Aiming to outdo Personas 3 and 4, as they should!
Ah the venerable tidbit. I’m not sure if news for any other game I’m interested in comes in tidbit form as often as Persona 5, a weird combination of tight-lipped Japanese development (“please look forward to learning more when you play the game”) and insatiable Persona fans going for the granular.
These bits come from Persona series director Katsura Hashino writing in “Persona Magazine #2016 March,” as translated by Gematsu. The game is still coming this summer! Not a fake out!
As we’ve been guessing from the few trailers, dungeon design “is vastly different from previous games,” and they all, “incorporate different stories,” like Persona 4. Atlus also calls its own “phantom thieves” motif a bit of a cliche and an intentional one at that. Persona 5 aims to “combine contemporary drama with Persona.”
The cast are all misfits and social outcasts this time around, but Ryuji Sakamoto (his persona is Captain Kidd) is, “a ‘let’s change the world’ character who pulls along the protagonist.” And without bolstering the dumb “why do anime characters look white?” crowd, looks like the blonde Ann Takamaki (persona is Carmen) is “one-quarter American,” which, uh, what? I’m pretty sure you can only be 100% American or 0% American, legally. Unless dual citizenship halves it. I don’t know. It’s really hard and expensive to renounce American citizenship, though. Partially because more and more people are doing it over the last five years. Ann also has some vague influence on Ryuji and the protagonist going over to the “other world” in the first place.
Morgana (the cat whose persona is Zorro) is responsible for training the crew as “phantom thieves” — I’m sensing a “culprit” style term that’s going to be way over used. And Yusuke Kitagawa is a painter/art student. There’s also going to be a Social Link style system, but perhaps the team’s success with more mature story-telling in Catherine has them aiming higher this time around (which I both hoped for and expected):
“Is communication the driving force for those who are trying to make a change? With that question in mind, Hashino says that it will be good if Persona 5 depicted human relations a step above Persona 3 and Persona 4‘s Social Links.”
Agreed!
One final bit of tid: while we’re all looking forward to P5 in June, this year is the 20th anniversary of Persona, and, “Atlus is thinking about making an announcement that will please users,” perhaps after it gets P5 out the door.
