Persona 3 Reload Features A Secret Message If You Beat Merciless Difficulty

thegamer.com:

Beating Persona 3 Reload on the Merciless difficulty is, as the name would suggest, pretty bloody hard. So, it's no surprise that the game rewards you for blasting through on the hardest difficulty, giving you a unique item that other players would miss entirely.

As discovered by a player who just pulled off a Merciless run, beating the game like this grants you new dialogue with Elizabeth. Here, she gifts you a Blue Envelope, which reads a simple, yet mysterious message: “At the end of a great trial, the answer illuminates my path."

As highlighted in the replies, you can't switch to Merciless mode mid-playthrough, so you'll have to beat the entire game on this difficulty to get the item. You'll also need to boot up a New Game Plus run to view the item's message.

So, what does the message mean? In the thread, many believe that it's pointing towards DLC for Persona 3 Reload. The most likely candidate is The Answer DLC, a re-release of the epilogue that was included in Persona 3 FES, an expansion to the original Persona 3. A reliable Persona leaker has already said that The Answer will be released as DLC at some point in the future, so this discovery appears to confirm the rumour.

Unfortunately, this means we could be in for a long wait until we can an expansion that adds the female protagonist from Persona 3 Portable - if we ever get her as DLC at all. There's no guarantee that this will be the case, which is particularly frustrating when we got a Persona 3 Portable re-release last year that included her story.

In the meantime, fans are on the case. As we reported earlier this month, fans are getting together to add Kotone's playthrough into Persona 3 Reload. This was a pretty glaring omission at launch, especially since you'd think that a full remake would give players the most definitive way to experience the game. Hopefully, she's at least added as DLC further down the line, much like we're probably getting with The Answer.

Persona 3 Reload is out now, available