Persona 3 Reload - Episode Aigis: The Answer Reviews
Episode Aigis is one for the super fans. Its worthwhile story beats are rare and buried beneath a lot of all-too-familiar dungeon crawling, and it's undeniably expensive in terms of asking price. At best, it's an intriguing but flawed epilogue; at worst, it's a completely unnecessary addition to a fantastic game.
Episode Aigis -The Answer- brings back the atmosphere and tactical combat that Persona 3 Reload is known for, offering a deeper look at the characters and their emotions after the main events. The epilogue adds interesting challenges and new difficulty options, as well as adjustments that make the experience less punishing than the original version, with highlights including a stylish setting and a reworked soundtrack. However, the repetitive exploration and lack of variety in activities outside of combat can make the campaign tiresome. Without the rich mix of social simulation and exploration that made Persona 3 Reload such an engaging experience, Episode Aigis is an epilogue that is recommended primarily for avid fans of the series.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review
Persona 3 Reload Episode Aigis: The Answer works brilliantly as an epilogue, bringing the story of Persona 3 Reload to a definitive conclusion. While the frequent battles and exploration may not be for everyone, the structure and gameplay make sure it never feels tedious.
Episode Aigis - The Answer wonderfully expands the story of Persona 3 Reload, offers the usual fun fights, superb soundtrack and serves as a great, very emotional epilogue, but suffers from the same old dungeons and little aside from a lengthy combat-loop.
Review in German | Read full review
The Persona 3 Reload DLC, Episode Aigis: The Answer, may be tedious to play at times, but in its faithful recreation are important lessons about the toughest parts of our lives, told through the lens of the series' best characters.
If you loved the story of Persona 3 Reload and you’re hungry for a little more time with the members of SEES, the Episode Aigis - The Answer - DLC is more than worth it, providing about 30 hours of additional gameplay that shakes up the formula you perfected back in February. The characters feel like faithful progressions of themselves, and as long as you can forgive Metis prattling on about doing anything for her sister, I can’t recommend the DLC enough. I never got to play it back in the PlayStation 2 days, coming into the series far later with Persona 5, but with P3 fast becoming my favorite since then, I feel like it’s the most natural conclusion we could have asked for to the bittersweet story of Persona 3 Reload.
Structurally, The Answer is an often frustrating epilogue that shaves off some of the best parts of Persona games. Thankfully, Reload’s quality-of-life updates make the grind more tolerable and the remake adds enough small social elements like reading books and watching movies with your friends that it doesn’t feel like it’s all business. But as a meditation on grief, it feels like a kindness afforded to characters who once had to rile in the ambiguity of the original ending. It would have been easy for Persona 3 to end on a nihilistic note, showing the entire group fall apart without their leader and denying all the lessons they learned. But grief never really goes away. We just learn to help each other live with it a little more each day.
The Answer gets a facelift with the same coat of paint that Persona 3 received, but retains all the shortcomings that made it the most divisive extra content in the series.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
The production is a moving continuum full of synergies, as well as absolute beauty. Episode Aigis, exactly as it had done in the FES version, is the worthy, moving and touching conclusion of the third chapter of the franchise, which represented a great return and a fundamental experience to better understand the depth of Persona 3 Reload.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Persona 3: Reload is one of the best games of the year. If Episode Aigis had been part of the package we saw in early 2024, many of the problems with the DLC would not been so heavy, but since it is sold separately, it is very easy to see the problems that the epilogue presents us, even with all the good that we find here.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
This revamp of The Answer improves the original experience, but that experience still mostly revolves around hours of dungeon crawling.
While the new epilogue is certainly better balanced than the original, it still has a lot of the same pitfalls. The cutbacks break through just enough to bring the DLC experience down. Persona 3 Reload's Episode Aigis DLC is good but not great. They say "it's about the journey" and that certainly rings true whether you're in 2008 or 2024.
Persona 3 Reload Episode Aigis was an interesting way to continue the story and bookend some “loose ends,” but whether it resonates with you will depend on how much you’re willing to grind to get “The Answer.”
Episode Aigis is nearly a 1:1 remake of the Answer, completing the Persona 3 experience, but one that comes at an exorbitant cost to the fans.
There's no reason not to complete Episode Aigis with how much ATLUS has made this post-game episode easier to complete than ever before. Getting to the end of Episode Aigis and seeing Persona 3 Reload's characters' ending in a somber, yet bittersweet, fashion is a perfect way to step away from the glory that is Persona 3 Reload that has made 2024 a fantastic year for Persona fans. It bears repeating: Episode Aigis is a JRPG post-game done right; it's so right that it's worth returning to Persona 3 Reload if only to see the ending.
Episode Aigis: The Answer respects the original content, which some will like and others don't, but it also fixes some of the original aspects that people didn't like about the DLC, like the lack of the compendium and having no control over your party, making it the best way to experience this epilogue.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
Episode Aigis is a great addition to Persona 3 Reload, if only for the additional story content and new battle challenges. But this episode sheds too much from the base game, leaving a tedious adventure in the wake for those looking for The Answer. ∎