With the September release date inching ever closer, Atlus is starting to really dole out the goodies when it comes to their PlayStation Portable re-imagining of Shin Megami Tensei: Persona. Earlier in the week we saw website updates (with more promised) and now we've got a lengthy video highlighting how the game has been upgraded, what's been added, and how the experience has been streamlined from the original PlayStation version from the '90s.
Even if you played the original incarnation of the game, this new version brings unique things to the table. The battle system has been tweaked to allow for much quicker turn based combat. The music has been overhauled (and will come on two CDs with launch versions of the title), and most impressive of all is the addition of the Snow Queen quest—a segment that was cut from the game back in its first release. Oh—the game's harder too. Masochists will love it.
Of course, it's not all about change. Demon wrangling is still a major component of the experience (but the system has been made more user-friendly) and fusing the hellish minions together in the Velvet Room (with the help of Igor) is still in the mix as well.
As the video demonstrates, it looks like Persona PSP is shaping up quite nicely. Atlus seems genuinely excited to bring this new version of the cult classic to a generation of gamers who missed it on the first go-round. Let's hope it sells well—maybe then we can finally get Persona 2: Innocent Sin here in America.
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A film critic by trade, specializing in Euro-horror, cult exploitation, and Asian action cinema, Mike has written reviews for a diverse group of print and online publications. He covers horror news, movies, books, and games at TheHorrorGeek.com and Horrorsquad.com and spent two seasons as The Horror Geek on Comedy Central's pop-culture game show, Beat the Geeks.
Mike's childhood was spent playing videogames any time he got a chance. His parents had a Pong console and his grandmother had an Atari 2600, where Mike cultivated his skills by playing hour upon hour of games like Space Invaders, Berserk, and Asteroids. From those early experiences Mike learned one thing: he loved games.
In 1999, Mike became a staff reviewer at Cinescape Magazine's website where he spent a year learning the craft of game criticism. After internal changes led to Mike leaving Cinescape in late 2000, he joined up with RPGFan in 2001 and spent several years writing reviews for them. Happy, but looking for an opportunity to expound on a wider variety of titles, Mike joined GameCritics.com and hopes to help Chi, Dale, and the rest of the GC staff bring a higher level of respect to the field of game criticism.
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I’ve never been a fan of J-Pop (or the typically rather tasteless JRPGs aesthetics, for that matter), but I found the soundtrack in Persona 3 and 4 to be suitable and quite enjoyable – if also noticeably less entertaining to have to listen to during, say, the 90th hour of gameplay than during the 1th. That said, because of the considerable differences in tone and overall atmosphere between P3-P4 and Persona 1 it’s definitely going to be a bit more jarring to hear this particular kind of music in the latter game. But the choice of music isn’t something which… Read more »
I’m with you on the music. I hate the cheesy J-pop of Persona 3 and 4 too–and I’m sad to see they’re adding it to this game as well.
That being said, everything else they’re changing looks like an improvement. I’ll suffer through the shitty pop music (with the volume muted in case anyone’s in ear-shot) for a better Persona experience overall.
Why oh why did they redo the music?
It’d be different if they were just remixes or updates of the original tracks, but the poptrash they’ve shoehorned in here not only doesn’t really fit with the game, but is worse in nearly every measurable way to the original soundtrack.
I understand that the intent is to make it consistent with P3 and 4, but such an effort seems wasted on a game that’s so fundamentally different anyway.