At long last, Atlus has released its gameplay trailer for ‘Persona 5’!
The game is expected to be released sometime this year for both the PS3 and PS4. Katsura Hashino returns as director as well as Shigenori Soejima as lead character designer for this next installment in the ‘Persona’ series.
The trailer is a welcome sight given that the initial teasers for the game gave fans little information about ‘Persona 5’ other than the main character’s appearance and a return to a city setting similar to that of ‘Persona 3.’
While there is still little information on the specifics of its characters and story, there is enough in the trailer to give us some hints. Three new characters were revealed (a brunette girl, a blond boy, and a…cat?) along with what looks like a masked vigilantes/thieves theme. This criminal-inspired theme goes along with the original teaser in which five chairs slowly appear and become shackled, as well as the main character appearing in jail clothes and locked in a cell at one point in the new trailer (which would make the game quite thematically different from ‘Persona 4’ as this comic points out). Other than that, fans will have to speculate until more details are revealed.
The trailer doesn’t show any gameplay as far as battle mechanics but moving about the world now appears to have its own gameplay as well, a first for the ‘Persona’ games. Jumping from platforms, ducking and rolling, possible stealth mechanics; quite a difference from its “walk or run, press button to interact” predecessors’ gameplay.
The news is not just exciting for fans of the ‘Persona’ series. According to IGN’s Colin Moriarty:
“Persona 5 is a huge deal. The way this particular series lit-up JRPGs not only back in 2008 with Persona 4, but on Vita with the Golden iteration, is a sign of things to come. Persona is on the brink of being a true global phenomenon in gaming, and it may just begin with Persona 5 . . .”
Whether this statement turns out to be an accurate prediction we will just have to wait and see, but fans of the JRGP genre will certainly be rooting for Moriarty’s statement to ring true.
Hopefully more information will be released soon as well as a more definitive release date; until then, fans of the series have the recently released ‘Persona Q’ to hopefully hold them over.
