Persona 5 announced: I am far too masculine and dignified to make “squee” noises, but if that were not the case I would do so here

Katsura Hashino of Atlus, director of Persona 3 and producer of Persona 4, has announced that work is now under way on the fifth game in the popular RPG series. Virtually nothing else is known at this point; even the system it's being made for is still a mystery. Atlus USA has been doing a nice job making the various Shin Megami Tensei-related games available in America, and Persona 3 and 4 were two of my favorite games on the PS2, so confirmation that there will be a Persona 5 is great news for me.

I'm curious to see where they take it. One of the interesting things about parts 3 and 4 was that, despite sharing a setting and having the same basic mechanics, the tone of the games was strikingly different. This extended from the plot and characters into subtle things like the color of the in-game menus (dark and somber-looking in 3, lots of cheery yellow and orange for 4) and whether the majority of the game's important events too place at night (Persona 3) or during the day (Persona 4). It was quite a shift.

Which made sense, given that the dominant theme of Persona 4 was the pursuit of truth, self-understanding and acceptance, and the overcoming of illusions and ignorance, whereas the theme of Persona 3 was DEATH IS INEVITABLE AND INESCAPABLE, ESPECIALLY FOR YOU. (I hasten to add that the game is much more fun than that probably makes it sound.) I thought that they did both styles extremely well, so I look forward to seeing what's next.

A chilling vision of things to come

In my intro post to this blog, I promised/threatened that I would occasionally include some actual serious commentary on video games to balance out the pointlessly obscure references, sniggering 3rd-grade humor, cruel mockery, and outright lying that usually fill this space.

To that end, I’ll be doing a series of occasional posts on games I’ve recently completed. I don’t expect them to be systematic or objective enough to be considered “reviews” in any proper sense; it’ll just be whatever thoughts about the game come to mind. So, when I do a post on Battlefield: Bad Company and interrupt my discussion of the various multiplayer modes to go on an 8,000 word rant about how the four soldiers who serve as the protagonists in the single player campaign are consistently referred to as a “squad” even though in the U.S. Army the four-man unit portrayed in the game is more properly called a “fireteam” and a squad is actually comprised of two such fireteams and seeing the terminology wrong just makes me SO INCREDIBLY ANGRY, don’t say you weren’t warned..

I have a bit of a backlog of older games I still want to play, and I’m generally not in a huge hurry to get games as soon as they come out unless there’s some sort of really cool preorder incentive (e.g. many of Atlus’ games) or I’m worried about having trouble finding a copy later (again, Atlus). So, when I start talking about this cool game I just beat called Keith Courage in Alpha Zones and post my treatise on what it might mean for the future of the Turbografx-16… Well, again, you knew what you were getting into.

My first post in this vein will be about Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 from Atlus. Gird your loins while you still can.