 There's a quiet loneliness that pervades in the first few hours of Persona 3 Reload. Yes, there are monsters and ghouls and battles against spooky enemies, but when the dark hour ends and you're left to your own devices in the real world, you're just a school student, the new kid, with no actual friends and nobody to spend time with. It's become a mainstay of the Persona formula to make the player feel out of place and unwanted at the start of each game. This isolation is paramount to the game franchise's repeated narrative arc, as you grow from a lonely outsider to develop lasting friendships with those around you, slowly finding your place in a society that wasn't sure if it wanted you at first. To start off though, this feeling of abandonment can be overwhelming, whether this is your first Persona game or whether you're already a card-carrying member of the Phantom of Thieves. If Persona 3 Reload isn't your first time with this franchise, you might find yourself missing your old friends. You might wonder whether you'll actually connect with this new game as well as you did with the previous ones. All of which is an excellent facsimile of how it feels to be the new kid at school, not yet sure of your place in the world. As a new player of Persona 3 Reload then, you may find yourself wandering around aimlessly at the start. Turfed out of school classes and simply told to meander your time away until the next big fight, you have no friends to hang out with, no club meetings to attend. So you wander. You explore shopping centres and arcades. You stumble into a cluttered dusty bookshop where you meet two of the game's earliest supporting characters, Bunkichi and Mitsuko. Each Persona game has its own way of making the player feel lonely at the start. In Persona 3, your character is an orphan, with no family, no home, no permanent place in life. At a time then when you're struggling to make new friends, this elderly couple, Bunkichi and Mitsuko, become the surrogate family you need in that moment. At a time when nobody else in the game seems to care too much about you one way or the other, the elderly couple are there to ask you about your day, to shower you in affection, and occasionally to give you sweets. The game doesn't so much guide you to them as it lets you stumble upon them of your own accord, but it's clear that they're meant to be among the first friends you make in your new home. And yet, something feels off. There's a sadness behind their eyes. A casual comment here, an awkward glance there, there is something that your elderly new friends aren't telling you. Then the tragic truth comes out. The reason this couple has taken such a shine to you is because you remind them of their son, a memorial for whom is planted in the grounds of your school. If it weren't clear already by this point in the game, the central theme of Persona 3 crystallizes in this moment. This is not just a coming of age story about growing up and finding your place in the world. It's also a story about confronting and learning to live with the inescapable shadow of death. Video games as a whole have a complicated relationship with the concept of mortality. There's a certain flippancy in the way many games deal with death. This is a natural result of death being thrown around so casually as a default fail state and a large number of games going back all the way to the arcade coin of days. Oh, you died, never mind. Pop 20p or 50p back into the machine and you can just try again. Or once games moved into the home through consoles and computers, simply hit restart. Death is not permanent. It's nothing more than a temporary inconvenience. Eventually, many games would give up on a kind of penalty for death whatsoever. You start back almost exactly where you left off. Death in such games is nothing more than a slap on the wrist, not even worth worrying about. Perhaps because of this cavalier attitude towards death, games have always struggled to show the trauma, the processing of grief and loss in a believable manner. Take for example what is perhaps the most famous death in all of video games. Yes, it's a shocking moment within the narrative, but at the same time, the player has a stack of phoenix down in their pocket that usually cures death outright. Or the off-meamed moment in which a soldier stands at the grave of a fallen comrade and the player is instructed to press F to pay respects. Even when played completely straight, video game death is little more than a narrative beat, and the process of healing emotionally from a tragic loss is distilled down into a single contextual button prompt. All of this is not to say that video game character death cannot be impactful or emotional, in as much as the player is willing to invest in them. But even the most heartbreaking game death isn't truly permanent when the player can simply start a new save and bring their digital friend back to life. Perhaps it's for this reason that many gamers have long sought ways to make deaths more meaningful in their games. The hard mode, or Nuzlocke run, in Pokémon games is an excellent example of this. Players arbitrarily choosing to remove the game's inbuilt euphemism, treating each defeat in battle as a death rather than a fainting, and forcing themselves to retire a Pokémon that runs out of hit points. Doing so not only makes the game harder, it also makes the game more painful. Players bond and invest in a digital character that's barely more than a sprite and a set of numbers. We project feelings and emotions and personalities into these characters that we've invented ourselves. We seek out moments of grief and pain. We inflict this trauma upon ourselves. Why? Because doing so makes the game more meaningful. It makes our triumphs all the sweeter, but just as important, it gives us an opportunity to roleplay grief in a safe, clearly defined space. Because for the most part, games typically shy away from letting the player use these spaces as a way to process our real world fears, surrounding the impermanence of life on Earth. Death comes for us all. This is the simple, sometimes overstated message of Persona 3. Most noticeably, this is seen in the overarching plot of the game. You and your high school friends are humanity's only defence against the end of the world, and an all-powerful being that is planning to consume all of existence. Thus, faced with a brewing apocalypse, we see how different people react to being confronted with their own mortality. Some people hide from it, pretending that nothing's wrong. Others collapse in despair, unable to even move, the anxiety and fear and dread becoming so tangible. So far, so common in video games, none of this is a million miles away from other games about death, such as the Legend of Zelda Majora's Mask. What Persona 3 does different with this familiar doomsday setting is the twist on the formula. Yes, there are deaths coming in the near future. In addition to this, though, almost every major character in the game is still struggling with deaths that have already happened. As noted, your player character in Persona 3 is an orphan. They are living on a daily basis with the fallout from the loss of their family, and the kind of isolation and loneliness that this creates. To them, death is not an abstract thing to be avoided. They live with the consequences of death every single day. As you go through the game, you discover that the elderly couple are far from the only non-player characters that are still processing some form of loss. Whether this loss was recent or not doesn't matter. In all cases, the pain is still very raw. Spend enough time with practically anyone and they'll tell you about the person or the life that they are grieving. Take for example the young man with a terminal illness who's trying to come to terms with all the moments he won't get to experience, or the companion character who's left in perpetual limbo over her late father's legacy because of the questions about his actions before his death that she will simply never learn the answers to. Persona 3 is a rarity in gaming because of its unashamed focus on the mourning process, on how it feels to lose someone, and on the difficult journey that it takes to heal from this separation. Death is not just a fail state here, nor is it a threat that must be averted. Death in Persona 3 is a constant companion, often in several ways, literally. Death cannot be avoided, it lingers just out of sight but never out of mind. When exploring Tartarus, if the player dawdles a little too long in any one place, they'll be pursued by the literal embodiment of death, the grim reaper itself. To fight death, to try to beat it, is almost entirely pointless. Most players are better off running and hiding rather than trying to fight death head on. Death's presence must be embraced, excepted. You can't win this fight, except when you can. While not exactly an easy fight for a Persona novice, under the right conditions death can be beaten when it appears in Tartarus. Indeed, skilled and well-prepared players will make a goal of challenging death head on. If you're skilled and lucky enough to defeat death, you're rewarded for your trouble. It drops some of the rarest, most powerful items in the game. As in real life, we all have to face it and nobody can escape from its painful consequences. This, though, doesn't mean you have to like it. It doesn't mean you can't push back, overcome its influence, heal from its wounds. At first glance, Persona 3 Reload feels somewhat fatalist in its message. You can't run from death, it will find you. Square your shoulders though, take a breath and work through your grief, and you learn something new. That you can't avoid death, but you can overcome it. You can heal. So, the player character in Persona 3, an orphan with no home, no family, and no place in the world, slowly builds a new family. And, in doing so, you help those around you to heal from their own trauma surrounding loss and grief. Because ultimately, this is the message of Persona 3 Reload, to learn to embrace death and to rise above it. That is the moral of the story. That is why Persona 3 Reload matters.