But that's not the point, 2016 is the year Persona 5 will be releasing and director Katsura Hashino has plenty of things to share with his fans including new characters, dungeon changes, social links and much more in the latest Persona magazine. Let's start with the details about Persona 5's main supporting characters.
- Ryuji Sakamoto, the protagonist's first friend, will be the main reason why begins his life as the phantom thief. Sakamoto is kind of defiant, but at his core, he's a nice guy. He features a persona by the name of "Captain Kidd", which will be a good fit for the character due to both his setting and voice actor Mamoru Miyano.
- Ann Takamaki is a quarter-American girl who returned to Japan. On the outside, she may appear popular, but in reality, she doesn’t have any friends. That is until she joins our group of friends, which will then lead her to become the life of the party. Her Persona, “Carmen,” has a femme-fatale side to her, and due to a certain incident, they join the protagonist and Ryuji to take on the other world. It is also stated that Takamaki will have a huge impact on the fate of the main characters.
- Not much details were shared about Yusuke Kitagawa, another main character, but we do have a little description of him. He is an eccentric character with a different sense of charm and you'll see that the minute you see him just by his appearance.
- One of the fan favorites in Persona 4 was the whimsical teddy bear, Teddie. Thankfully Persona 5 will also feature a character like this, but he will go by the name of Morgan and look like a regular cat. His purpose in the game is to help aid the protagonist and his friends in the phantom thieving business as he done it plenty of times before.
Similar to most Persona games where the characters will be faced with inner problems, however, it's a little different in Persona 5. Most of the characters in Persona 5 will be labeled, judged and are living unfortunate every day, which will make them have to rise up and escape the situations that are in front of them.
This leads to the 'Social Link' aspect of the game, which is also slightly different. The feature won't exactly be the feature we know from past game as Hashino hopes to see it go a step higher in the human relation part of things; not much about this new social link was discussed.
We know not that Persona 5 takes place in the big city, Tokyo Japan. The reason the team chose it is because they want to connect to their players with the Phantom Thief, taking place in a real place instead of a fictional one is much more, dare I say, realistic.
Hashino does mention one of the core elements in the Persona franchise, the dungeons, but sadly doesn’t go into them in great detail. All he said is that they will be different from past titles and that each dungeon will be thoroughly enjoyable.
Persona 5 is expected to release in summer 2016 in Japan for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 3, and some time later in 2016 for North America.