I’m going to unpack that statement now, because it has nothing to do with gameplay:
For those unfamiliar with the series, Shin Megami Tensei: Persona is a series of off beat, turn based JRPGs that play like demonic Pokemon meets your standard dungeon crawl meets The Sims with a story heavily influenced by Japanese mythology and Jungian psychology, with an emphasis on deconstructing variants of common JRPG and character tropes to explore the darker aspects of the psyche of fairly regular and relateable people. If that sounds awesome, it’s because it is, if it doesn’t make any sense Giant Bomb has a(mostly spoiler free) explanation.The upcoming PS3 and PS4 release being Persona 5.
Last generation JRPGs, including Persona, virtually disappeared from the English speaking console space and turn based examples were even more scarce. Oh sure I can think of some, I’ve played most of them, but the FF 13 series is the only high profile example I’m aware of and many (including the 13 series) suffered from pretty serious problems in one way or another. Square Enix has even admitted that they’ve been screwing up following the success ofBravely Defaultandbig financial lossesin 2013. This overall trend has led to people (that I respect less each time they say it) claiming that JRPGs are dead and that turn based RPGs in general are dead, especially on consoles.
I happen to really like turn based JRPGs, and I know as a fact that neither subgenre is dead and both can sell really well (even the oft maligned FF13 and 13-2 sold millions of copies in America/Europe and Dragon Quest is big in Japan,) which brings me to my point: I hope Persona 5 does for JRPGs and turn based JRPGs what Dark Souls did for challenging games and Skyrim did for offline single-player only games when everyone was insisting weredeadback in 2011.
I want it to grab the mainstream by it’s throat and beat the idea that turn based RPGs and JRPGs are alive and well into it’s collective consciousness. I want it to sell 4 or 5 times what the competition does in the west and prove to both ignorant gamers and devs/publishers that the market is fine and that there are millions of content starved console gamers just waiting for games to play and that JRPGs, turn based and otherwise, are a good place to invest your time and money.
Let’s face facts, Square Enix lost it’s edge and has been increasingly chasing the action crowd for a decade. While they could theoretically push turn based JRPGs back, I don’t see it happening. Know who is, as far as I know, the only company currently poised to fill the gap in the market Square Enix has left and potentially save the genre 10 more years of struggle and obscurity? ATLUS. ATLUS and it’s pair of in house studios make the best JRPGs in the business bar none, uniting most of them under the banner Shin Megami Tensei (or simply Megami Tensei in Japan.) The Persona series is the most popular branch of the Shin Megami Tensei tree and it puts ATLUS in a unique position to potentially fill a the big hole Square Enix has left unfilled in the west for 10 years. None of it’s games have sold very well but proper budgets and minimal marketing have let ATLUS continue to profit by catering to it’s (extremely loyal) fanbase for the last 3 decades.
Then Persona 4 Golden happened. An enhanced Vita port of Persona 4 for the PS2, as if by magic (and by magic I mean multiple successful movies, a manga, a radio drama and a pair of TV shows based on Personas 3 and 4 getting attention) Persona 4 Golden’s release was accompanied by a Vita sales jump of 150%, more than double it’s usually weekly sales, and Persona 4 Goldensold almost a million copies,more than doubling thesales of the originaldespite being on a system with an estimated 95% smaller user base, selling only 1.9 million units in theUSand approximately 4 million inJapan.
It’s been a slow build to Persona 5 from Persona 4, but given the content starved JRPG crowd and the recent surge in popularity of Persona 4 despite the painfully small userbase of the Vita, I think ATLUS is uniquely primed to follow the footsteps of Fromsoft and indeed Bethesda, to take their already successful series and see an explosion of popularity that reminds everyone that turn based JRPGs are here to stay.
Square Enix claims to get it now, and maybe they do, but they’ve lost my trust over the last decade and don’t have anything ready for a year or more anyways. So if you have a Vita or a PSP or a PS3 or a PS2, like JRPGs and you haven’t played the Persona series, do so. They are cheap on the PSN and whatever game you’re playing now isn’t as good. If you can’t, hit YouTube, watch Let’s Plays of Persona 3 and/or 4.
This is where the article becomes a call to arms. If you are one of the 1 to 2 million people who have played Persona 3 or 4: tell everyone. Everyone needs to know how awesome the series is, everyone needs to be excited for Persona 5, everyone must know the name. It needs to be a name like Dark Souls. When it’s name is mentioned everybody must have an idea of what it is and what that means, why they might like it. ATLUS has apparently been doing some clever marketing, but they can’t shell out 20 million dollars to market their game large scale. If we can’t be convinced to shut up about how great it is, how good it looks, how deep the combat is, how well the series handles it’s numerous mature themes, how well written the characters are, they don’t have to. Make noise on Facebook, use a # on twitter, take over Reddit, repeatedly express your excitement to anyone who will listen. We can do what was already done for Dark Souls and be the mouthpiece that uses their current momentum to turn a cult classic to a world wide phenomenon.
