Atlus has released a new Persona 3 Reload demo across all platforms, letting you play a sizable chunk of the game. If you’re thinking, “Wait a minute, didn’t that game come out a year ago?” — you’d be correct. Despite launching fourteen months ago, you can now start your quest to romance everyone on Tatsumi Port Island all over again, for free. New players can also try it for the first time. Of course.
Play Hours of ‘Persona 3 Reload’ For Free
On April 8, Atlus surprised fans by releasing a new Persona 3 Reload demo on all major gaming platforms including PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Steam, Windows, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S platforms. However, what makes this release particularly interesting is that it lets you play hours of content from the game’s opening hours. Specifically, you can play up to the Priestess boss in May.
Amusingly, the demo highlights that you can play the game’s intro while “starting Social Links.” Look, there’s no judgment here. As a lifelong Persona fan since 2006, I’ve spent hundreds of hours pursuing relationships in the beloved JRPG franchise. And I get it — S-Links are one of the selling points of Persona. So maybe this year-late Persona 3 Reload demo is actually genius, as the feature could hook new players into buying the full game.
Atlus Seemingly Testing New Demo Strategy
While a year-late release of Persona 3 Reload might seem strange at first, this isn’t the first time Atlus has relied on demos to sell its games. In the up to its launch in October 2024, Metaphor: ReFantazio received a prologue demo that let fans play the game’s opening hours a month in advance. Perhaps that preview was so successful at driving sales that the Japanese developer is now testing the strategy with all of its other major IPs?
I mean, even if most Persona fans already took down Tartarus last year, the new P3R demo could still bring in newcomers. From my own experience, I’m more likely to purchase a game if I enjoy its opening hours and can transfer my progress to the full release. Hopefully, this becomes the norm for Atlus, and we get a prologue demo when Persona 6 is inevitably announced.
Hopefully next time, the demo will arrive before the game is launched, and not a year after. So if you’ve ever had any interest in Persona 3 Reload, now is the time to try it out! The new demo let’s you play the game’s first two months, which includes various Social Links, battle sequences and features.
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