If you have not seen the TGS trailer for "Persona 5", do yourself a DAMNED favor and watch it, right, f ** king, NOW. Its the video above, hell, even if you've watched it, just watch it again, I've probably watched it about 40 times in the past 48 hours.
So, the game has been delayed. Boohoo, everyone is sad, angry and disappointed. But you know what? The game probably has a reason for being delayed, and you damned well know that if its delayed, you can bet your ass that Atlus is going to further improve it as a masterpiece. The game, already looks great. Hell, it looks AMAZING, the delay probably means that they've got some stuff to fix. Would you want our sacred "Persona 5", the game that we've waited about 7 years for, to be incomplete or buggy? I'm sure not, the delay, for the better or worse, will help the game out, Stop bitching and take it like a man (or woman).
I have all due faith that Atlus WILL deliver with "Persona 5". I did not do a post about the 2nd trailer because honestly, that one did not show all that much new stuff, but THIS trailer right here ... I just had to jump right in. Without further ado, let's talk about the TGS trailer.
Speculation On New Characters
So, there's one thing we know for now. Based on the opening few seconds of the trailer, we see our heroes running down a pyramid as they are being chased by .... something. We can see a very BRIEF glimpse of 5 characters ... plus Morgana, of course. So 5 characters plus our dear cat, that's about 6 characters confirmed. Whether or not they'll be legit party members, that, I do not know, but we can safely assume so. At least now we know that we have more than our standard 4 characters we saw from the first trailer. Who are these new guys anyway? That's also a mystery that has to be solved another time. The trailer DID preview new characters, but we're not sure if they're part of this 6 man party as we see in this opening cutscene.
First up, we have this fellow. This guy is new, we did not see him in the first trailer, but we can assume him to be the blue haired young man at the end of the second trailer. Honestly, I'm not too sure who this guy or what he's up to. He might be a 5th party member, or simply another phantom thief like our heroes that isn't working together with them. At this point, we really don't know anything, because his appearance is seriously so brief. I assume that he IS going to work with our heroes at some point because of a certain part in the trailer though. He DOES remind me a bit of Makoto from "Persona 3", at least without the mask on.
There we go. See the second guy on the left with the tanuki tail? Look at his mask and outfit, he shares the same appearance as our masked man up above. Since he's running together with Sakamoto, our protagonist and Morgana, he SHOULD be a party member of sorts. But as mentioned earlier, whether or not he was part of the 6 man squad at the beginning of the trailer, we don't quite know for sure yet.
More On The World And Activities
So in this trailer we also got to see more of the main gameplay, and that excites the hell out of me. Compared to our previous trailer, what we see here in the TGS trailer looks a lot more fleshed out. We have full view of our protagonist walking around the streets, loitering in school, waiting for the train...it looks pretty cool. I say it looks more fleshed out because this time we can see the mini-map as well as little pop ups on the NPCs that showcase their thoughts. Its really nice, and this time around, the areas look a lot more alive than in the current "Persona" games, with NPCs moving around and building commercials playing in the background. The big city sure is nice.
Then we move on to the presumably, so called, after school activities. In the past, most of these are just an action or scene being played out, followed by some information about what happened. It looks like this time, we can actually take part in these events as the player. We see the protagonist going batting in an ACTUAL mini-game, as well as him doing some martial arts training to strengthen his body. Can't wait to actually see what's open for us to do as a high school student roaming around the city after school. Do we get to go speed dating? Who knows?
Personas Being Masks, The Dungeons And Story
Now we know one thing for sure, the "Persona" summoning in this game. The old man narrator describes the "Personas" as masks for the user, which is probably why the many different characters are donning these so called "masks". It can also be seen in the trailer that we can "get" our Personas from battles, and these come in the form of masks. I'm not sure what to think about this, but maybe there's a deeper meaning and darker undertone for the story/setting for this game, which is great. More on this one later though, for now, we move on to the dungeons/environments that we see in the trailer.
This...this is huge. I was awing myself during the small segment of the trailer where they showed our heroes running through the different dungeons/areas. There's A LOT compared to what we saw many months ago in our first trailer. In addition to that castle/mansion area, we've got a lot more to go through this time. We see a pyramid, the outer area of what appears to be a castle, and even a scenario where the characters jump into freaking paintings. Then there's this futuristic looking area that looks like the inner workings of the Sidonia space craft in "Knights Of Sidonia"...I believe that there's more to come here, but what we see so far sure looks promising.
The story for this game also looks like its going to be quite dark. This is just me judging from the small little snippets in the trailer and the tone of voice for the characters....but I guess things aren't going to so well for these guys. There seems to be conflict within the characters, and the very fact that the characters are using the masks to hide themselves probably have some other ulterior motive, like making the Personas stand out to steal the attention. In a way, the Personas themselves work like masks, don't you think? Anyway, there's a scene where the main character is cuffed up in a chair, he's shown in his mask on a massive TV screen on a building, and he's even shown snuffing out a sinister smile towards the end of the trailer. I don't know about you, but that probably means something. Combine that with the other characters saying negative stuff makes for some heavy stuff (someone even says he doesn't want to die in a desperate matter, that shit happens often, I'm sure.). Everyone probably has their own 2 cents on what being a thief and bearing all this persona nonsense means to them.
The Seiyuu List
This is just icing on top of the cake. I know I know, we probably won't even get to hear them in the English version because our games will never have dual audio (pretty please, Atlus?), but one can dream. The cast here is fantastic, we only know that the protagonist is voiced by Jun Fukuyama, and that Anne, Ryuji, Morgana are voiced by Nana Mizuki, Mamoru Miyano and Ikue Ohtani respectively. The entire cast looks quite solid, and I must say, I can't wait to see what kinds of characters some of these guys are voicing. More importantly, who's the new seiyuu playing Igor? Or are they going to continue using voice clips? If someone else new voices him, I hope Jouji Nakata's doing it.
That's kind of it for now, "Persona 5" is shaping up to look like a fantastic game. Sure, it got delayed, but now I really can't wait to see what else the game has to offer. The wait for the next trailer is going to be long....
