Jika Persona 3 Memberi Saya Ick, Apa Artinya Itu Bagi Persona 6?

Recently, I bowed to pressure and finally booted up Persona 3 Reload. Given the announcement of Persona 6 at Summer Game Fest 2026, and the vast amount of time between that game's inevitable release and the time I played Persona 5--nine years and counting--I thought I'd dip my toes back in the series. Unfortunately, I could only make it so far, because Persona 3 Reload, I'm sorry to say, gave me the ick.

All of the charming -isms I once loved about the Persona games seemed to dissipate upon booting Persona 3 Reload up. The expository writing in the game's opening, wherein an authority figure literally explains the game's gimmick to a room of characters who already understand what's going on, made my eyes roll to the back of my head. But this is just kind of how these games have been for a long while, and though I understand the need to explain things to audiences, I would rather the game I'm playing treat me like I can read and comprehend plots higher than a grade-school level.

Persona is a verbose series, one that smashes the sheer density of writing found in visual novels into a turn-based RPG, which often means there can be long stretches of very little action and a lot of reading. At times, these sections are a welcome opportunity to catch my breath between major plot points, especially when blended with Persona's hallmark life-sim elements. However, other times, I just want to play the stylish and tactical combat that these games are known for, not sit through trivial dialogue encounters.

This frustration crept in while playing P3R's opening chapter and trying to get to the action, only to instead be hit by scene after scene of having to navigate the halls of a high school, answer questions in class, walk back to my dorm room, and constantly be intercepted with asides from classmates like Junpei and Takeba.

When I was last fully immersed in Persona, I had an unspoken proximity to the series and the stories that the games told. By the time I played Persona 5 in Spring 2017, I was only a few years out of high school--I could easily relate to its teenage cast. I played a huge chunk of the game out of a friend's college dorm during a particularly aimless chunk of my early 20s. I lusted for adventure, structure, and direction, all of which Persona 5 provided by dropping me into its stunning vision of Tokyo and tasking me with stealing the hearts of abusive members of society while balancing a social life greater than anything I had going at the time.

Persona 4 Golden was much the same. I played it right before Persona 5, during the summer between high school and college, and the domesticity and tranquility of Inaba and its townies resonated with me a great deal. I saw my own indecisiveness, anxieties, and even uglier qualities in the cast, and as a result, think I had a patience for them that I now find myself in short supply of.

By comparison, I won't be able to play P6 until I'm at least 30, and if playing P3R was any indication, my tolerance for moonlighting as a teenager and relitigating that time in my life is at an all-time low. Suffice to say, I’m not totally jazzed on the idea of P6 so far, especially if it's anything like the current crop of Persona titles! And there's little reason to believe it shouldn't be.

For one, as I noted at AV Club, it feels like Persona has been trending in a pretty uniform direction for some time now. Since the release (and universal acclaim) for Persona 5, Atlus has made no secret of its desire to bring older entries in line with the standards that that game set. P3R, unsurprisingly, looks and feels a whole lot like Persona 5. Persona 4 Revival, from its looks alone, also owes a great deal to the series' breakout hit. Even Atlus' Metaphor: Refantazio, a medieval fantasy RPG completely unconnected to the Persona franchise, is reminiscent of Persona 5 in how it looks and plays.

And look I get it, Persona 5 was pretty great at the time, but a decade on--obviously discounting the series' many spinoffs in different genres--it increasingly feels like the only kind of RPG Atlus is interested in making.

Persona 6's Steam page offers very little in the way of concrete details about the forthcoming RPG, and Atlus has outright said that fans shouldn't expect to hear anything about the game until after the release of Persona 4 Revival in February 2027. But the game's Steam page does have crumbs that give some indication as to what to expect, and most of them lead me to believe that it's just business as usual. There are mentions of leading a double life as a student, as well as callbacks to urban myths and the occult that have many thinking P6 will harken back to the original pair of Persona titles. As expected, the listing also calls out some of the series' hallmark social features, like friendship and romance, which were added with Persona 3 back in 2006 and have become defining elements of the franchise alongside the high school setting.

On one hand, I know it's way too early to count P6 out. I'm sure that over the years of making and remaking countless titles, P-Studio has fresh ideas for the next big installment in the franchise. And when it is ready to talk about them, I'm sure many of those ideas will dazzle and awe. But there's also something to be said about Persona's incredibly rigid formula, how little the series has really evolved in the last 20 years, and how same-y the mainline installments have become in the last decade alone.

You see, it isn't Persona's setting, infantilizing writing, and teenage protagonists alone that I'm chafing against. It's perfectly normal to drift away from things you once adored as you grow and change, and maybe I'm just more ready to drop the high school framing of it all more than others. Even a move to young adulthood and college or a foreign school--two very unlikely moves for the series--would mix things up enough for me. That right there is my real issue: I just believe Persona might suffer from a lack of vision.

If Metaphor: Refantazio (developed by an offshoot of Persona 5 developers that adapted the series' qualities, not P-Studio precisely) was especially good for anything, it was showing that moving away from Persona's typical haunts could in fact bolster the material of these games. Ditching elements that simply wouldn't work, like romance, and adding brand-new mechanics and features, like a job system, felt like a revelation. Adapting Persona's social links and life-sim elements to an election and tournament in a rich and mature fantasy world felt like a marvelous evolution of the Persona series' tenets. Not to mention, Refantazio served as proof that the Persona formula could be adjusted and still spit out something worthwhile.

If the morsels of information we know about P6 are to be believed, its return to the hallways of another school in Japan and familiar struggles read like a step backwards. Or, if we're just talking about the Persona series, like standing still. I worry that Persona's sameness--there always has to be a school, teen protagonists, and a Social Link system that has largely stood the same for twenty years--might just be the greatest limiting factor the series faces. And that hasn't always been the case. The first two Persona games might take place in the same setting, but from P3 onwards, a huge stylistic and mechanical shift overtook the series and made it what it is now. Is it too much to hope for yet another as we stare down the barrel of another major Persona title?

It's beginning to feel like it in fact is too much. As we gear up for a new installment and era in the franchise’s history, I can certainly say that what I want most is for the series to break out of this phase it's been caught in and bloom once again. But maybe I've simply outgrown it all. And if that’s the case, I fear the ick might be here to stay.