Persona 3 Reload, a remake of the originalPersona 3, lets players rewind time. In practice, this means that you can go back and complete any time-sensitive tasks that you missed, without needing to reload to a previous save file.
This qualify of life change is very different from the original Persona 3, which made you live with your mistakes if you accidentally missed the timeframe to complete a task. It’s just one of the various changes introduced in the remake to make time management much easier, so you shouldn’t need to make a bunch of backup saves as you go.
While Persona 3 Reload doesn’t launch until February 2, we spotted this in our pre-launch playthroughs. It suggests that the developer,Atlus, wants to help players avoid frustrating mistakes, like accidentally timing themselves out of missions that fail if they sit on them for too long.
In our playthroughs, we noticed that Persona 3 Reload lets you go back to the last few days. For example, our Evergreen Specialist,Gabrielle Castania, noticed that on June 6, she was able to go all the way back to June 3. So while there are limitations on how rewinding is used, it’ll definitely come in handy if you missed something.
Persona 3 Reload is launching on PlayStation 4, PlayStation5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.
Gabrielle also shared a bunch of other changes to how the game plays, and a lot of them are focused on time management. For example, Maya’s social link now only takes up your afternoon, not an entire day, giving you a bunch of extra time to use up.
Other changes help you save time in real life, not just in-game. For example, there’s an auto-battling system that can be used once you know an enemy’s weakness. Similarly, if you’ve found a missing person, you can now get someone else to escort them back off-screen, saving you from taking them back to safety yourself. And of course, the rewind mechanic will help with this too, since you won’t lose game progress by going back to a previous save.
In an interview with TheGamer, Persona 3 Reload developers said that they wanted to “respect the original while trying to create something new”. This certainly seems to aid that goal, but we’ll have to see if the fans think that the devs have pulled this off when Persona 3 Reload launched on February 2.
