If this mysterious teaser trailer is any indication, we could be learning about a followup to Atlus’ phenomenal Persona 4 as early as this Monday.
A quick recap: If you never played Atlus’ 2008 PS2 swan song Persona 4, then A.) you really missed out and B.) here’s what you need to know. The plot of Persona 4 revolved around a mysterious “Midnight Channel” (Mayonaka TV in Japanese), a world within televisions that reflected the true thoughts and secrets of humanity.
Enter the teaser you see here to the right. While extremely short – only 15 seconds – it’s nonetheless fairly telling. In it, many Japanese voices overlap asking a single question, which is then written on the screen: Ne, Mayonaka Terubitte shiteru? “Hey, do you know about Mayonaka TV?” Images of static-filled TV screens and other bits of modern-day Japan – high-speed trains, crowded streets – flash in and out until it ends with a static-filled screen with one URL: www.mayonaka-tv.jp.
The site in question has an image of a TV with a countdown on a yellow background – and by all reckoning, the TV is counting down to something that will take place on April 11th. That date is significant, too: Persona 4 fans might recognize April 11th, 2011 as the day the game begins with the main character’s arrival in the sleepy country town of Inaba.
Everything about this teaser trailer and countdown site is fairly mysterious, and while there’s no concrete evidence linking it to Atlus’ Persona series – Persona 4 in particular – there’s a ton of circumstantial evidence doing just that: First, you have a teaser trailer with people talking about Mayonaka TV. Said trailer has the frequent image of static-filled TV screens, a key part of Persona 4. What’s more, The site in question has a countdown to the day the story of Persona 4 begins.
That’s not all, either. While this one is a bit of a stretch, it’s interesting to compare the appearance of the TV on the countdown site to the one first seen in the game’s intro sequence. They’re practically identical, yellow background and all – and the numbers at the bottom of the countdown resemble the numbers that appear in said intro movie (about 0:46 in).
It’s all circumstantial, but it doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to conclude that this could hint at the next Persona installment. Or, if not a full-fledged Persona 5, how about a port of Persona 4 to the PSP, similar to what Atlus did with P3? Or how about a P4 anime adaptation?
Frankly, I’m hard-pressed to think of what it could be that isn’t a Persona announcement. One commenter suggests a link to Sony Music JP, which could suggest a mundane music-related announcement, but I looked through the entire site and couldn’t find anything connecting the two.
Either way, I’ll be crossing my fingers for a Persona 4 announcement this Monday. I freakin’ loved that game.
Update: AnimeNews has unearthed evidence that this will be a Persona 4 anime adaptation, produced by Atlus in conjunction with Aniplex. Sounds good to me.
