The peoples Persona
As a kid, role-playing games always captured my imagination, but none of them made me spend more time min-maxing and grinding like Persona. (Maybe Final Fantasy IX, but that game is a 10/10, always.)
When I was around 14 or 15, a friend of mine was always making Persona references whenever he saw the chance. I didn't have the slightest clue what he was talking about, but it piqued my interest. How could a game be so good that you have to quote or refer to it ad nauseam? Needless to say, I picked up my first copy of a Persona game and I was hooked. The brilliant combination of a watered-down dating sim and a dungeon crawler makes the game flow with a pace I haven't experienced since.
Remakes remakes remakes
Quirky and unabashedly Japanese in everything it does, Persona hooked me even to this day. When I picked up Persona 3 Reload about a month ago on the Switch 2, I thought it would be a slow game I'd play when nothing else excited me. Instead, it made me appreciate the series even more.
Sure, the games can feel pretty slow and repetitive from time to time—just like real high school life—but then it hits you with something big. You just have to beat the boss or see the cutscene before you shut it off. As someone who played through P3:FES a long, long time ago, revisiting the suspiciously Odaiba-like location has me hooked.
Oh you want some tunes? I'll give it to ya.
Writing this, I still haven't even touched on what is arguably one of the Persona series' strongest points: the soundtrack. Banger after banger of tracks fuse everything a human has ever tried composing into a beautifully messy mix of genres and tunes.
I even think Persona inspired my desire to collect games and merch. Now, every time I'm in Japan, I look for editions or merch from the series and you sure as hell aren't finding much of it in the West so you better. (although it has gotten better since the release of Persona 5).
ATLUS and the future
Remakes are usually my guilty pleasure in 2025, either that or indie games. I haven't had any respect for AAA game developers in a long time, seeing as most of what they churn out are just lazily asset-swapped UE5 games that run like absolute dogshit. You have to force the person playing it to enable DLSS just to get the thing running.
ATLUS, on the other hand, carefully puts out mainline games in the Persona series, and it feels like a slight shift in gaming every time it happens. I sure can't wait to see what happens after Persona 6 is released.