Highlights

  • The Dorm Hangouts system in Persona 3 Reload rewards players with unique characteristics and social stat boosts by improving relationships.
  • Persona 6 could benefit from bringing back active skills tied to leveling up Confidants, adding a tangible element to character growth.

What sets Persona 3 Reload and other games in the franchise from the rest of JRPGs is its social sim element. Players need to improve their relationships with other characters to get better stats from Persona Fusions, which involve sacrificing two Personas to create a more powerful one. This mechanic was called “Social Links,” but was changed to “Confidants” in Persona 5. Confidants offer the same benefits as Social Links but with additional rewards. Even Persona 3 Reload offers such rewards for its improved Social Links, which only proves that the Confidant system is the way forward for Persona 6 and future sequels.

Persona 3 Reload, released in February 2024, is a remake of Persona 3, released in 2007. Its updated graphics, UI, and combat rival the latest game in the franchise in terms of chronology, Persona 5. The game also added new features adapted from definitive editions of the title and the sequels. One significant improvement it made over the original is the Social Link mechanic, which borrows heavily from P5’s Confidants.

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Related
Persona 3 Reload Social Link Tier List

Forming bonds and creating Social Links with characters is a crucial part of Persona 3 Reload, but some of these Social Links are better than others.

The Confidant system provides significantly more perks than outdated Social Links, like new abilities, access to more powerful items in the store, Shadow negotiation, craftable items, and even new side missions. Players can see the influence of Confidants in Persona 3 Reload’s Dorm Hangouts. The player can hang out with their chosen SEES member in two different locations.

If they spend time with that character three times in a single place they’ll gain a characteristic. Hanging out with the same SEES member three times in another location will enhance their characteristic. The player character also gets other benefits like social stat boosts and consumables when improving their relationships. Here are the characteristics of only a few of the major characters:

  • Junpei Iori starts with Critical Boost, which improves crit chance and damage. The improved version of this is Critical Amp, which drastically boosts both crit stats.
  • Yukari Takeba gets Healing Master, which decreases the SP cost of recovery skills to 50% of the base value. The upgrade, Healing Apex, reduces SP cost to just 25% of the base value.
  • Fuuka Yamagishi’s Weakness Buffer characteristic reduces the damage of weakness attacks to allies. The Weakness Mitigator upgrade lessens the damage that allies take from weaknesses further.

The extra perks from Persona 5’s Confidants and Persona 3 Reload’s Dorm Hangouts make the game more rewarding. This is because players get more than just Persona Fusion bonuses out of their social interaction efforts. Even Persona 4 had a similar Social Link system to Confidants, as ranking up a character’s Social Link added active and passive skills to their Persona.

Persona 6 Should Bring Back Active Skills if it Will Continue Using Confidants

If there’s anything Persona 6 could improve on Persona 5’s Confidants, it’s the return of active skills. Brand-new abilities that players can get exclusively from leveling up their Confidants could be crafted, for example. This way, players aren’t constrained by the skills they get from their Persona leveling up. Plus, getting an active skill just feels more tangible compared to passive ones, like Ryuji's Follow Up attack, which only trigger by chance.

The social sim’s influence on combat has evolved with each Persona sequel and Atlus and P-Studio continue to experiment on it with systems like Confidants and P3P’s Dorm Hangouts making relationships more vital to the player’s combat performance. This design direction only solidifies one of Persona’s overarching messages: enhancing one's relationships with others is a crucial part of understanding and improving oneself.