Like plenty of folks in the West, Persona 5 was my first rodeo, and I’ve been working my way back through the series ever since. So far, I’ve only playedPersona 3and 4, but friends who have been fans since the original games have told me how much of a social element later titles added. You didn’t used to go to school, work part-time, hang out with your classmates, and study in your room – in Persona and Persona 2, you watched the story, and you fought the monsters, that was the game. Now, Persona 3 Reload: Episode Aigis feels like a natural continuation of that system.
Originally included as bonus content in Persona 3 FES in 2007 when it was re-released a year after the original gameadded said social aspects, fans of the traditional gameplay style were once again allowed to hunker down with a few extra dungeons to fight through. The game takes place on a repeating string of March 31sts, with the members of SEES subject to a perpetual Groundhog Day-style nightmare where everything keeps repeating over, and over, and over.
The only way to stop the cycle is to venture to the depths of the Desert of Doors, a vast expanse of sandy nothingness in the Abyss of Time that has opened beneath the Iwatodai Dormitory, sealing the members of SEES inside. At the beginning of the DLC, the group is attacked by an unknown assailant clad in black, claiming to be Aigis’ sister. After a brief battle between the bots, the other anti-Shadow weapon, who introduces herself as Metis, explains that she’s come to kill SEES and save Aigis. Tepid about trusting her, SEES bargains that they’ll explore the Desert of Doors for another way out, with Metis joining the team for the combat exploration.
Aigis soon awakens to the protagonist’s power of the Wild Card, able to swap between Personas at will. As someone who heralds Persona 3 as her favorite game, having played P3P as the female protagonist and then P3R as the male one, seeing a third character now sitting in the in the elevator Velvet Room was oddly exciting.
Since Episode Aigis takes place a little while after the conclusion of the base game,everyone’s Personas have weakened, though they retain the fully evolved versions of them that they grew into during the Full Moon missions. Your first teammates enter the DLC at level 25, and it felt natural to me as someone who hasn’t touched the game since logging over 200 hours on it back at launch. Like SEES, I was getting my feet wet again and remembering how to use our powers, so having everyone held back a little and leveling through the DLC felt appropriate. Muscle memory can atrophy, but it never truly goes away.
Gameplay in The Answer is limited almost exclusively to combat and dungeon exploration, with the Desert of Doors leading you through labyrinthian hallwaysjust like in Tartarus. Aigis takes up the helm as leader of the group and, as a humanoid weapon, can auto-target things like Shadows and the gloomy shapes that provide items and Twilight Fragments, which makes exploring as her feel just different enough from exploring as the protagonist in the base game. You’re still running around creepy, winding floors with your SEES teammates, but tweaking the mechanics a bit more precisely towards Aigis was enough to stave off feeling redundant.
I did find myself missing the social elements, though, since the Episode Aigis DLC is pretty heavily focused on combat. You’ll have brief respites to Paulownia Mall once you’ve accessed the memory of it following your first major victory in the Abyss of Time, and are able tovisit the police station and Mayoido Antiquesamong other shops, but the mall itself is unforgivably laggy.
Anytime I visited Paulownia Mall, whether it was of my accord to stock up on weapons and gear or as part of a cutscene as someone reminisces, the game chugged painfully, making cutscenes critically ill-paced and my movements jerky as I tried to run between stores. Oddly, walking up the stairs to Mandragora, the karaoke shop, was fluid, but coming back down to the main plaza slowed everything into oblivion once again.
Other than that, and the handful of times the audio mixing could have used some better leveling, with the music volume making it tough to hear the characters speaking, the game plays as smoothly as I wanted it to. Despite your inventory being reset, you’ve still got access to the same wealth of items, spells, skills, and more that you didback in the base game, but you’ll just need to discover them all over again as Aigis. The compendium carries over if you’re continuing, too, but you likely won’t have enough yen on hand to summon the powerful ones for quite a while.
If you loved the story of Persona 3 Reload and you’re hungry for a little more time with the members of SEES, the Episode Aigis - The Answer - DLC is more than worth it, providing about 30 hours of additional gameplay that shakes up the formula you perfected back in February. The characters feel like faithful progressions of themselves, and as long as you can forgive Metis prattling on about doing anything for her sister, I can’t recommend the DLC enough. I never got to play it back in the PlayStation 2 days, coming into the series far later with Persona 5, but with P3 fast becoming my favorite since then, I feel like it’s the most natural conclusion we could have asked for to the bittersweet story of Persona 3 Reload.
Persona 3 Reload: Episode Aigis -The Answer-
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Persona 3 Reload: Episode Aigis -The Answer- remakes content added in 2007’s Persona 3 FES edition of the game, including about 30 hours of gameplay with Aigis as the leader of SEES, navigating the team and her sister Metis through the Abyss of Time in search of answers on a mysterious shadow they can’t quite catch up to.
