Last week, Atlus finally lived up to its promise of sharing more information on their eagerly anticipated game Persona 5, when they gave us our first look at the game by sharing an extremely stylish debut trailer. Since then, even as the world has whipped itself up in a frenzy, and Atlus themselves have shared some more information about the game, we’ve mostly been left to our own devices.
Well thankfully, that changed today, when information from the latest issue of Famitsu (where Persona 5 is the cover game) leaked, where the director of the game shares some more tidbits about the title. Here is what we found out (translation provided by Siliconera):
- Much like in previous Persona games, the protagonist is a second-year high school student, who transfers to the city during the spring.
- The protagonist moves into a coffee shop owned by friends of his parents (presumably, this is the coffee shop that we saw in the trailer).
- The game starts out in Shibuya (which was prominently featured in other games like The World Ends With You and Atlus’ own Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor), but more locations from Tokyo also feature in later.
- Atlus confirmed that the Persona 5 protagonist is not a blank slate- he carries some baggage, and he has some sorts of problems that must be resolved sooner or later, or they will create issues for him down the road.
- The Velvet Room is now a prison cell.
- Social Links, the series’ signature feature, will be returning in Persona 5 in some form, although they may not necessarily be called that, and they may work differently.
- Not all dungeons will be randomly generated, and most of them will be designed to showcase the main character’s abilities as a ‘phantom thief;’ that said, Atlus did warn us that there will be some degree of randomization in the game.
- As widely expected, the protagonist’s first exclusively usable Persona is named “Arsène,” a direct nod to the game’s chief source of inspiration.
- Battles will still be turn based, though they have been reworked.
- Atlus confirmed that players are battling Personas like Jack Frost and Sandman, as seen in the trailer, though they refused to comment on the significance of this.
- Each character will now carry guns.
- All the other characters we have seen so far are characters who are introduced very early in the story; the cat, Morgana, is specifically highlighted as being very important to the game’s overall plot.
And that’s it!
Personally, this is more than enough for me to get hyped over- now I just hope that Atlus goes ahead and announces the release date for this game, in Japan, and the rest of the world, soon, because I absolutely cannot wait.
