A “full restoration” of the original Persona game on PS1 is coming to the PSP with restored content, updated graphics and gameplay, and, thankfully, a new localization.
Atlus knows when it’s struck gold, and it certainly has with the Persona franchise, which, with its third and fourth entries, has become about as popular as games about teenagers shooting themselves in the heads to summon monsters or exploring haunted all-male bathhouses can be. Now they’re redoing the game that started it all, Revelations: Persona, for the PSP.
Announcing that the game is “fully remastered,” Atlus revealed that Revelations will feature rebalanced gameplay, a visual upgrade and a brand-new localization. That last bit should come as great news to anyone who suffered through the original’s horrid localization, which was a far cry from the skillful translation jobs Atlus is becoming known for today.
Moreover, the Revelations remake will restore previously cut content that, for some reason, never made it into the US version of the game. That includes an entire lengthy quest during which the protagonists’ school is turned into an ice maze and they have to fight a guy who has an enormous penis demon erupt from his stomach. Yeah, I wonder why that got cut…
No word on whether the remake will undo some of the other controversial changes made during the original localization, like the Westernization of most references to Japanese-y things like names and places, the redrawn character portraits, or the changes made to the character Mark, who was Asian in the Japanese version but then got recolored to look African-American and spoke in Ebonics in the NA version. Considering that the new Persona games make an effort to retain their Japanese flavor down to obscure honorifics and holidays (Respect Your Elders Day? What?), I would imagine Revelations will get the same treatment.
Fans of the last two Persona games should be excited for this, but keep in mind that the game doesn’t play exactly like their current favorites. Yeah, there’s Persona collecting and fusing and dungeon crawling, and the game also revolves around a group of high schoolers, but there’s no social simulation aspect and the battle system is totally different. Still, more Persona is more Persona, even if you don’t get to have a harem of virtual girlfriends and there are penis monsters coming out of people’s stomachs.
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