Persona 3 Reload producer apologizes for the third time for excluding Portable's female protagonist, reiterates it's "likely never" happening for the JRPG remake

gamesradar.com:

Persona's series producer has once again apologized over Persona 3 Reload not featuring Portable's female protagonist, and has reiterated that it's "likely never" going to happen.

Poor old Kazuhisa Wada - he just can't stop apologizing. In the months following Persona 3 Reload's release earlier this year, the Persona series producer was repeatedly asked about the possibility of the remake featuring Portable's female protagonist, Kotone, at some point further down the line.

Wada said in the first interview in March that adding Kotone to Reload would've simply been too expensive, and then apologized for Kotone being excluded from Reload in another interview later that same month. In the latter of the two interviews, Wada explained that adding Kotone would've likely cost "two to three times that of Episode Aigis," the epilogue expansion releasing in September.

Now in August, Wada is once again apologizing for the situation. In Game Informer issue 368 (which is no longer available online because GameStop essentially deleted the entire archive), Wada explains that "back when we were planning The Answer, we had considered the female protagonist, but the more we discussed it, the more unlikely it became. 

"The development time and costs would have not been manageable, and due to the nature of the content, it's difficult to entrust this externally. Even if we were able to move forward, the actual release would end up being far into the future," Wada says, then apologizing again to all the Persona and Atlus fans who have "supported us for so long." 

This line of thinking is what allowed Atlus to make Episode Aigis - The Answer, Wada says. "Persona 3 Reload 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," the producer says.

How did Persona 5, Persona 3, and now Metaphor: ReFantazio