Persona has been my favorite JRPG series for years.Persona 3 is especially dear to me, but I didn’t get to play it until Persona 3 Portable came to current-gen consoles back in early 2023. Episode Aigis is the concrete conclusion of Persona 3’s emotional story, but since it was previously limited only to 2007’s Persona 3 FES, I didn’t experience it until the DLC launched forPersona 3 Reloadin September.
Episode Aigis focuses on your robotic teammate who learns in the base game what it means to feel, now unable tostopfeeling after losing someone dear. In her grief, the desire to turn off the emotions she worked to master grows so intense that it manifests into an entirely separate being, made to carry the emotional burden for her while Aigis marches through her cyclical days as mechanically as possible. She has a recurring dream that she’s chasing who she lost but can never seem to catch up, left feeling defeated and stuck each time she tries.
As much as I love Persona 3 now, I’m kind of glad I’d never played The Answer before now. I was 14 when FES launched in 2007 and 31 when I finally played the content with Episode Aigis for Persona 3 Reload, and with more than double the life experience under my belt now, I have more soft spots for stories to poke if they want to make me feel something. And poke Episode Aigis did.
Shortly before the DLC dropped, I reopened a personal can of worms that I always regretted had been sealed incorrectly. I loved someone deeply as a teenager and spent my 20s wondering what we could have done differently, so I was elated when they recently reached out to reconnect a few months ago. It went poorly in ways I couldn’t ever have anticipated, so I slammed the lid back on that proverbial can and found myself wishing I had just left it alone, and what I hoped might be rejuvenation wound up being a terrible, rocky kind of closure.
Though it was a hapless homecoming, it resurfaced a lot of former feelings of grief just in time for Episode Aigis to hit me where it hurt. I saw myself in the girl running with her arm outstretched through the darkness, fruitlessly chasing after someone she would never reach again. I identified with sloughing through layers of repetitive, dungeon-like sadness to get to the root of the problem instead of just letting myself get lost in its labyrinth. I remembered feeling so stifled by leaden emotions that I wished I could just turn everything off, that feeling nothing might be better than feeling everything if everything was that overwhelming.
Always wondering ‘what if’ when something goes awry is a great way to wedge yourself in a harmful cycle, just like Aigis did.Her endless mourning created the Abyss of Time, sealing her and her friends in a Groundhog-style rerun of the same day until they were able to confront and move through their feelings of sadness, no matter how tough or ugly it got along the way. Before that person reached out, I thought I had laid my feelings about them to rest, but I think time may have just covered the wound instead of actually healing it. Like Aigis, I was stuck somehow, even if I didn’t realize consciously that I was. And also like Aigis, now that I have ‘The Answer’ to my what-ifs, even if it wasn’t the one I wanted, I finally feel ready to fully unstick myself.
I might not have had to fightthe physical manifestation of humanity’s occasional call to the voidin my efforts to confront grief I didn’t realize was still pinning me in its vice grip, but Episode Aigis guided me as I finally movedthroughthat feeling instead ofpastit.
The DLC ends with a shot of Aigis running toward a brighter future now without shackling her pain to her ankles and letting it drown her in sadness, and spending all those hours helping her confront feelings managed to help me do the same with my own before I even realized that it had.
Persona 3 Reload
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Persona 3 Reload is a ground-up remake of the RPG classic, aligning the aesthetics with the more recent Persona 5. It does not contain any of the changes or extra content from Persona 3 FES or Persona 3 Portable.
