Persona 3 Reload DLC is Being Review Bombed

12.03.2024 - 18:57 / gamerant.com / Dominik Bo

The Persona 3 Reload Expansion Pass is presently being review-bombed by Steam users. The fan backlash started as soon as the first third of the DLC bundle was released, thus allowing Persona 3 Reload owners to buy and subsequently review the entire package.

Atlus and Sega officially announced the Persona 3 Reload Expansion Pass as part of the March 6 Xbox Partner Preview event. The $35 add-on was envisioned as a three-part offering. Its first, newly released wave comprises Persona 4 Golden and Persona 5 Royal background music sets. The one scheduled to debut sometime in May will introduce Velvet Room costumes and another BGM set. Finally, Atlus is planning to release a remake of the Persona 3: FES epilogue chapter, Episode Aigis: The Answer, in September.

Now that the first wave of the bundle is out, the entire Persona 3 Reload Expansion Pass can be reviewed on Steam by those who bought it. But most of the fans who took the time to share their impressions offered a negative perspective on the DLC. As a result, the Expansion Pass currently has nearly 300 reviews below the «Mostly Negative» threshold mere hours after becoming available for purchase on March 12, with more coming in every minute.

The hefty price tag attached to the Expansion Pass appears to be among the most common complaints among the people who rated it negatively. Some of them posited that $35 would be more acceptable if the DLC at least added the female protagonist from P3 Portable to Reload, thus turning the remake from just another version of Persona 3 into the definitive edition of the game.

At the same time, others appear to be unhappy that the Expansion Pass exists at all, arguing that a remake of an 18-year-old game should have been content-complete out of the box. A number of people also bemoaned the fact that Atlus didn't at least bundle the extra content with the $200 Collector's Edition. Meanwhile, some fans labeled the $35 Expansion Pass as particularly baffling in light of the fact that Persona 3 Reload already has $30 worth of day-one DLC.

Many people who wrote a negative review of the bundle also harshly criticized the decision not to make Episode Aigis: The Answer available as a separate purchase, describing its promise of more story content as the only thing worth paying for. As things stand right now, all of the add-ons for the game except for two of its Persona 5 Royal costume sets have negative reviews on Steam. Prior to this wave of backlash, fans have also lambasted the Persona 3 Reload day-one DLC packs for a variety of reasons, like the decision to deliver the game's artbook and soundtrack in the form of Unreal Engine executables burdened by DRM.

Persona 3 Reload is a remake of Atlus' beloved 2006 JRPG. Featuring