Persona 3 Reload has no FES or Portable content, so you can probably look forward to buying that later instead

if you expected that persona 3 reload would include content added in later versions of the game, you’ll be disappointed to learn that it’s just a remake of the original game.

One would think that with the luxury of hindsight, Atlus could look back at the three different versions of Persona 3 and combine them into one complete package to create Persona 3 Reload, a remake of the PS2 title formally announced at the Xbox presentation of yesterday. Instead, by some bewildering reasoning, it’s choosing not to do that, instead going the route that only does the original release of the game and won’t include anything from FES or Portable. Persona 3 Reload producer Ryota Niitsuma and chief director Kazuhisa Wada confirmed this in a recent interview with IGNwhere they explained their reasoning behind this decision.

“So first I’d like to mention that since the basic concept of the Persona 3 remake was to remake Persona 3, we don’t have the FES and Portable contents included,” Niitsuma explained. “We wanted to really work to recreate the Persona 3 experience.”

Niitsuma went on to say that “we still can’t go into the details at this point, but we’ve basically redone everything from scratch as far as the original version of Persona 3 is concerned. So we have newly recorded voices, we have new scenes and events. We’ve got new music as well.” and fixed. We’ll be releasing that information, following everything. So look forward to that.”

Wada also explained that the main updates Atlus is focusing on is bringing it more in line with Persona 5, but keeping everything from the original version in terms of story. The frustrating point for fans is that many want to be able to play as the female protagonist introduced in Persona 3 Portable, making this remake quite alienating for a large part of the fanbase.

Atlus has a history of releasing new versions of its games, obviously Persona 3 is one of them, with Persona 4 later receiving its Golden version and Persona 5 its Royal version. There’s always the possibility that Atlus is planning something similar with the Persona 3 Reload, but there honestly doesn’t seem like much of a reason not to.

Persona 3 is due out early next year on PlayStation, Xbox, PC, and Nintendo Switch.