Spoilers are over now!
It’s a very satisfying ending and explains the few lingering questions from the end of the game. Definitely worth checking out if you enjoyed Persona 3, but maybe watch a compilation on YouTube rather than playing 19 hours of Tartarus repeats…
Thoughts Now:
It is a sad reality… not worth 19 hours of Tartarus to hear, but a sad reality none the less!
Persona 3: Reload – Episode Aigis is a satisfying epilogue to the game from a story perspective, tying up some lose ends and giving a few characters some real emotional depth as well as more of the classic Persona “group of teens fighting a personification of a negative aspect of humanity” moment. Sadly the other 19 or so hours are a bit of a slog… that then turns into a complete slog. Even if you like the P3:R combat like I do you will eventually wear down and just want to get off the ride. An easy 4, maybe even 5 for the story but the constant combat against repeated enemies in repeated dungeons for so long drags this DLC down a great deal, all the way down to…
Hogan Reviews 