Sometimes I still don’t quite believe it. After years, decades, of Atlus stubbornly refusing to put a bunch of Persona games on anything but a PlayStation, I now have 3, 4 and 5—in their expanded-edition forms—plus a 3 remake in my Steam library. What a time to be alive.
Of course, there’s still something missing, isn’t there? Persona 1 and 2, the original PS1 games that were made before the series came under the directorship of Katsura Hashino (who’s now off working on Metaphor: ReFantazio), are hard to play nowadays. The first game technically came out on PC, but good luck getting a hold of it legitimately, while the second has never broken free of its Sony jail.
The good news is that Persona series general producer Kazuhisa Wada is well-aware people want to get their hands on the originals in some form, and it sounds like he’d like to do it. The bad news is that—if it ever happens—it doesn’t sound like it’ll be soon. In a chat with GameSpot, Wada said that remakes of the original games weren’t “on [his] schedule right now,” but he’d “like to do it someday.” Which sounds like the kind of thing my parents used to tell me when I asked for a toy I was absolutely, definitively, never, ever going to get.
Right now, of course, Wada and co are focused on the imminent release of Persona 3 Reload’s Episode Aigis DLC, the new version of Persona 3 FES’ Aigis-focused epilogue. After that? Well, I’d have to imagine someone’s chipping away at a Persona 6 somewhere in the bowels of Atlus’ offices. Perhaps once that’s done, it’ll seem worth Atlus’ time to make us some P1 and P2 remakes?
To be honest, I’m not entirely sure I need them. If I were the philosopher-king-tyrant of the world, Atlus would just pretty up the original games with some light-touch remasters and put those out before moving onto to something entirely new. I probably won’t get my way, though. People like their remakes: Persona 3 Reload became the fastest-selling game in Atlus history almost instantly, after all.
Another thing I’m not getting? The female protagonist from Persona 3 Portable in Reload. Asked about her absence, Wada said that the team considered it when planning Episode Aigis, but “the more we looked at what this would take to make happen, the more unlikely it became.” It’s just too cost- and time-prohibitive, says Wada, and too delicate a task to farm out to an external studio. Which he’s pretty much said before, mind you, but I do kind of like that the enthusiasm for P3’s female protagonist (Kotone Shiomi, put some respect on her name) is so high that it’s haunting every interview he does.
