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When it comes to the difficulty options, Persona 3 Reload offers your typical Easy, Normal, and Hard, as well as Peaceful and Merciless. While three of those likely sound familiar to any RPG player, the easiest and most difficult options may leave you wondering if one or the other might be a better fit for your experience.
Should I pick Merciless difficulty in Persona 3 Reload?
I mean, this is a decision that comes down to a lot of factors. How familiar are you with the Persona series and Persona 3 Reload? If you’ve played every game and every version, you might be okay with picking this from the outset. If you are new to the series and this entry, I’d say choose Peaceful, Easy, Normal, or Hard instead.
I did try Hard and Merciless into for a few in-game weeks. Merciless is very difficult and more challenging than hard. It felt like enemies dealt more damage and weren’t as strongly affected my my attacks. If you get a game over, say during a fight with a floor guardian boss while ascending Tartarus, you basically need to accept it, reload the last save you made, and go through everything again. Always save on the first floor of Tartarus before heading out! (Though this is a good rule of thumb for any run on any difficulty.)
You can drop down to another difficulty from Merciless if you aren’t enjoying yourself. However, as the menu option tells you when you begin a file with it, you can never go back to Merciless in that run if you do.
What about the Peaceful option in Persona 3 Reload?
Honestly, I bounced between Normal and Easy when I played. Mainly because once I hit November, I was getting a bit exhausted with all the Tartarus floors and wanted to dash through things quicker as I pushed toward the top.
At one point during this, I did swap to the Peaceful option so I could speak to how it feels. I genuinely didn’t think it was all that different from Easy. The main difference is if you are in a fight… say you head into a Monad area and an unexpectedly strong foe there manages to knock out your avatar, Fuuka, Akihiko, and Koromaru because of a lucky shot… you can choose to revive by saying you can’t die here and everyone in your party will be at 100% again.
Persona 3 Reload is available for the PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and PC.
