Persona Overload
The Persona franchise is a critical darling in the JRPG world, but it wasn’t until Persona 4 that people started to really take notice. With a successful adaptation on the PlayStation Vita and a popular beat ’em up spin-off series already under its belt; it is seeing yet another spin-off on the Playstation Vita. This time however players are going to have to bring their dancing fingers, as it’s a rhythm game.
Persona 4: Dancing All Night was announced back in 2013 alongside the recently released Persona Q. During their massive Persona Channel 2015 stream, they revealed loads of information about the game, including the Japanese special editions, new characters, track-lists and even released a new trailer. It is slated for a 25th June release in Japan, but there is no word on a Western release just yet. The games Japanese website has some information in English, including the track-list, so it’s well worth a look.
However, that wasn’t the only big news to come out of the Persona Channel 2015 stream, as fans were finally able to see gameplay footage of the next main game in the series, Persona 5. With a mooted release date still of the end of 2015, at least for Japan and North America, the game will be landing on PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4. It will yet again be taking place within the schooling system, as a group of high schoolers are pursued due to the justice they believe in.
Who is chasing them we don’t know yet, but the gameplay shows what looks like a much more action orientated style of gameplay, with platforming sections clearly shown and what looks like a cover system. The team revealed in the trailer is much smaller than the branching cast of Persona 4. It will be interesting to see if the team grows bigger than the 4 shown off in the trailer.
Persona 5 seems like an interesting turn around to previous games that had a fairly traditional “heroes vs. bad guys” set-up. The worlds seem much more populated as well and it will be interesting to see how much freedom we have to explore. You can read more from the director, Katsura Hashino, over at Gameatsu and catch the trailer below.