Summary
Persona 3 Reloadis going to have to walk a fine line between being a faithful remake and still modernizing elements of the original game to make it more accessible to newerPersonafans. It’s unclear just how much Atlus is going to deviate from the originalPersona 3when it comes to gameplay improvements inPersona 3 Reload. However, as the gamelooks to update its combat system to be more consistent and user-friendly, it may take a page out ofPersona 5 Royal’s book and rework some of its classicPersonaseries skills.
Skills in thePersonaseriescan be broken down into a variety of categories split between physical skills and magic skills. Slash, Strike, and Pierce skills all fall under the physical skill category and usually correspond to different weapon types, while magic skills utilize the typical elemental types like Fire, Ice, Electricity, Wind, Light, and Darkness, with Nuclear and Psychokinesis being added inPersona 5. While most of these skills deal specific amounts of damage of their elemental types, Light and Darkness skills instead have the chance to insta-kill foes, leading to some unbalanced and often frustrating combat scenarios.
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InPersona 3andPersona 4, Light and Darkness skills are represented by the Hama and Mudo skills and their higher tier counterparts with the main focus of these skills being to grant the user the chance to insta-kill an enemy. Despite raising the chance of this happening at higher levels, these skills never felt consistent enough to be worthwhile on party members, making characters who specialize in them likePersona 4’s Naotoless than ideal especially against bosses. Conversely, it can be quite annoying to face enemies who have access to these skills and get unexpectedly wiped by Mahamaon or Mamudoon.
Persona 5andPersona 5 Royaltake a somewhat different approach to the Light and Darkness elemental skills changing them to Bless and Curse respectively. While skills like Hama and Mudo remain in these categories,Persona 5also introduces non-instant-kill, damage-dealing skills of these elements: Kouha and Eiha along with their higher tier variants. The introduction of these skills makes characters and Personas that specialize in Light and Darkness much more consistent and viable as mainstay party members, especially when compared to past entries likePersona 3andPersona 4.
It would go a long way to improve combat and party build variety ifPersona 3 Reloadadopts this approach to Light and Darkness skills fromPersona 5 Royal.Party members like Ken and Koromaruwould be much more useable as they could have greater diversity in their pools of useful skills if their Hama and Mudo skills were replaced or supplemented with Kouha and Eiha skills. While neither is as bad asPersona 4’s Naoto who almost exclusively uses Light and Darkness skills, a change to these elements would give Ken and Koromaru more elemental variety outside just Fire and Electricity skills.
Although Atlus may want to remain as faithful as possible to theoriginalPersona 3when developingPersona 3 Reload, a change to Light and Darkness skills to add damage-dealing Kouha and Eiha fromPersona 5makes a lot of sense. These added skills wouldn’t necessarily have to replace the insta-kill skills like Hama and Mudo, so they could achieve a middle ground between the old and new approach to these elements without disrupting the original game design ofPersona 3too much. The flexibility and consistency damage-dealing skills bring to combat compared to insta-kill skills makes them an obvious choice forPersona 3 Reloadto improve upon over the original.
Persona 3 Reloadis set to release in early 2024 for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
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