This week’s edition of Japanese games magazine Famitsu contains some brand new information on Persona 5, offering some more perspective and a clearer look at the upcoming title. Here’s what we know:
– The protagonist is, surprise, surprise, a second year high-school student transferring to a new school at the beginning of the school year. He’ll be moving in above a coffee shop owned by friends of his parents, which’d explain why the gang’s hideout looks so similar to the bar from Catherine.
– The game is set across various parts of Tokyo, but begins in Shibuya. It’s interesting to see Atlus using a real world location for the game, as opposed to fictional locales such as Tatsumi Port Island or Inaba.
– Social Links will be coming back, so you’ll be able to romance your favourite Persona girls and get angry to the point of sending me death threats when I off-handedly mention I’m not a big Chie fan.
– The protagonist’s starting persona is named Arsène, after famous fictional French thief Arsène Lupin.
– The magazine is reporting that there’s a vague indication that the protagonist is forced to fight or something bad may happen to him as a result. The shot from the trailer showing him locked up was intended to act as a visual metaphor for a “prison of the mind”.
– Interestingly, this is tied into the onomatopoeia “ブチッ” (buchi), a snapping sound, used in the summoning of Personas. Typically the series has used onomatopoeia to represent a clicking or flashing sound. Buchi can be used to represent a physical or mental snap, which may give credence to the end of the trailer, where the protagonist is enveloped by the flames of his Persona.
– And finally, Famitsu report that the dungeon shown in the trailer was not randomly generated. While this doesn’t mean that there won’t be randomization in the dungeons, Famitsu claims there are certain sections that will be hard-coded in, presumably for reasons relevant to the plot.
It’s all very exciting stuff, and being that we’re huge Persona fans here at Chooch, it’s sure to do nothing but stoke the staff’s fires while we continue to argue and fight over who gets to review the game when it eventually comes out.
