THOSE familiar with Atlus’ history would know the company makes business decisions as weird as their games’ stories.
Launched earlier this year, Persona 3 Reload was a remake of the original Persona 3 from 2006. The latter had two versions – Persona 3 FES and Persona 3 Portable. Each version was the original 2006 with added, different content for each. FES had a new epilogue, while Portable had the option for players to pick a female protagonist when starting the game.
During the time of these games, Atlus was in dire financial straits, and fans at the time accepted these various versions as the company double dipping to make a profit off a successful game, while improving on the 2006 version with quality changes.
Last year, Persona 3, 4 and 5 director Katsura Hashino told a Japanese radio station that at the time of Persona 3, Atlus was “about to collapse” and the game “would be their last game”.
Thankfully, things turned around, especially after Sega bought Atlus’ parent company. Despite its success now, Atlus continues to employ the business decisions they were making almost 20 years ago when they were “about to collapse”.
For the developers’ new Reload, the game was developed and released purely as a remake of the 2006 game, with none of the added content from FES and Portable.
At the time, producer Ryota Niitsuma made it sound like Reload was developed just to remake the original 2006 experience, without the later versions’ bells and whistles.
During the Xbox Partner Preview earlier this month, Atlus announced it will release an expansion originally in FES, called Episode Aigis, as part of Reload’s planned content release through its “Expansion Pass”. And it will cost an additional US$34.99 (RM165), which is half the retail cost of Reload.
It will never be known why Atlus did not release Episode Aigis already included with Reload, but the company’s history of double dipping hints towards another hefty RM165 expansion in the future for Reload with content from Portable.
