With Shin Megami Tensei 5 having finally launched for the Nintendo Switch, questions are going to be asked soon about what lies next for Atlus- and the company seems to have some big plans for 2022.
In a recent annual end-of-the-year feature, Famitsu interviews over 100 developers as they look ahead to 2022- one of them was Atlus’ product manager Shinjiro Takada, who says that sometime next year, Atlus is planning on releasing a major game that will “become a pillar of Atlus”.
“I chose ‘challenge’ as the keyword for 2022, with the hope to release a game that will become a pillar for Atlus,” Takada said (translated by Persona Central). “All of us at Atlus are working hard to develop this game so that it will be interesting and satisfying for everyone, so please look forward to it.”
The game that instantly comes to mind here is Project Re Fantasy. The new fantasy RPG IP, led by Persona director Katsura Hashino by Atlus’ new internal team Studio Zero, was first talked about way back in 2017. Around this time last year, Atlus suggested that concrete details on the game would be arriving sometime in 2021, though we can probably assume that the ongoing pandemic presented obstacles there. Earlier this year, the developer also said that Project Re Fantasy was making progress “little by little”.
Of course, Atlus has started staffing up for the next mainline Persona game as well, though it’s safe to say that that one’s probably several years off yet. Rumours have suggested that a multiplatform Persona 3 Portable remaster and Switch and PS4 versions of Persona 4 Golden are inbound as well, though it remains to be seen how accurate that is.
