How this game saved his company from bankruptcy and became a modern RPG phenomenon (and no, it’s not Final Fantasy)

Gaming News How this game saved his company from bankruptcy and became a modern RPG phenomenon (and no, it’s not Final Fantasy)

2024 will be a big year for Atlus. From the month of February, The Japanese publisher is off to a strong start with the release of Persona 3 Reload, a remake of Persona 3 using Unreal Engine 5 to render in the style of Persona 5, the game behind the franchise’s recent popularity. A little later, in the fall, we will finally be able to play Metaphor: ReFantazio, the new project from the creators of Persona 3, 4 and 5, announced since 2016.

With all these titles planned, we can say that Atlus is doing very well, so much so that Persona is now one of the great modern franchises of SEGA, the studio’s owner, alongside Yakuza/Like a Dragon. And yet, Atlus wouldn’t be where it is today if a radical decision hadn’t been made 20 years ago for a game that changed everything for the company: Persona 3.

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Before Persona, there was Shin Megami Tensei

With the success of Persona 5, you’ve probably become interested in the series as a whole. And if we look closer, You’ve probably noticed that there’s a real dichotomy within the Persona saga between the first two episodes and the last three. Persona is originally a sub-series of the successful Shin Megami Tensei (SMT) series. These are role-playing games with turn-based combat, always dealing with the same bestiary of demons from different mythologies from all over the world. All of this often takes place in a dark atmosphere with esoteric and occult themes.

To differentiate itself from other series in the franchise, Persona is unique in that it features high school students in a school setting and adopts an anime aesthetic, and has been since its beginnings. While the first episode is really reminiscent of SMT due to its dungeon crawler nature, the second episode stands out for the structure of its dungeons. Apart from this originality, this has to be acknowledged“Initially the series stays very close to the SMT formula.”. In other words, we are dealing more with a new variant within a niche franchise, which is not conducive to its democratization. However, things are about to change with Persona 3, thanks to the persistence of one man: Katsura Hashino.

Katsura Hashino, homme fort d’Atlus?

When Katsura Hashino arrived at Atlus in 1994, he immediately worked on several SMT projects in key roles, most notably as game designer for Shin Megami Tensei If…, Devil Summoner and its sequel Soul Hackers. In other words, important titles for the franchise. Building on this success, Hashino is promoted to director and supervisor of a major project: the third numbered episode of the main series, namely Shin Megami Tensei: Lucifer’s Call. A game that will have great success at the license level, to the point of claiming a remaster in 2021 that will achieve half a million sales.

Despite this success Atlus is not doing well in the 2000s. More specifically, it wasn’t Atlus so much as INDEX, its parent company, which was threatened with closure before being acquired by SEGA in 2013. In the context of the time, Katsura Hashino was chosen to develop the third episode of Persona. If we look at his career, this decision makes sense because SMT If…, which he worked on as a game designer, was a proto-persona. When the designer was at the helm of the project, Atlus was on the verge of collapse and he learned that Persona 3 could well be the company’s last game. A situation that is reminiscent of the creation of the first Final Fantasy. To prevent this from happening, he decides to make the franchise more attractive, which won’t be to everyone’s taste.

During an interview last year with J-Wave Radio, Katsura Hashino said that before starting development on Persona 3, he first analyzed and analyzed the previous games in depth, be it in terms of systems, decor or themes, to come up with a new formula for it Suggest leadership team. And the creators of the franchise don’t care. He says he had great difficulty convincing some of the company’s veterans, who thought his proposal deviated too much from the series’ basics. Given this, Hashino responds that this change is necessary for the license to attract new players and that it appeals to more than just fans. Otherwise, the company would disappear at this rate. After long negotiations and given the urgency of the situation, these senior executives finally accepted Hashino’s proposal, concluding: “This will be the Persona series. Everything will be fine, forgive me.“

Persona 3, the game that saved Atlus?

Persona 3 thus breaks the classic Persona structure on all levels. The most important point of this overhaul concerns the visual novel and dating simulator aspect that is now part of the series’ identity. Specifically, the focus was on the dialogues, the characters and the relationships that the player maintains with them, which develop over time, particularly thanks to his social skills. Additionally, The player has to cope with the everyday life of a high school student between classes, free time, odd jobs and dungeons to explore, which is radically different from previous games. This makes the experience much more conversational, but creates a strong sense of connection with the characters, a key element of the series’ popularity.

It must be said that this is partly due to the work of Shigenori Soejima, a genius character designer for whom this was one of the first projects as art director. For the occasion, The latter takes the anime aesthetic even further to appeal to a youth audience, while maintaining an SMT-specific dark dimension. The same goes for Shoji Meguro’s compositions, whose funky tones at the intersection of all genres will over time become an important part of the series’ identity and popularity.

Result, Persona 3 becomes a solid basic formula for the franchise, which is perfected with the following episode Persona 4 and leads to the phenomenon Persona 5, which has now sold more than 10 million copies. Building on this success, Atlus wanted to expand the franchise’s popularity by developing numerous spin-offs on P5 (Strikers, Dancing, Tactica…), but also re-releasing 3 and 4 on modern consoles. From now on, Persona is better known than its parent series Shin Megami Tensei, which also benefits from this popularity. Today it is the turn of Persona 3 to return to the spotlight with Reload, its remake that allows as many people as possible to discover this gem in more modern conditions.