Persona 3 Reload: Beginner’s Guide | Top Tips and Tricks

Persona 3’s long-awaited remake, Persona 3 Reload, is finally here! It’s still as unique and challenging as the original release, too, so we’ve prepared a beginner’s guide to help ease things out.

Knowing how to properly build Social Links and spend your time will be key in this game, for example. Even veterans of the original should know about some of the new mechanics, such as Theurgy!

Eager to take on Tartarus and Dark Hour? Read on for our beginner’s tips and tricks.

Beginner’s Guide | Top Tips and Tricks

Socialize!

The modern Persona games are all about socializing and building up Social Links with your friends, and this was started by the original Persona 3. As such, socializing is just as important in Reload as in the original game.

You will meet many people as you attend classes and explore the city. Make sure to foster your Social Links with these people whenever possible.

Also, bring Personas matching the Arcana of the Social Links whenever you meet these people, too. This will give you a huge bonus to your Social Links whenever you answer correctly during events.

Which, on that note, you have to be careful with what answers you pick whenever you get prompted.

Telling a young girl that it’s her fault her parents are getting divorced is obviously not going to earn you any points!

On that note, even answering correctly during class questions can earn you some Social Link points with classmates.

Overall, just make sure to bring matching Personas to Social Links and be nice to the people you interact with.

Also make sure to spend your free time exploring the school and surrounding city, meeting new people to form new Social Links.

Fostering these Social Links will give you an experience bonus whenever you fuse new Personas, and can even unlock new Personas altogether, giving you an edge in battle.

Remember to Fuse Personas

You will be able to get many new Personas as you explore Tartarus, but these Personas will be rather basic.

Instead of just using those, you should make sure to visit the Velvet Room every now and then and fuse new Personas. They will have extra skills and higher stats!

Unlike the original Persona 3, you get to choose which Skills to carry over when fusing. This makes it easy to create powerful Personas that have varied skill sets ready to take on any treat that comes your way!

Plus, like we said in our previous point, new Personas you fuse will obtain a large sum of experience as a bonus if they match any of the Social Links you have.

The higher the Social Link, the larger the bonus. The larger the bonus, the stronger the Persona will be!

Use Shift and Theurgy

This tip is both for newcomers and those of you who have already played the original game: make sure to use the new combat mechanics!

The first one is Shift, which works akin to the Baton Pass in Persona 5. Anytime you land a Critical hit or exploit a weakness, you will have the option to use Shift to pass your turn to another character.

This is great at keeping the ball rolling, as most of the party members have very limited elemental abilities. If you can’t exploit any more weaknesses, simply Shift to someone else who can!

Use Shift well and you will be able to knock out all enemies at the same time. This will, in turn, allow you to deal with a devastating All-Out-Attack, which makes quick work of most enemies.

Theurgy, on the other hand, is a brand-new ability. It functions akin to an ultimate attack, dealing devastating damage and having an extremely showy animation.

Theurgy can only be used once a character has a full Theurgy bar, however, which means you should save it for strong foes.

Also, every character charges their Theurgy bar differently. For example, Yukari charges it whenever she uses healing spells like Dia, while Junpei only charges it when landing Critical Hits.

Don’t ignore either of these new mechanics if you wish to come out of the Dark Hour unscathed.

Try to Maximize Your Time in Tartarus

Persona 3 Reload uses a calendar system, much like the other modern Persona games. Just like Social Links, this calendar system was first introduced in the original Persona 3.

That does mean, though, that you have limited time to do everything there is in Persona 3 Reload!

As such, you should try to maximize your time in Tartarus whenever you enter it. To make this a little easier, you won’t get Tired in this remake, unlike in the original release.

However, you will still have to carefully manage your SP as you keep climbing Tartarus’ hundreds of floors.

Every dozen or so floors, you will have to defeat a powerful boss Shadow. Defeat these Shadows and climb enough, and you will be prevented from progressing any further until the next Full Moon event.

You should try to reach these roadblocks within a single night, if at all possible, in order to make the most of your limited time!

Don’t sweat it if you can’t pull it off, of course. It will get easier to do the more you progress into the game. But, in short, you should always try to reach the highest floor possible in as few nights as possible.