What was supposed to be a moment of joy has quickly shifted into despair as Persona fans express their disgust with ATLUS’ decisions. The company announced the Persona 3 Reload Expansion Pass last week, bringing the long-awaited remake of The Answer – Episode Aigis chapter as its main dish. However, the now-available DLC is suffering a heavy review bomb attack from displeased players.
While many people (myself included) speculated that The Answer would come as DLC later, few would expect they would charge us $35 extra. This led to a harsh reception by fans who are quite unhappy with how the company is handling this extra content which was, in theory, supposed to be available from the get-go.
Scummy Sale Tactics, As They Say
As this article is being written, the Persona 3 Reload Expansion Pass has Mostly Negative reviews on Steam and a similar reception through social media. Price is always the main complaint. Players who bought the $100 Deluxe Edition still have to open their wallets again for the extra content.
Users on X also pointed out the same irony. Despite the most expensive physical edition being dubbed the “Aigis Edition,” The Answer – Episode Aigis – is nowhere to be found. Instead, it featured the first DLC batch (also costing $30), which was initially believed to be the only one.
Xbox players have it a bit easier, as the Ultimate version for Game Pass gives you the whole Expansion Pass for free, even if you don’t own the game and your subscription eventually expires. But that’s only a fraction of the over one million players who bought the game at its already salty $70 price. And you still need to have the Ultimate subscription active for that.
As it stands now, the DLC pack is more expensive than full games such as Hi-Fi Rush. Not to mention that they’re charging half the price of the entire game for a single piece of content. People are calling it nothing short of a mere cash grab. But wait, The Answer is not the only thing included here, is it?
Well, it is called the Expansion Pass for a reason. Players will also get exclusive BGM packs with songs from other titles in the series and more outfits for the whole team! This periodically-unlocked extra content makes it worth the price, doesn’t it? Nah, we know it doesn’t.
While it’s cool to have extra tracks and outfits, it’s hard to justify that price for a DLC where most players won’t get to enjoy what they’re paying for. The Answer is the main attraction here, not some BGMs you can already listen to through YouTube or Spotify while playing. You would also need to have a new playthrough to make use of certain outfits, but turns out that there’s nothing exclusive to NG+.
While the pricing is comparable to, let’s say, Phantom Liberty for Cyberpunk 2077, there were many reasons to return to that game when the DLC dropped. Systems were completely remade from its launch, there was a ton of new content, and it was easy to access the new non-cosmetic content. It was a breath of new life for a game scrutinized for its flaws at release, now bathed in praise.
There’s nothing similar being added to base P3R, so no matter how amazing a track such as Gentle Madman would sound in the last batch of Tartarus floors, most people aren’t playing a whole 70-hour game again just for that. The Expansion Pass model just doesn’t fit as well here. And no, it’s not like people are just hating on the game because cosmetic DLCs exist. It only takes a few seconds scrolling through negative reviews to see the real answer (no pun intended).
No, it all comes from the sales model. This is an Expansion Pass and none of the included content can be bought separately. If you only wanted the Velvet Room outfits, you have to pay for the extra songs as well. If The Answer is all you’re looking for, you’re out of luck. Hand over the cash and wait until September when it’s finally unlocked, no questions asked. And, unfortunately, this is not unheard of in the series.
Just Wait For the Better Version
Expanding their base games has never been ATLUS’ strong point, to be honest. Releasing enhanced titles such as Persona 3 FES and Persona 4 Golden made sense in the 2000s and early 2010s, as DLCs wouldn’t work quite well in the PS2 era. Still, they tripled down on this trend with Persona 5 Royal, an updated version of a game that was already getting regular DLC content.
Although all of the mentioned versions bring enough changes to provide a whole new experience (with Royal ironically being by far the best example), you’re still essentially paying again for, overall, the same game. At this point, I might just outright ignore Persona 6 when it’s out and wait for the updated version a few years later.
To put it in perspective, you would now have to pay $105 to get a modern version of the same experience you had in the original Persona 3 FES. I would be lying to myself if I said I wasn’t expecting them to sell The Answer as DLC (it kinda makes sense, in a way), but they still made us believe it wasn’t coming at first.
Game producer Kazuhisa Wada mentioned how The Answer was originally planned to be included in Reload but was ultimately canned, and they only resumed production due to fan demand. While I do believe this to be true, I can’t shake off the feeling they were already expecting something like that to happen.
The Answer was locked in older hardware for years and wasn’t made available when previous titles in the series were ported in 2022. Reload was announced a few months later, so it was safe to assume they were saving it for the remake. It made perfect sense. I’m not against selling the epilogue as DLC, but they could definitely have handled that better.
They knew people would ask for it as it was one of the most criticized points for the game and a reason for many not considering Reload the “definitive” edition: that and the complete absence of the female protagonist. While FeMC is probably locked in the Shadow Realm forever (AKA that bad P3P port), we’ll still be able to see the main FES story in its entirety.
The Answer should be, at the very least, available as a standalone product from the very start. This whole drama would probably have been avoided if they had gone with this route at first. Hell, they would’ve probably gotten away with a $30 release without much criticism. People would definitely still be salty, but possibly to a lesser degree.
Honestly, it wouldn’t surprise me if something like a Persona 3 Reload – Full Moon Edition – was announced featuring the whole experience for a cheaper price. No reason to change the re-release method if it works.
DLC reviews should be better once the dust settles down and the main dish comes out of the oven, though. But it doesn’t mean this should be the norm from here on out. ATLUS has been living one of its best moments right now, so they can’t afford to screw this up. With two big in-house titles coming later this year (and Unicorn Overlord out now and being distributed by them), it’s time to start listening more to fans’ requests and not solely their wallets.
Published: Mar 13, 2024 12:39 pm