Persona 3 Reload producer says Portable's female protagonist would cost "two to three times" as much as The Answer DLC, so it won't be possible

Persona 3 Reload fans desperately want the female protagonist added into the game, but its producer says that would be too expensive.

Sorry, Persona 3 fans, it sounds like now matter how much you beg, Portable's playable female protagonist Kotone won't be coming to Reload. In a recent interview with Persona Central, general producer Kazuhisa Wada was asked about the possibility of the Portable exclusive character, where he essentially said it would be too expensive to include her. "I’ll begin with an apology, but unfortunately, the appearance of the female protagonist in P3R will not happen," Wada said.

"Of course, we considered the inclusion of the female protagonist alongside “Episode Aigis,” but the more we delved into it, the more hopeless it seemed… The development time and costs would likely be two to three times that of “Episode Aigis,” making it challenging to entrust entirely to external companies and exceeding our capabilities. Even if P3R and the “Expansion Pass” were to exceed our sales expectations and resolve the cost issues, the release would still be far off."

Wada again apologised, and made it clear that the possibility of a playable female protagonist is very unlikely to happen, saying, "I’m very sorry to the fans, but I don’t think there’s any possibility to make it happen in the future either."

If you didn't know, Persona 3 Reload is actually the fourth iteration of the game. There was the original release, which was followed up by Persona 3 FES, and then a little while later Persona 3 Portable came out, with both versions receiving new content. The main bit of new content in FES was an epilogue called The Answer, or Episode Aegis in the Japanese version, which wasn't included in Reload at launch, but has been confirmed to arrive as a piece of DLC this coming September. However, Portable went a step further by adding in a whole playable female protagonist, with her own storyline and all.

This will obviously be a bit disappointing to those hoping for even the slimmest of chances, but hey, you could always mod her in!