Persona Q, Shadow of Persona 3 & 4

[trenchkamen]

I’ve been enjoying Persona Q-it’s a fun dungeon crawler with fanservicy bits-but I haven’t felt the same sense of awe I felt playing the original games. All of the spin offs work like supplementary material to the original game, fun in their own right, but now they seem to bury the main game. Maybe that’s why lately I’ve felt disengaged from the

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[satyreyes]

I haven't played the spinoff games -- no PS3 -- but I did play the P3 Vita port, as well as P4 Golden, this year. Have you played Golden? I'm not really part of the Persona fandom, though I love the games, so I don't know how it's been received. I loved it. I thought the added scenes and arcs were mostly in the spirit of the original. There was a little awkwardness, the occasional moment where you can tell the writers are getting carried away with what they can make the characters do, and good lord was Yosuke always this bad at women?, but I liked Golden better than the original game, and I liked the original game a lot.

Instead of Persona spinoff games, I played the Danganronpa games. I was introduced to them as sort of a Persona/Phoenix-Wright hybrid, which are two of my favorite things. And I liked them a lot. But if the Persona label had been on them, I would've been pretty disappointed. The characters may be head and shoulders above what most games bother with, but even the most carefully developed Danganronpa characters don't approach most of the Persona cast. They are (sometimes literally) cardboard cutouts by comparison. I imagine I would feel about Danganronpa kind of like you felt about the spinoffs: that these characters didn't do justice to their richest selves. To enjoy Danganronpa, I had to stop expecting it to be Persona and let it be fantastic on its own terms. That's harder to do for games that have "PERSONA" in their titles.

It's just a guess, but I kind of suspect Atlus is cowed by how passionate Persona's fanbase has become, and is acutely conscious of how easily they could poison the brand with a bad mainline entry. They are not exactly rushing to get out P5. But they figure that they can play around with remakes and half-serious spinoffs. I mean: does anyone expect a brawling game to feature deep characterization? When P5 comes out, it'll definitely be put up or shut up. I want P5, but guess I don't blame Atlus for wanting to put off the moment of reckoning.