While we had a lot of love to share in our Persona 3 Reload review, we couldn’t help but note one glaring omission in the remade slice of life dungeon crawler: Kotone Shiomi, the female protagonist added in Persona 3’s PSP port, Persona 3 Portable. Despite her absence, Players have held out hopes that Portable’s female protag option might return as other content from earlier versions of P3 arrives as DLC for Reload. Sadly, Persona series producer Kazuhisa Wada once again says it’s not to be.
In an interview from Game Informer issue 368—which, because GameStop obliterated the archive for its recently-shuttered magazine, is only available in print—an apologetic Wada said Atlus had considered adding Kotone to P3R while planning the upcoming epilogue DLC, Episode Aigis – The Answer. Unfortunately, the amount of work would prove impossible in the development time Atlus had available.
“The more we discussed it, the more unlikely it became,” Wada said. “The development time and costs would not have been manageable.” Even if Atlus signed off on an eventual female protagonist DLC, Wada says it would release so far in the future that it’d be financially unviable.
“P3R has just released, and there is currently a lot of player interest, so if we are to do an additional release, it has to be now. But since it is not possible for us to release P3R with the female protagonist in this window, we just can’t do it,” Wada said. “I’m really sorry to all of the fans who were holding out hope, but it is likely never going to happen.”
It’s the second time Wada’s publicly apologized for Kotone’s absence, following an earlier mea culpa back in March. I don’t envy his position; I can’t imagine a passionate fanbase is always willing to accept the economic constraints on game development with patience and grace.
Still, even with Episode Aigis – The Answer restoring the missing epilogue content from Persona 3 FES to P3R in September, the exclusion of a female protagonist will always sting. Luckily for us on PC, modders are working to restore Kotone when studio budgets can’t.