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Atoning for my Innocent Sin with Persona 2

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Persona 2: Innocent Sin was next on my list. Back in August of last year I talked about how I wanted to play the original Persona game, and created a traditional text-based “Let’s Play” discussion thread in order to motivate myself into continuing with the game. Once that was done, I knew that I’d have to follow up with the Persona 2 games eventually, and as we welcomed 2019 I began a similar “Let’s Play” of Persona 2: Innocent Sin. It’s a game that I had zero experience with at the time… with P1 I at least played a fair amount before bouncing off, but here I was in the dark. However, I quickly found that it had plenty of ideas of its own that made it worth recommending..

It starts off with a fairly simple and vague premise; our heroes face a threat, mysteriously awaken to the power of Persona, meet Philemon after falling unconscious and are told that they’re destined to go on a big JRPG quest (well, not quite.) Although most of Innocent Sin has the classic mapping, battling and negotiating you’d expect from an early Persona, it has one of the most painful openings I’ve seen in a while. Two or three hours into the game, you’re searching rooms for objects to smash whilst being hit with random battles… and it just feels like padding. Thankfully, things pick up beyond this, and you’re quickly swept up in a mystery of falsities, fragmented memories, and truths.

The Innocent Sin of rumourmongering

Innocent Sin

Innocent Sin is also the game that introduces the Rumour system – a gameplay mechanic that seems unusual at first but effectively lets you add gameplay modifiers to things like shop prices and stock. It’s a neat feature but it could have been explained a little better – I got the feeling that it ended up sounding more complex than it actually was. Negotiation also returns, but you can’t skip entire battles quite in the same way that you could with P1 (it takes a few more button presses), which is a disappointment. I can’t say that Innocent Sin’s any smoother a ride than P1 because of the laboured negotiations, but you can find ways to make progress feel smooth if you learn negotiations and play with fusion. All that aside, you’ll still be fusing, battling, and opening locked doors… so there remains a lot of familiarity within the gameplay.

The finer details of the story go in all kinds of weird places, and there are ideas and concepts that I think are genuinely interesting (particularly later takes on the early idea of “rumours becoming true”), as well as some narrative events that hit pretty hard (one or two scenes with Maya at the shrine were quite shocking.) Other story moments just felt a bit too dense in terms of information; almost as if the writers were throwing too many ideas into the story – I’ll confess that sometimes it was tricky to know what you should be paying attention to. The other main observation I made was that P1 clearly turned into Maki’s story…and I don’t feel like Innocent Sin has that central identity. Maya could maybe fit into that role based on some of the events near the end, but I found Maki’s journey more interesting.

Different but likeable

Innocent Sin

Notable gameplay features include multiple characters negotiating together, with the success of this being influenced by their relationship – something that’s manipulated based on in-game events and dialogue choices. It’s perhaps a proto-Social Link system, and is genuinely a neat idea… but embarrassingly I didn’t take notice of it until later in the game. Additionally, Velvet Room summoning is a little different – simpler and more grindy, but easy to get behind. Oh, and the battles also seem a bit kinder; you don’t struggle as much with formation and grid placement, and attack ranges are rarely useless.

In general, I enjoyed P1’s general story and negotiation more, but Innocent Sin has more immediate combat and perhaps a more interesting cast. Just like P1, I think you could have a current-gen update of P2 somehow (as long as it patiently explains the gameplay concepts), but the changes made in P3 and beyond still transform an intriguing series into an unmissable one. Then again, I still have Eternal Punishment to look forward to, so I can’t judge P2 as a whole just yet…

If you’re interested in playing Persona 2: Innocent Sin, it’s available digitally on the PlayStation Store for PSP and Vita.

So I decided to LP Persona 1

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Aside from a few Steam sale bits, I haven’t really bought any new games since the Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection, and there’s a bit of a void in terms of forthcoming game releases that I’m interested in. The perfect opportunity, then, to LP (or “Let’s Play”) Persona 1 – a game that I’ve bounced off continually and never had the patience for. I love the Persona games, but only the newer ones; the first game lacks the social linking, calendar events, one-more attacks, visible roaming enemies during dungeon-crawling and other features that made P3 so refreshing, and it’s hard to play it coming from the newer games. Often I’d lose patience with the random battles, labyrinthine maps and complex negotiations before silently giving up. However: I have time to kill, and the decision to LP Persona 1 – in the classic, pre-video Let’s Play format of written updates within an online discussion board (in this case, rllmukforum) – would offer the motivation for me to keep coming back. After all, if I’ve entered a discussion board and stated that I’m going to do a thing, I’ve got to stick to my word.

Admittedly, I had one or two other advantages this time. Despite owning a digital version of the PSP game, it’s on an old account that I’d have trouble getting to right now – instead, I opted to use the PPSSPP emulator. This enabled me to take advantage of screenshots that I could add to the LP updates, and some welcome additional tools such as a turbo mode that played the game at an increased speed – making tedious battle animations play out in moments. Also, since I was playing from my desktop I could keep a written file on anything I wouldn’t be able to accomplish in a play session; it sounds nuts, but I never enjoy that feeling of coming back to a game and not knowing what you were planning to do.

LP Persona 1 with understanding

I LP Persona 1
When choosing to LP Persona 1, a player has to remember that this is a much more typical JRPG structure – you have establishing dialogue, your first dungeon and boss, post-dungeon dialogue, a moment to shop for better things, more plot development, the location of the next dungeon and boss, post-dungeon dialogue… and so on. Therefore, the majority of that gameplay is going to be in those dungeons. Dungeon exploration is done in first-person on a grid (similar to, say, Demon Gaze), and like newer games you need to explore your surroundings in order to fill out the map, but you’re going to run into dead-ends, lifts with multiple floors, locked doors and unlock switches, loose foundations that make you fall to a previous floor, floor tiles that spin you in a random direction, multiple exits (some of which go nowhere)… And remember, this is all done whilst being interrupted by random battles. Anyone who criticises the way in which P5 drags out its dungeon gimmicks (myself included) should know that P1 is a much worse offender.

Those random battles can be a drag too – with grid-based positioning to consider, about 20 different interactions to use in negotiations, lots of status ailments, and none of the “One More” or “All-Out Attack” systems from the modern games. The high frequency of encounters encourages a player to just mash any command and hope to get the battle out of the way, but you have to think about every encounter, and it bloats dungeon exploration time further. Again, keep in mind that P1 offers little of the downtime you get from modern Persona, so it’s little wonder that fatigue sets in. However, several days after my decision to LP Persona 1 I did appreciate a key mechanic that offers some relief from the dungeon-crawling: spell card ownership. If anyone in Team Persona is reading, know this: if you’re planning another remake of Persona 1 in the future, the importance of owning spell cards (through successful mastery of those 20 negotiation interactions) needs to be stressed to any and all players… because it makes dungeon exploration fun.

LP Persona 1 with negotiation

I LP Persona 1
Strictly speaking, a spell card’s primary use is to open up new fusion possibilities in the Velvet Room; it’s the most rewarding result you can get from a negotiation (granting new toys to the player), and it’s generally the end goal of every negotiation. However, if you negotiate with an enemy who’s already given you their spell card, they will end up fleeing the group of enemies (and sometimes dropping money or an item). Obtain spell cards for more enemy types, and you can skip entire battles. Obtain spell cards for yet more types, and it trivialises dungeon exploration. You’d think that ignoring battles might leave you underlevelled, but you need to reach certain levels before you can obtain certain spell cards, so you’ll still get the experience you need for those tricky boss encounters (where negotiation isn’t an option.) Sometimes negotiations can have different results; make an enemy scared and they’ll flee the battle, make them angry and they’ll get a free turn. If there’s one thing I would have liked, it would be a “memory” feature that displays the result of an interaction if you’ve used it on a particular enemy before, but that’s just a small thing.

Learning negotiations can make battles less of a chore, and quicker battles make dungeon exploration less of a chore. So how does the story connecting these dungeon sequences hold up? Well, without giving too much away, it revolves around a hospitalised student named Maki who suddenly turns up whilst the main characters are handling the creepy adversaries who have shown up around the gameworld. As the game progresses, we get more background on Maki’s appearance, and it’s quite refreshing to see a game where the story is centred on a party member who isn’t the protagonist – this is Maki’s journey. Admittedly, for a game with a female character at its core there are one or two scenes that come close to damsel rescue, but even these can result in Maki dealing with her inner demons. The rest of the story has mystery, villains, revelations and even some lighter moments such as the “Tesso” boss encounter, and it’s every bit as engaging as a modern Persona plot. Again, it’s easy to lament the loss of social links or calendar events, but the lack of downtime at least results in a focused pace.

LP Persona 1 with patienceI LP Persona 1

With an engaging story and (eventually) rewarding dungeon exploration, Persona 1 holds up well if you’re patient. Does Persona 1’s universe deserve more attention in a world where there are many more spin-offs for the newer games in the series? I don’t know how many of today’s gamers would be as patient with the classic gameplay, but a new adventure in the P1 setting with modern Persona design sensibilities could work. So when’s the next Atlus Consumer Survey?

To view PlayStation’s page on Persona 1, click here

Catherine: Full Body announced, with debut trailer

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Catherine: Full Body is the latest in a hypothetical series of “announcements that I never expected to be made” – the original game was one of the most unusual high-profile (I’m sure there were weirder indie games that I hadn’t heard of) games I had played in 2012, mixing a soap-opera level romantic drama with tense block-based puzzling. Compared to your typical world-saving RPG heroes and blind-firing space marines, it stood out amongst the crowd, and with the game coming from the same studio that brought us the Persona series, it certainly defied expectations. Catherine: Full Body remasters a seventh-gen title that refuses to be pigeonholed. The narrative swerves from the plausible to the absurd, the settings shift from mundane to otherworldly, the gameplay combines social minigames with block pushing and even the music slips between smooth jingles in the Stray Sheep bar to dramatic bombast in the nightmares. To begin with, it’s kind of hard to pin down, and Disposable Media can recall tales of people getting burned after seeing the involvement of Team Persona and expecting something closer to an RPG.

Catherine: Full Body – drama and novelty

Catherine: Full Body
At least when Catherine: Full Body is released players may have a better idea of what to expect. Looking back at my first playthrough(s) of the game, I found the puzzling tricky but not impossible, I thought that the core narrative was engaging but a bit too exaggerated for the purposes of tension (again, it’s a TV drama at best), and my favourite moments were probably the quieter bits in-between – checking in on the regulars in the Stray Sheep and hearing about their backgrounds, toying with the morality gauge during phone conversations, examining all of the interactive objects – the jukebox, the arcade machine, the restroom mirror… There’s a lot in there that is open to criticism, but the novelty of playing something so unique is enough to carry you through the first playthrough (besides, once you’re familiar with the puzzles you can clear the main game on Normal difficulty in just a few evenings.)

There aren’t a whole lot of details on Catherine: Full Body right now – we know that there will be a third central female character and new scenes for all three girls, and – brilliantly – the multiplayer Colosseum mode will return with online functionality. It’s said that a Niconico stream and trailer reveal will be on the way later this week (UPDATE: the trailer can now be found below) – personally I’m wondering if they can outdo the absurdity of the original’s Love Is Over special edition…

The website for Catherine: Full Body can be found at http://fullbody.jp/

Prima’s Art of Persona 5 book is here

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Despite being a fan of the later Persona games, I kind of feel like I haven’t talked about Persona 5 as much as I thought I would, at least not on Disposable Media. In my review back in April I came away from the game overwhelmed by how much had been added, but a little disappointed by some of the unique gameplay ideas that didn’t quite hit their mark. Initially I was going to immediately go back for a New Game+ run but then decided that I needed a break from Persona – I did, however, complete the game for a second time in October. Playing it again didn’t really change my opinion of the gameplay, but it did allow me to appreciate the fantastic aesthetic all over again. And so when I received Prima’s gorgeous Art of Persona 5 book recently, it was a good opportunity to enjoy all of the visual excellence once more.

The Art of Persona 5 – plenty of content

Art of Persona 5

The Art of Persona 5 is a much thicker tome than the Official Design Works books I have for Persona 3 and 4; their sub-200 page counts are dwarfed by the Prima book’s 448. The size of each individual page is more or less the same as the pages of the Official Design Works books, but you only have to pick this up to know that it means business. Inside, The Art of Persona 5 covers everything from character art and persona illustrations, through to promotional images, location backgrounds and more. Just like the Official Design Works books, certain sections have accompanying commentary from the creators, giving their view on what they were trying to achieve with the visual design of a particular character. I had never bought a Prima art book before, so I wasn’t sure if they’d be as generous with “bonus content” as the Official Design Works books – however, there’s plenty to enjoy beyond the illustrations.

The Art of Persona 5 – so shiny

Art of Persona 5

When it comes to the book’s downsides, I’m not sure if I’m a fan of the glossy cover that’s slipped over the top of the whole thing – I feel like it’s asking for finger marks and folds from more careless hands that may be drawn to the book if you haven’t left it in a safe place. Also, you only have to look at the contents page to see that the character art is the main attraction here. For me, it’s not really a downside as I was hoping and expecting a fair amount of the pagination to be reserved for the characters – however, people expecting more pages to be used for world and UI imagery may be disappointed.

The Art of Persona 5 – worth the wait

Art of Persona 5

Generally I’m very satisfied with The Art of Persona 5 – it may look a little out of place next to my Official Design Works books, but the amount of quality images and illustrations you get in the book make up for any inconsistencies on my shelf. At the time of writing, certain sites online contain skewed consumer reviews from numerous people who were disappointed with the shifting release dates, but it’s a good enough read when it’s finally in your hands. (And besides, it wouldn’t be a Persona 5 product without a number of delays.) Obviously I have no way of comparing it to the P5 Official Design Works book, but I’d like to think that either one of them would be worth picking up. (Buy both if you must, but I don’t know if I’m that fanatical…)

The Art of Persona 5 is out now and priced at £19.99. It’s published by Prima Games and you can find the book at their website here or at Amazon.

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Atlus Announce New JRPG The Alliance Alive for Nintendo 3DS

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Following on from the success of Persona 5 came the news Atlus will now publish in Europe. And now Atlus announce new JRPG The Alliance Alive for Nintendo 3DS. The title is due to be released in early 2018 for the handheld, and it comes from The Legend of Legacy developers FURYU Corporation. Their previous title was released for the 3DS in late 2015 in the U.S and in Europe in early 2016.

Atlus Announce New JRPG The Alliance Alive for Nintendo 3DS

The Alliance Alive is apparently going back to the classic greats of Japanese RPG gaming. Which means a sprawling world to explore, filled with numerous secrets, 9 apparently memorable characters, and turn-based strategic gameplay.

For those familiar with the genre, The Alliance Alive has been written by Yoshitaka Murayama, directed by Masataka Matsuura and designed by Kyoji Koizumi. With a soundtrack by composer Masashi Hamauzu. And the plot starts 1000 years ago, when Deamons invaded the world of Humans, subjugating us and creating a Great Barrier to seaparte the realms. In the process, the Dark Current appeared, decimating humans, swallowing cities and meaning that Daemons now rule the society left. But funnily enough, that may be about to change…

 

How that changes will involve some turn-based battling. The Alliance Alive will also feature the ‘Ignition’ system, which allows for a lot of customisation and reaching an ehanced state to deliver a ‘Final Strike’. Plus you’ll also need to establish and unite guilds across four realms, and experience the intertwining storyline as you take on the Daemons.

No release date has been announced yet, but given the pedigree of Atlus and the fact that The Legacy of Legend was favoured by those who prefer their RPG games to be old school, it looks pretty promising. With the same designer, director and composer, if you liked The Legacy of Legend, you should love this…

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Atlus will publish in Europe going forward

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When you think of Atlus games coming to the west, what comes to mind? The initial plans for Catherine to come to the west in the summer of 2011, only for it to be delayed until February 2012? The western release of Persona 5 slipping from 2015 to spring of 2017? Persona 4 Arena’s date shifting from August 2012 to May 2013? The slightly iffy dialogue in Persona 5’s localisation? Well, in the future you might not have to make your way to Deep Silver‘s HQ as you brandish your pitchforks and torches like some kind of Bloodborne goon. Instead, it’s been revealed that Atlus will publish in Europe – the PR manager of Atlus USA has explained that this will enable the company to release special edition products in more territories – but for most European fans it’s probably a relief to see the publisher acknowledge the continent for once.

Atlus will publish in Europe

Atlus will publish in Europe – what changes?

Knowing that Atlus will publish in Europe might not change anything – especially for us sorry folk in the United Kingdom – but for a long time it’s felt like any communication from Atlus to “the West” has had a decidedly American flavour. Disposable Media recalls European Persona fans getting all of their live news from Atlus USA streams, and when the chat flooded with requests for Europe release information John Hardin (who has since left his PR role at Atlus) would shrug and say something along the lines of “eh, I dunno, ask the Europe guys” – not much help when we had given up on them for any kind of information. People can speculate as much as they like about how this might affect releases or promotions, but the news that Atlus will publish in Europe hopefully means that a better connection with gamers in this continent can be established. And if not, you’ll know where to direct your angry tweets…

Atlus will publish in Europe

If you have your own thoughts on the news that Atlus will publish in Europe – especially if you’re a European gamer – leave a comment below

New Persona games revealed: Q2, P3D, P5D

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New Persona games have been announced this week following the Persona Super Live P-Sound Bomb concert that was recently broadcasted on the Japanese streaming service Nico Nico. Atlus has revealed that two new rhythm games will join Persona 4: Dancing All Night and will release on PS4 and Vita. The new Persona games will be titled Persona 3: Dancing Moon Night and Persona 5: Dancing Star Night. Already a teaser website for the two games is available here and it contains trailers from Youtube that can be viewed here (P3: DMN) and here (P5: DSN) Whilst I welcome the arrival of new Persona games, I admit that I still haven’t played Persona 4: Dancing All Night, but the two new Dancing games should complement the P4 game well, and anyone who’s a fan of the games’ music will want to get hold of Moon and Star.

New Persona games

New Persona games – Q2

In addition to this, Atlus has announced a sequel to Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth, the 3DS game that blended elements of Persona and Etrian Odyssey. Little was revealed about this game, but whilst putting together this article I learned that a teaser site for Persona Q2 had already gone live here – it appears to show an animated version of the Phantom Thieves logo and “Take Your Heart” slogan from Persona 5, although the logo’s drawn in the style of Q. Whether this means fans will be getting a Q game centred around the P5 cast or one with characters from multiple games remains to be seen. Again, Persona Q is one of the few spinoffs I still haven’t played (as I don’t own a 3DS and am not familiar with Etrian Odyssey gameplay) but I look forward to finding out more about the three games as news emerges. (Although is it too much to hope for a new Arena game too? Please, Atlus?)

New Persona games

Persona 5 review (PS4)

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It was an unenviable task. Persona 5 was released in April as the follow-up to one of the most finely crafted JRPGs of recent years: Persona 4 had tight dungeon design, a simple but likeable narrative and a collection of activities that never made the game feel limited or unfocused. From the outset, the fifth game wants to show you that it has bigger plans – you unlock a vast number of locations, there are several simple minigames to play, the narrative is denser, the world is more detailed and the dungeons are more elaborate. Together with your fellow phantom thieves, you must change the hearts of corrupt individuals by exploring “palaces” that represent their innermost perceptions of themselves and the world they’re in. For the most part, it’s business as usual – you study in the mornings, explore dungeons outside of school, and when there’s no target you can hang out with friends or indulge in stat-boosting activities. However, the dungeon crawling has seen the most significant overhaul, with changes both good and bad.

Persona 5 – fighting words

Persona 5

When you have a target and a palace, you navigate from room to room as you map out the palace, take out enemies, level up, and locate the “treasure” of someone’s mind. This is at its best when you’re doing the classic Persona thing – fighting battles and opening doors to new floors. Those battles still work with the same elemental weakness system that was so satisfying in the earlier games, but Persona 5 also overhauls the “negotiations” of the first game. Knock down opponents (by using elemental attacks the opponents are weak to) and instead of performing an all-out attack (a special move that damages all foes) you can talk to them. Depending on the foe and your responses, they could get angry and resume the battle, run away, give you an item or become a Persona that you can summon for your own use. With Shuffle Time gone, this is now the only way you gain new demons – each one offering skills (elemental attacks, physical hits, buffs, nerfs, status ailments, healing etc) that can be used in battle. It’s more satisfying than it was in the earlier games because each negotiation only has a small amount of multiple-choice questioning compared to the multitude of reactions and emotions in the first game.

Also satisfying is the planning of each change of heart. Find the treasure of someone’s palace (by battling through each floor to the end) and your team heads back to base to plan a proper infiltration. This lasts one in-game day and culminates in some of the most enjoyable boss battles in the game; most of these special battles have triggers in the arena that require party members to temporarily leave the main fight, but if the setup is successful then the battles get turned around and the party’s damage output ramps up. It’s a thrilling twist on the usual Persona boss format, and it’s great to see a JRPG where boss fights almost feel like a reward.

Persona 5 – locked doors

Persona 5

However, before you can face a boss you must negotiate the palace environment, and these are more complex layouts than the dungeons of previous games. Persona 4 sometimes turned a race to the stairs into a meandering backtrack to find a miniboss who would drop a key, and Persona 5 builds on this philosophy with more cunning locked door conundrums. Sometimes you’re just finding a switch to flick or a duct to crawl through, but other locked doors involve puzzles and minigames. Not all of these are that successful – a pitch-black maze in one area became a bit wearing and one later puzzle with weird transformative fog overstayed its welcome – but others have more enjoyable sequences. The successful implementation of these puzzles, locks and minigames isn’t necessarily down to how challenging they are, but more to do with how they suit the pace of the rest of the palace. If you weren’t a fan of P4’s locks or the gimmicky warp rooms in Yukiko’s Castle and Void Quest, you might not like P5’s offerings, but fortunately the lowlights are few and far between.

One returning feature that’s more successful is the scattering of save points within dungeons – P4 wasn’t very generous with its save points, but here you find “safe rooms” every few floors where you can manage the team, save, warp to other safe rooms (or out of the dungeon) and discuss your progress with the party. To begin with these feel like convenient checkpoints that save time, but later on the complex dungeons and trickier battles make every safe room discovery a welcome relief – when you’re deep in a palace and your resources are drying up, there’s nothing more satisfying than being informed that there’s a safe room nearby, allowing you to record your progress and leave the palace safely.

If the party has no target in the main story, Mementos fills any additional need for dungeon-crawling. A vast labyrinth of simpler rooms, it brings to mind the atmosphere of Persona 3’s Tartarus, and is a great way to build experience and do more negotiations to get a new Persona or two. Whilst it’s less of a priority than other activities in the game, you might well find yourself coming back to it if you’re between palaces and your dungeon-crawling itch can’t be scratched. Mementos does have occasional fixed boss encounters, but the world’s regions are somewhat less elaborate than the storyline palaces, making them a much snappier fix of dungeon crawling.

Persona 5 – too much of everything?

Persona 5

The more I played of Persona 5, the more I felt like it wanted to be the ultimate Persona experience – it wanted to be all things for all people. Do you miss the earlier games’ negotiations? Here are some negotiations. Do you want more minigames and places to travel to? Here they are. Did you like the eerie atmosphere of Tartarus? Welcome to Mementos. It’s as if the developers felt that the only way to expand upon P4 was to literally expand the game and offer more of everything. In some cases this results in more ideas that don’t quite work – certain puzzles felt like padding, and some minigames just felt clunky – but at the same time it results in a polished game with lots to do.

Critics have said that this feels more like iteration on a template as opposed to being a true refresh of Persona, and I can’t argue with that… but if you want more Persona, this is something you can pick up and try. If I were asked whether I like this more than P4, I’d have a hard time saying yes because of those slower exploration sequences – however, failing to match P4’s winning formula doesn’t stop P5 from being an utterly charming and engrossing experience, and if you’re after a deep, polished and varied JRPG, it’s well worth your time.

Persona 5 is out now for PS3 and PS4.

Persona 5 success – Atlus’ RPG tops the UK software charts

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Atlus and Deep Silver can celebrate the recent Persona 5 success as the game entered the charts at number one recently. The UK site Chart Track shows that for the week ending April 8th, Persona 5 hit the top spot in its first week, surpassing the likes of Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Wildlands, Lego Worlds, GTA, and Mass Effect: Andromeda.

The Persona series had never really seen success over here to begin with; the third game in the series was the first mainline Persona game that people in Europe and the UK were able to get hold of. Persona 4 followed soon after, and eventually ports of the original two games were released on the PlayStation Portable. At the time, Persona 3 was something that enjoyed a positive word-of-mouth reception but it wasn’t until the later games that the series popularity truly took off around the world.

Persona 5 success – worth the wait?

Persona 5 success

The Persona 5 success must come as a relief for a game that’s been in development for so long; noises were being made about the game’s existence in the late 00s and early 10s, and the game suffered several delays with both the Japanese and western releases. Earlier games have since seen countless amounts of merchandise produced – soundtracks, art books, special edition extras – and it’s safe to assume that more of that will follow now that Persona 5 is released.

As for the game itself? Well, you might have to wait a little longer for some extended opinions to end up on this site – games in the Persona series aren’t exactly known for their brevity – but all signs point to it being another enjoyable and imaginative high school adventure. Whilst we’re so used to the CODs and FIFAs dominating charts, it’s good to know that the likes of Persona, Zelda and Nier are also enjoying commercial success.

Persona 5 released in the west

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It’s been a long time coming, but Persona 5 is finally available for western gamers. The game was first teased in late November of 2013, eventually arriving in Japan around September 2016. This week, you and I will be able to try the game ourselves – it should be available to buy on the PS Store today. Despite being a big fan of the latter games in the series, I didn’t want to flood Disposable Media with too many pre-release articles of speculation and snippets of news, not least because I was wading through that myself when trying to find substantial information from reliable sources. I highlighted a few of the trailers, shared the news of the initial February date and some details from an official stream, and pointed readers to one of the free theme giveaways. However, I saw a lot more news across other websites and if I shared every detail on these pages then it would be a complete mess. I had hoped that what I published would be reliable information relevant to the interests of people waiting for the game, and now that we’re seeing Persona 5 released this should be one of the last things I publish before putting the disc in and playing for myself.

Persona 5 released – living up to a legacy?

Persona 5 released

We’ve waited a while to see Persona 5 released, and it would be a bit of a missed opportunity to draft up so much speculation and then have nothing to add when the game finally arrives. We’ll have a review, of course, but Persona games aren’t known for their brevity, and I may well have plenty of thoughts to share along the way before coming to a verdict. Persona 3 was able to shake up the JRPG formula and fix so many issues I had with more traditional games in the genre. Persona 4 took the template of 3 and trimmed the bloated bits and the dead time into something more varied and interesting. P5 could be something special… but when I consider the standard set by the previous game, I feel like I should keep my expectations at a realistic level – if only for my own sanity. Expect more coverage of the Phantom Thieves’ adventures after we see Persona 5 released this week.

Persona 5 is out now on the PlayStation store, and should be hitting doormats around the west today.

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