30 Years Ago, a Japanese Sci-Fi Fantasy Spinoff Quietly Transformed RPGs Forever

Today, many RPG fans are well acquainted with Persona 3, which originally debuted in Japan on July 13, 2006. That game carried the series to new levels of success, ensuring a reliable audience for each new entry. Just look at how many people are eagerly awaiting Persona 6, a full 20 years later.

Despite the Persona franchise’s enduring popularity, few gamers have played the earliest entries that paved the way for Persona 3, especially Revelations: Persona. It was the first game in the now enormously popular spinoff franchise, and launched for the original PlayStation in Japan as Megami Ibunroku Persona on Sept. 20, 1996.

By the time Persona arrived, Atlus had already published numerous entries in its long-running RPG series, Megami Tensei. That series wouldn’t make its first appearance in North America until Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne in 2004 (known in Europe as Shin Megami Tensei: Lucifer’s Call), but it did well from the Famicom days in Japan. After the second Shin Megami Tensei installment for Super Famicom, the team decided to shift its focus and eventually produced Shin Megami Tensei If…

That new game, released for the Super Famicom on Oct. 28, 1994, introduced a more intimate setting than its predecessors: the halls of the fictional Karukozaka High School, which had recently come to occupy the demon realm. Players could form alliances with various students and eventually confront Ideo Hazama, a brilliant student who was bullied until he snapped and summoned a demon to get revenge. His fateful decision led to the high school’s awful predicament at that game’s onset.

Given Nintendo of America’s policies on localization and censorship, it’s easy to see why Atlus didn’t bring that game to overseas audiences. American parents would have likely responded with pitchforks and protests, but audiences in Japan were considerably more receptive. Their response made the game a large enough success that Atlus decided to expand on the overall concept with Persona.

In Persona, a group of high school students are playing a fortune-telling game when they unexpectedly gain the ability to summon powerful supernatural entities known as Personas. One hospital visit and a demon attack later, they find themselves roaming the town of Mikage-cho and battling monsters using their newfound capabilities. The game’s story eventually splits into two “routes,” depending on choices the player makes. One way or another, the ultimate goal is to save the town from evil.

Compared to the notoriously difficult Megami Tensei games up to that point, Persona emphasized approachable combat and progression. That made it the perfect game to bring to North America. The shift to students battling personal demons in a more intimate setting, instead of the possible destruction of the entire planet, set it apart from other RPGs of the era. Persona’s writers paid more attention to the inner emotions of its cast of characters, while retaining broad connections to the older games. At the same time, both Megami Tensei and Persona feature many familiar monsters inspired by mythology and pop culture, and their combat centers around elemental interplay and honing in on an enemy’s weakness. Persona 3 may have been the first game in the series to include the influential social links system, but Atlus made many other decisions early on that have served the franchise well.

Image: Atlus

Localization by Atlus USA stripped out a lot of the stuff that might have offended or confused western players, who had grown up on a steady diet of Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior games. The alternate “Snow Queen” route through the game was also eliminated, though mostly as a result of time constraints rather than censorship of content. Given the relatively small time between the game’s original launch in Japan and its release overseas, the localization team wouldn’t have had a lot of time to get everything sorted.

Happily, the success of Persona 3 a few years later gave Atlus the confidence to go back to its roots and fix issues in the first game that its original localization introduced. Shin Megami Tensei: Persona for the PSP released in North America on Sept. 22, 2009 and finally offered both routes through the game, along with a variety of other improvements. It had arrived in Japan earlier that year as Persona, no longer needing to reference the Megami Tensei series in order to fly off shelves.

Today, the original Persona is remembered more for the franchise it introduced than for its individual merits. If you want to play it, the PSP version is the one to go for, especially if you mean to play in English. Whatever version you try, it will feel a bit rough by 2026 standards, but without those early faltering steps, we wouldn’t have the franchise we enjoy today. Maybe Atlus will do us a favor and give it another update, after finishing its work on Persona 4 Revival.