Junpei Iori does not age. He merely gets a different hat. Persona 4 Arena 2!

Fucking finally, ATLUS. I’ve been waiting on Junpei Iori, Ace Detective since the first time I played P4A. If he gets special dialogue with Naoto because of that one off gag, I might never be able to have other fights. Not that I was going to play other characters now anyway. Yukari is here too, and she’s either wearing a cravat, or her jacket swings weird during a special. Good for her.

So, a P4A sequel. It’s more of an expansion, but this is a wholly new game. I guess you could call it Super P4A. It introduces new characters Junpei Iori and Yukari Takeba from P3. They come back with new clothes, though Junpei is using a new bat instead of a sword in his gameplay shot. You can see if you look at the pictures of the character select screen that these images are from an arcade cabinet. There’s a special Akihabara preview run from the 16th, which it is in Japan now, to the 18th.

It’s not just new characters. Apparently, gameplay tweaks are being made. There are some differences in the way the characters generally play, which can have huge echo effects in a fighting game, but you remember the rumor where they were going to have character be able to pick their persona before fights? Well, that didn’t get added in, but now you can pick to play either Normal Character or Shadow Character, like this Shadow Yukari. Shadow characters will have the majority of differences with developers saying that playing as Normal Character will more represent the original P4A. The specifics of it mention something called “Shadow Rampage” where… did you ever play Challenge Mode and get to Yu? Remember how he was crazy fast and could therefore do combos that were usually impossible? Yeah, that but limited by SP.

This Akihabara run is a test version. That means we’re not at the end of production, so there’s plenty more opportunity for surprises. If they manage to work in Koromaru, this has the potential to be the greatest game because it will have Bear vs. Ninja Dog. They’ve only announced the other two, so probably not, but it lives on in my heart.

(Images from Famitsu, as you can see from the watermark. See a few more pictures over at their article.)