Don’t blink now, but the Persona series is officially 25 years old this year. The first game came out in 1996 as a spin-off to the Shin Megami Tensei series, but the popularity of the Persona games eventually allowed the spin-off to become its own franchise. Now that it has there are plenty of Persona fans eagerly anticipating the next game in the franchise.
They may be getting some news on that soon! Atlus, the developers of Persona, recently teased a big year for the 25th anniversary. Their website features a timeline count down that will begin September 2021 and end Autumn of 2022. That’s a full year’s worth of Persona content and there is speculation that among that could be a new teaser for Persona 6.
Until now, Atlus has remained very quiet about the future of the Persona series. Since Persona 5 they released a spin-off with Persona 5 Strikers and the expansion Persona 5 Royal. These helped build out that universe and give more stories to the characters that many people fell in love with. However, now that those games have been released, it appears that they will be turning their development time towards Persona 6. An official online recruitment page stated as much. Via Game Informer.
“Thanks to a large amount of support we received for Persona 5, we have gotten a sense of accomplishment,” said Hiraoka. “But we can’t stop there. When we created Persona 4, there was the pressure that it had to exceed Persona 3. Now, we will have to create a 6 which exceeds 5. However, exceeding 5 will be difficult with the current staff. I would like to surpass this tall hurdle with everyone who joins us in this recruitment. The workplace is perfect for those who want a creative challenge when it comes to bringing games to the world.”
So we know that Persona 6 exists and is currently in some form of development, but how deep into development that is could be anyone’s guess. They might still be in the planning phases or they could be recruiting people to actually start building the game. What has fans excited though is that, with a full year of Persona content on the way to celebrate the game’s 25th anniversary, wouldn’t it be cool if we got a teaser of some kind? It doesn’t have to be much. Just something acknowledging the game existing would be great. It would also line up with how they’ve handled game announcements before. Persona 5 was first shown to us in 2014 and that was just an image with an intended release date.
Of course, that game ended up being delayed multiple times throughout development. We’ll just have to wait and see what they want to show us throughout this anniversary and maybe we’ll get a teaser out of it if we’re lucky.