This game isn’t just here to entertain you or make you feel good and happy. It’s here to make you think, feel, and reflect.

The remake keeps the original 2007 story untouched, with all its flaws. The pacing may seem painfully slow at first. You get introduced to the world, the premise unfolds, and then it’s just school life with small steps forward. Not every character gets the attention they deserve. The developers tried to fix this and made some progress by adding new interactions, but the improvement felt only partial and could have been done much better.

On the hardest difficulty, the combat is fantastic and challenging without being cheap. The game gives you enough resources to adapt on the fly and figure out enemy weaknesses without constant restarts, with superbosses being the exception. There are no unfair difficulty spikes if you keep up with the game’s rhythm, and later it even offers a clear path to quickly overlevel if you wish.

If you push through the slow start and really connect with the characters, you’ll experience one of gaming’s most tightly woven stories. The story, combat, soundtrack, atmosphere, and voice acting (JP) all come together to explore a single powerful theme. That is rare. When it all comes together, it leads to one of the most beautiful endings the video game medium has ever seen.

Persona 3 Reload is not just a game. It is art. Memento mori.