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Persona

Atlus's school-day role-playing games

Classic GamesSource-checked

Atlus's Persona series began in 1996 as a spin-off from Megami Tensei: modern-day teenagers who summon Personas, figures from their own psyches, and talk to the demons they meet. Persona 3 (2006) split each day between school life and a nightly dungeon, with friendships that make the Personas stronger, and that pattern carried Persona 4 and Persona 5, which with its Royal edition had sold more than ten million copies by 2025.

In a Persona game the monsters can be talked to. The first one, Revelations: Persona (1996), sent a group of Japanese high-school students against demons from another dimension, and gave them a list of things to try before fighting: GamePro‘s strategy guide advised staring at some, being sarcastic to others, and dancing for one called Macabre. Talk your way through and a demon might hand over a spell card instead of a fight. The idea came from Atlus’s Megami Tensei games. What Persona added was the teenagers, and the Personas themselves: figures summoned from the characters’ own minds, an idea Edge called “a nod to Jungian psychology”.

Ten years later Persona 3 gave the series the shape it has kept. By day the player goes to school, joins clubs and makes friends; by night those friendships make the Personas stronger in a monster-filled tower. Persona 5 and its expanded edition had sold more than ten million copies by 2025.

Fast facts

  • Developer and publisher: Atlus.
  • Parent series: Megami Tensei.
  • Main games: Revelations: Persona (1996), Persona 2: Innocent Sin (1999) and Eternal Punishment (2000), Persona 3 (2006), Persona 4 (2008), Persona 5 (2016).
  • Art: Kazuma Kaneko for the early games; Shigenori Soejima from Persona 3.
  • Sales: Persona 5 and Persona 5 Royal, 10.46 million together by the end of August 2025.

Revelations: Persona

Megami Ibunroku Persona came out on the PlayStation in Japan in September 1996, and Atlus brought it to America as Revelations: Persona that December. It was the first Megami Tensei game released there, and the advertisement said so: “first time to hit US shores”. It promised “over 300 different monsters”, “100+ hours of pulse pounding gameplay”, several endings, and the chance to “morph any member of your party into a more powerful source known as ‘Persona’”. GamePro’s reviewer, in February 1997, thought it might “even challenge the upcoming Final Fantasy VII as the season’s best RPG”.

The American version was not a straight translation. Characters and places were renamed, the hero’s hairstyle and some characters’ ethnic origins were changed, and one whole storyline, the Snow Queen quest, was cut. When the game was remade for the PSP in 2009 as Shin Megami Tensei: Persona, those changes were dropped and the Snow Queen quest restored. In 2018 Sony included the original on its PlayStation Classic.

Persona 2 and rumours

Persona 2 came in two halves. Innocent Sin (1999) began, the Official US PlayStation Magazine reported, with rumours that a local high school’s insignia was cursed, and it was fifth in the Japanese PlayStation sales chart for July 1999. Its sequel, Eternal Punishment (2000), followed a magazine reporter, Maya Amano, investigating murders by a figure called the Joker. Rumours were the mechanic as well as the plot: in a bar the player picks up a rumour, spreads it around town and watches the effects. Video Games gave the examples of a model zeppelin that cannot fly and a fortune teller who cannot tell fortunes. Eternal Punishment was released in English, and Germany’s Video Games, reviewing the American import, called the rumour system a very interesting feature and the game one about reality “and the masks that each of us wears”.

Persona 3: school by day

Persona 3 (2006) was a new start. Its director, Katsura Hashino, wrote much of the scenario, and Kaneko’s assistant Shigenori Soejima took over the art with modern-looking characters. Edge’s review explained the premise: “there are, in fact, 25 hours to a day”. During the extra “dark hour” most people are sealed in coffins while monsters roam, and a tower called Tartarus rises from the school grounds, its floors rearranged on every visit.

The rest of the day is school. Classes, exams, clubs and part-time jobs raise the hero’s academics, charm and courage, and each friendship, or Social Link, is tied to a type of Persona: the closer the friendship, the stronger the Personas the player can fuse. Edge thought the scheme lifted the game “out of the firm grip of its JRPG roots”. Retro Gamer later called it “against the tide of pretty much everything in its own genre” and concluded: “Only Atlus is making games like this.” The way characters summon their Personas, with a gun-shaped “Evoker” held to the head, caused controversy as well as attention.

Persona 4 and Persona 5

Persona 4 (2008) moved the school year to the sleepy town of Inaba, where people go missing and often turn up dead, and where a rumoured Midnight Channel shows whoever has vanished most recently. The hero can reach into a television and climb into a world where the missing are trapped inside dungeons shaped by their own minds; rescuing them means getting them to face their shadow selves, the parts of themselves they would rather hide. Edge, reviewing the Vita version, Persona 4 Golden, in 2013, saw the shadows as Jungian too, and summed up the game’s message: “being nice makes you stronger. Making new friends — and better friends of the ones you already have — makes you stronger still.” It called the four-year-old game “by some distance, Vita’s best game to date”.

Persona 5 (2016 in Japan, 2017 in English) cast its students as the Phantom Thieves, who steal the hearts of corrupt adults in Tokyo to make them change their ways. Wireframe summed up the series’ setting as “kids in school with ‘kids in school’ problems given a fantastical twist”. By then Atlus belonged to Sega, and Persona 5 became the series’ biggest seller.

Beyond the main games

The characters have turned up in other kinds of game: the fighting game Persona 4 Arena (2012), made with Arc System Works, rhythm games, and Persona 5 Strikers, an action game made with Koei Tecmo’s Omega Force. “Ironically for a series that began as a spin-off,” Wireframe noted, “Persona itself is no stranger to spin-offs.” The series has also had several animated adaptations. In 2024 Atlus released Persona 3 Reload, a remake of Persona 3.

Sources

  • GamePro issue 97, October 1996, and issue 99, December 1996: Atlus advertisements for Revelations: Persona (“first time to hit US shores”; “over 300 different monsters”; “100+ hours”; morphing into a “Persona”).
  • GamePro issue 101, February 1997: review of Revelations: Persona (“may even challenge the upcoming Final Fantasy VII”). Issue 106, July 1997: strategy guide (negotiating with demons; spell cards).
  • Official US PlayStation Magazine volume 2 issue 9, June 1999: Persona 2: Tsumi (the cursed insignia). Volume 2 issue 12, September 1999: Japanese sales chart for July 1999 (Persona 2 fifth).
  • Video Games (Germany), March 2001, pp. 34–35: review of Persona 2: Eternal Punishment (Maya Amano, the Joker, rumours, tarot cards and the Velvet Room).
  • Edge issue 164, July 2006, p. 54: Persona 3 shown, “high school-by-day, occult-by-night”.
  • Edge issue 181, November 2007, p. 94: review of Persona 3 (the dark hour, Tartarus, the school calendar, the three stats, the Evokers).
  • Retro Gamer issue 107, October 2012, pp. 72–73, “Future Classic: Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3” (Hashino, Soejima and Kaneko; Social Links; the Evokers; “Only Atlus is making games like this”).
  • Edge issue 244, September 2012, p. 63: Persona 4 Arena (Arc System Works).
  • Edge issue 251, March 2013, pp. 100–101: review of Persona 4 Golden (Inaba, the Midnight Channel, Social Links, Jungian psychology).
  • Wireframe issue 39, May 2020, pp. 110–111: Persona 5 Royal (Persona 5‘s release in English in 2017; the series’ setting).
  • Wireframe issue 50, April 2021, p. 95: review of Persona 5 Strikers (Atlus’s P Studio and Omega Force; the spin-off quotation).
  • Sega Retro, “Revelations: Persona” (web, secondary): the Japanese title, 1996; the PSP remake (2009); the PlayStation Classic (2018). https://segaretro.org/Revelations:_Persona
  • Wikipedia, “Persona (series)” (web, secondary): the release years of the main games; Jung; Kaneko and Soejima; animated adaptations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persona_(series)
  • Wikipedia, “Revelations: Persona” (web, secondary): the Japanese and American release dates (20 September and 14 December 1996); the changes made for the American release and their reversal in the PSP remake. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revelations:_Persona
  • “Persona 3 Reload launches February 2, 2024”, Gematsu (web, secondary). https://www.gematsu.com/games/persona-3-reload
  • KitGuru, 25 September 2025 (web, secondary), reporting Atlus’s announcement of 10.46 million sales of Persona 5 and Persona 5 Royal; see Atlus. https://www.kitguru.net/tech-news/mustafa-mahmoud/persona-5-royal-have-officially-sold-over-10-million-copies/

See also

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