Persona 5: The Royal Officially Announced
We’ve known for quite some time that Atlus was working on an “enhanced” version of Persona 5; we just didn’t know what would be in it or what systems it’d appear on. Today the first lengthy trailer for Persona 5: The Royal, or Persona 5r, was revealed, along with a Japanese release date (Halloween 2019) and a Western release window (sometime in 2020).
Just PS4 for now. Switch owners are rightly mad about this, as months of rumors (and the fact that Joker is in Smash Bros now) have pointed to Persona 5 showing up on the handheld-hybrid system. But the week’s not over yet! Tomorrow Atlus is scheduled to announce something called “Persona 5s,” and though we still can’t confirm what exactly the “S” in the title stands for, “Switch” would be the most obvious meaning.
If the “Royal” content is meant to stay exclusive to PS4, that feels like a waste. PS4 owners may not want to play the same game twice. Persona 4 Golden added roughly the same amount of content, but fans were fine with replaying the rest because it was on a different system (PS Vita). Persona 3 was expanded with FES on the same system (PS2), but the additional content was enough to equal an entire extra game, and it was accessible from the start.
It’s also possible this second announcement is more disappointing than we think, and that the S in “Persona 5s” actually stands for “Salmon.” More to come tomorrow.