Haven’t exactly been able to keep up with this perfectly but apparently Atlus has been slowly releasing english trailers for the characters in Persona Q. Featured today are the original character Zen, and Persona 3 fan favorite Junpee Iori.
They definitely sound pretty good. Vic Mignogna is doing a damn good job of being the idiotic and yet heartwarming and down to earth kinda guy. It’ll fit well with the colorful cast from Persona 4 who were pretty goofy for the most part. He’ll feel right at home. Zen on the hand is that calm and collected and somewhat more gentle sounding character. I can’t quite place the voice nor can I find a listing for it anywhere. I’ll update this when I find out who it is.
It’s nice to hear all this. Especially the cutscene dialogue since that guarantees that the full game will be voice acted as opposed to only in battle and key cutscenes since it’s a hand held game. It sounds pretty good.
Persona Q: Shadow of the Labrynth come out Nov. 25.
And Junpei persists in being the best P3 character. Seriously. I don’t care if I have no aptitude for playing him. I will always play Junpei because he, in a world of JRPG weapons like swords and bows, is fighting with a baseball bat. Those impacts are going to feel so good, and that juggle into the sky looks pretty fun. It’s like Kanji and his folding chair but totally sweet. I know what I said.
Oh, and if you’d like to know what’s being said, there’s a way. There’s no sub version, but ANN’s story on this video has it. Directly quoted:
Junpei: I’m sorry for causing you so much trouble all the time… I’m like this, but… Please marry me, Chido-!! Ah… No way… It was a dream… Junpei: Ah, Ya-so I-na-ba, huh… Wait, where is this!? Junpei: Ah! That “everyday young life” thing! (a reference to the Japanese Junes theme) Junpei: Who are you calling a mob character! And whoa, Yukari-cchi is horrific! Junpei: I’m Junpei Iori, head of the Shadow Walkers! Junpei: I’ll take this on! Narrator: Simply simple AAA simply easy-going ta-ta-ta! The super-speed full-power racing slugger! Junpei Iori! Junpei: Is this… a Shadow? So this really is the Dark Hour? Junpei: Wait, Feather Pink! We can talk this out! It’s dangerous to point that kind of thing at people-! Junpei: Well then, it looks like it’s time for Junpei Iori Hour! Shadow Junpei: OK, Game Over time. Too bad.
What sort of hidden pain will you be taunted with Junpei? Will it be about Chidori? My favorite moment in P3 came about because of a pain like that, so I’m looking forward to this.
Oh, I see Strega on the horizon and a dog in my future. The official PV for P3 the Movie #2: Midsummer Knight’s Dream has been put up on the official site. It’s an embedded player, so you’ll have to follow the link here or in the picture for now. It’s listed as PV5.
I’m not sure on the timeline of this movie. We’re going to meet Strega. Koromaru will join the team. Ken and Shinji are there too. As should be expected of the character who got her own gaiden, there is a heavy sense that they’re banking on how much we want to see Aigis and get to the beach section.
Do you like Persona but have been kind of lost because you don’t have the right platform to continue the experience on? Atlus has started publishing with you in mind, because it’s apparently time for Persona 3/4 Related Game Festival’s hype machine to start revving up, and you’ve got three systems worth of chances to get one.
Our first game is Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth, and I can’t help but want to pronounce “Persona Q” as “Personack.” It’s the fanfiction author’s dream as it looks to be a straight up crossover between the whole of the P3 and P4 cast in an entirely straight up dungeon crawling experience. Just by nature of the game and the trailer, I’m guessing this will be without the social link aspect unless the whole aspect is self contained within the reasonably large party, but that’s not likely. So we’re probably looking at the super deformed The Answer in terms of how the game will play. I do look forward to seeing the interaction between the younger SEES and the P4 gang. Maybe we can get Yosuke ineffectively hitting on… well, the girls.
Second is PV2 for P4A: The Ultimax Ultra Suplex Hold. This one comes out in a few days, so there’s not a whole lot to say other than get hype. Few combo videos on the new playable shadow forms, little bit on our new super anime best friend, and a teaser for someone who’s probably the final boss. All I can say other than that is that man, Junpei, you have the worst timing with the… Dark Hour? Also, Mitsuru’s motorcycle evolved in a helicopter.
Then this. Persona 4 Dancing All Night is a rhythm game staring Yu, Rise, and Kanami, who I believe was the new idol in Rise’s agency when she was retired during the events of P4, dancing all night on stage. The game features a soundtrack composed by series veteran Shouji Meguro. And that’s all I really have to say on that. This is just kinda weird. I could understand this as something like a minigame, but to make a full on RRD out of it is something else. They’ve even included the super summon cut in, presumably for when you’re about to bust out your special move? I wonder if it’ll just be these three. Teddy has to be in because I really do like the disco ball that is his face.
Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth will launch for the 3DS August 5th, 2014. P4A The Ultimax Ultra Suplex Hold launches for the Ps3 in four days on the 28th. Persona 4 Dancing All Night Long will launch for the PSVita in Autumn of 2014.
6 more days until the movie launches, so one more PV for the road. We probably won’t see it until it goes to blu-ray/DVD, but this teaser shows us that our protagonist gets to have thrilling persona battles while riding the motorcycle around Tartarus’s crazy architecture. If he doesn’t kick flip off the bike so Orpheus or some other persona can smack it through a shadow causing them both to explode, I will be sorely disappointed. Considering everyone getting beat up by the Emperor/Empress combo, I assume that will happen during the fight to save Fuuka.
While it ultimately would be only a portion of the movie, the action element does actually look all right. I like Shinji headbutting that guy and getting to see Akihiko boxing. The animation direction looks like it has a lot of potential. I was really caught by how much more of a demented look the protagonist has when the evoker goes off on the roof and Pharos looking at the protagonist like he was looking at a dreamy boy. I mean, he is, so it’s just a nice touch. We just decided to replay P3, so I’m excited to see how it’s going to translate.
Inching up closer and closer to this one. We’re just over a month out, so it’s time for the PV where we beat up shadows. I like the one Yukari kills because it just sort of pops like she’s playing a balloon mini-game. The animation also looks solid. The art is good, and the characters have a good sense of flow when hitting things, though this is one brief, second long snippets of that. Speaking of the art style alone, I also really like how they got Tartarus to look. With the moon in the background, it looks like something out of an old fable. Dark and imposing, but entrancingand mystical.
I think we’re also getting a good sense of where the story’s focus is going to be. When this was announced as a movie compilation instead of an anime series like P4 was, I think we were all curious about how they’d handle things like social links. You can devote an episode to downtime and get a few of those out of the way in an anime, but you can’t really stop the movie for 20 minutes so our lead can go to the mall and learn how to be a sleazy businessman. From what they’ve shown us, this movie isn’t going to have anything to do with that stuff. Social link characters will probably have background cameos so that we can go shadow busting at least up through rescuing Fuuka. With as much focus as they put on it, that might be the final conflict of the movie. The trailers have shown Shinji but not most of the characters that would have been around during his major arc, so I think we’re probably saving up that storyline for Movie 2.
The movie comes out late next month, so we should be getting its blu-ray release maybe sometime early next year, and that’s probably when we’ll get it in the west. I hope they can pull all the old VAs back and dub it. I liked that cast.
Ohh. Yukari isn’t wearing a cravat. She’s just grown up into Phoenix Ranger Featherman Pink.
The first official PV since its kind of announcement around a month ago, Super Persona 4 Arena, now under the much more insane name of P4U: THe Ultimax Ultra Suplex Hold, has gotten a PV. You can see the game in action and how it seems to have gotten a greater overhaul than just adding in three new people. To me, the game just looks a little faster, and characters seem to have been updated with new moves for new combos. The HUD has changed a bit, and interestingly, some people seem to have different amounts of persona cards, Elizabeth has 6 while Shadow Labrys has 3, so they break at different rates and are more suited to characters that are more persona reliant than others, Akihiko only has 2. Or maybe that mechanic is just different overall.
But the really eye catching thing, other than the title and the official website’s picture being Aigis suplexing Yu, is our new characters: the aforementioned Phoenix Ranger Featherman Pink, Yukari Takeba, Junpei Iori who seems to be largely the same guy, and the new character who wandered into the wrong studio looking for a KH recording, Sho Minazuki. It’s his scar and the swords. The serrated at the bottom dual wielded katanas with little trigger guards. Yeah. He’s original, so it’s likely the game’s huge ass story mode will have some amount of focus on him.
Movies are never enough. Let’s have a musical too. This is a flyer for what will be the Persona 3 stage play PERSONA 3 the Weird Masquerade. It will be a live action musical put on by CLIE, a stage production company that does this sort of thing including collaborations with Nico, beginning its run January 2014.
The actors have not been decided on, but key parts of the production team have.
Oka is an award winning director of both film and stage, garnering tons of praise for his originality, but the other two may strike names with Persona fans. Kumagai was the key writer for P4: The Animation and will be returning as the writer of Spring of Birth. As for Meguro:
Ah, that’s good. Meguro is the big time ATLUS composer who’s been working on Megami Tensei games since way back in Persona 1. He mostly makes the beautiful BGM, but he was also the composer for P4‘s ending theme “Never More,” so he’s all ready for composing for singers. He will also be returning for Spring of Birth.
CLIE is supposed to be setting up an official site soon. Whether that will be a section of their main site or a wholly other domain, I’m not sure yet. Keep an eye peeled.
Good to see you, Junpei. Good to see the persona summoning animation too. I like the way it has an outline that the color fleshes out. It gives a sense of something ethereal becoming real. I also appreciate seeing The Fool arcana big shadow actually attacking Yukari and Minato before they get to the roof rather than just menacing the dorm building off screen.
But yes, Persona 3 -Spring of Birth- will be released to theaters November 23rd. For those of us not in a position to see a movie in Japan, that puts us at getting a potential English release sometime early next year from the gap between movie showing and DVD release. On the upside, we should be getting the movie theme, “More than One” by Yumi Kawamura, much sooner. Kawamura is the singer behind all the major P3 songs, so it’s not surprising they’ve brought her back. If it ends up being as enjoyable as “Kimi no Kioku,” I’ll be into it.
Persona is pretty new to us, as I’ve mentioned before. Only just finished P3 and haven’t finished P4 because of this and that. Because of that, I haven’t seen the P4 anime, and this movie will be done by the same team and studio. I’ve heard good things, typically, but the two or so out of context scenes I have seen looked well directed but lacking for money to really make the animation good. Hopefully, with this being a movie instead of a series, they’ll have more overall money to pump in to making Akihiko boxing shadows as pretty as that deserves to be.
(Hero Character) Makoto Yuki – Akira Ishida (Athrun Zala in Gundam SEED and Destiny, Kaworu Nagisa in Evangelion)
Yukari Takeba – Megumi Toyoguchi (Revy in Black Lagoon, Winry Rockbell in Full Metal Alchemist)
Junpei Iori – Kosuke Toriumi (Inui in Shinsekai Yori, Kiyotaka Ishimaru in Dangan Ronpa, Yuri Lowell in Tales of Vesperia)
Mitsuru Kirijo – Rie Tanaka (Lacus Klein in Gundam SEED and Destiny, Yomi in Azumanga Daioh)
Akihiko Sanada – Hikaru Midorikawa (Heero Yui in Gundam Wing, Masaki Andoh in Super Robot Wars)
Fuuka Yamagishi – Mamiko Noto (Tsukiko Sagi in Paranoia Agent)
Igor – Isamu Tanonaka (Mucha in Mazinger Z, Loki in Cyborg 009)
Elizabeth – Miyuki Sawashiro (Jolyne Kujo in JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All Star Battle, Fujiko Mine since 2011)
All of these actors and actresses are consistent with their video game appearance, as you probably imagined. To that end, Isamu Tanonaka, who passed on in 2010, will be acting again from archived clips like in the P4 anime.
I’ll actually watch this one since I’ve already experienced the game. Looking forward to giving it a try.
One Pixel Jump 