Persona 3 Reload is finally here and has given the original game a much-needed fresh coat of paint. It's also made some changes to certain scenes and designs from the original game too, but this new spit and polish seems to have come at the cost of one of Persona 3 Portable's more interesting fan theories.

For a long time, Persona 3 fans have theorized that a small boy that the player meets while spending time with student Yuko Nishiwaki is actually a much younger Ryuji Sakamato from Persona 5. For starters, Persona 3 takes place in 2009 and the Persona 5 wiki has Ryuji's birth year as 1999, which would make him 10 years old at the time and a roughly similar age to the boy in question. He's also wearing a yellow shirt, has a fairly cocky attitude, and is inspired by Nishiwaki to take up running as a hobby, all things very closely associated with Ryuji.

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It was an interesting fan theory that had its believers and skeptics, but Persona 3 Reload may have shot down the theory once and for all. First shared by Twitter user ScrambledFaz, the small boy from Persona 3 that was the source of all the theorizing appears to have undergone a pretty dramatic redesign, no longer sporting his bright yellow shirt and looking a lot more generic than his Persona 3 Portable counterpart.

In fact, there's not much there to really indicate that this is the same child, with absolutely no defining features that could link him t Ryuji at all, apart from an eventual love of running. If this little boy was an intentional nod to Ryuji, then it would make sense for developer Atlus to accentuate his similar features a lot more rather than change them entirely, especially since Ryuji is actually a known character now and there's no reason not to point him out.

There are still some believers in the replies to ScrambledFaz's tweet, claiming that the kid's black hair is evidence he's still Ryuji, as he canonically dyes his hair blonde from black in Persona 5, but black hair is also just extremely common in Japan. He will always be Ryuji in our hearts though, and isn't that what truly matters at the end of the day?

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