One Aspect of Persona 3 Reload’s Tartarus Needs to Influence Persona Miniboss Design

Highlights

• Persona 3 Reload offers updated visuals and gameplay improvements, bringing the beloved JRPG to a new generation of players.
• Randomized dungeons have been a staple of the Persona series, adding variety to combat encounters and optional bosses.
• Persona 6 and other future games should expand on randomization, making each playthrough unique and engaging for players. Specifically, bosses leaning into random attacks could help greatly with replayability.

Persona 3 Reload is the latest entry in the long-running franchise, but it is also a remake of what many consider to be the first modern Persona game. Because of this, it is the most feature-rich and graphically advanced entry in the series, but it also features some relics of the late 00s games in the franchise. In this way, P3R is both a window into the series’ past and, quite likely, its future. The series’ love of randomization plays a central role in Persona 3 Reload, just as it did in the original. Wherever the series goes next in Persona 6, it needs to learn from and expand on this aspect of P3R.

Before the inclusion of scripted Palaces in Persona 5, the two games before it exclusively featured procedurally generated dungeons, not dissimilar to Mementos. These dungeons have somewhat uniform aesthetics, and when the player enters a floor, its layout is generated randomly. Every time the player leaves P3‘s Tartarus or any of the various dungeons in P4, its floorplan is lost and reset upon the next entry. Persona 3 Reload is mostly faithful to this approach, although it features much more detailed and diverse environments. The scripted dungeons of P5 are likely to return in the next entry, but P3R shows that randomization is still a relevant and important part of the Persona formula.

Persona 3 Reload’s Combat Is Rigid

Persona 3 Reload‘s improved feature set makes it one of the most compelling JRPGs in recent years, but some aspects of it remain the same as other recent entries. The floors of Tartarus are randomized, but the enemies within them are largely static, not unlike those of P5‘s fully scripted palaces. This means that mini-bosses will be the same for all players and that during new playthroughs of the game, one will mostly be playing through the same fights. This does very little to hold back the player experience in Persona 3 Reload, but it does feel like something of a missed opportunity, especially in the case of Monad shadows.

Scripted combat encounters make sense for the game’s story, but P3R has plenty of optional content hidden behind Monad Doors. These doors have a red sigil and contain extra areas that typically hold more powerful enemies. For these optional mini-boss fights, randomized strengths, weaknesses, and other attributes would do a lot to make them feel more unique. Furthermore, Persona 3 Reload‘s New Game Plus mode features the same encounters as one’s initial journey through the game. There are certainly benefits to replaying the game still, but randomization in New Game Plus could make the title’s various mini-boss and boss encounters more engaging for one’s second playthrough.

How Could Persona 6 Better Implement Randomization?

Randomization needs to play a bigger part in Persona 6 than the mere inclusion of an unscripted dungeon in the style of P5‘s Mementos. Games in the series have had plenty of optional mini-bosses and side content, but deliberately challenging side quests could be the perfect place for Persona 6 to call upon the series’ long love affair with randomization. Making elements of optional boss fights vary could help make each playthrough unique and give every Persona fan their own unique experience. In the New Game Plus mode, normal enemies and story bosses could have some randomized elements as well.

Randomization Is an Important Part of Persona’s Past and Future

The Persona series’ use of randomization is one of the things that has set it apart from other JRPGs, but new entries need to make better use of it to stand out from their predecessors. Randomized dungeons have been a staple of the series for almost two decades now, but the fights housed within have remained largely static. Introducing randomized elements to combat, especially optional encounters that are designed to be challenging, could be a big step forward for the next Persona game. Hopefully, Persona 6 will expand on P3R‘s use of the mechanic and push the series forward in some new directions.