At Xbox’s Partner Preview showcase last week, Atlus announced that Persona 3 Reload would be receiving the original game’s add-on epilogue, Episode Aigis, as DLC at the tail end of an expansion pass. The expansion pass, which will cost $US34.99, will also have two additional waves of DLC before it, which include background music sets and costumes based on other games in the series. The news was met with a predictable amount of skepticism and anger from fans who felt that the expansion, being nearly 20 years old, should have simply been included in Persona 3 Reload to make it a complete game.
The series producer, Kazuhisa Wada, has now provided an explanation for why Episode Aigis (initially released in America in 2007 as an epilogue called “The Answer”) is arriving as much later DLC for Persona 3 Reload. According to comments made by Wada in an interview with Famitsu, the Persona team wanted to “make it happen from the time we first drafted P3R,” but various hurdles kept the team from being able to make it a reality, resulting in the epilogue being dropped altogether. According to Wada, however, once the game was announced at Summer Game Fest last year, they “received a lot of feedback from fans asking for a follow-up story,” which led to the epilogue’s revival well into the development of P3R.
Even then, the Persona team seemed spread thin, with Wada even considering taking on a directorial role when another staffer, Yu Hazushime, stepped in to serve as the director of Episode Aigis. Hazushime has previously worked on titles such as Soul Hackers 2, and previously directed Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE.
As director of Episode Aigis, Hazushime is overseeing an overhaul in line with the rest of the P3R project. Though Wada noted that some of the epilogue’s more “shocking content” and dialogue is being tweaked to “suit the current era,” he assured that the fundamentals of the scenarios are unaltered. The core dungeon of the expansion is also being adjusted, being made faster and more “compact” in keeping with P3R’s tempo, receiving new background music, and a “new aspect” that Wada and Hazushime refused to give away.
Despite fan feedback prompting Episode Aigis’ eventual inclusion in P3R, Wada dashed any hopes that it might also result in Persona 3 Portable’s female protagonist eventually being added. Though he “feels sorry for the female protagonist,” Wada claims that development on the game would’ve dragged on too long if they also tried to develop her entire path.
“I really feel bad for the female protagonist, but unfortunately, there is no chance of that happening. Of course, we were also considering planning for a female protagonist, but the hurdles were too high, as it was expected to take a long development period and cost several times as much as ‘Episode Aegis.’”
According to Wada, the team on P3R is also responsible for the development of “completely new works,” meaning that they had to eventually cut off the amount of work done on the title to work on future Persona games. Unfortunately, that means no female protagonist for P3R, but maybe the Persona team will finally take to heart that this matter should be a priority moving forward in the series, and leave mistakes like this in the past where they belong.
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