Revelations: Persona
1996 · RPG · PlayStation
Overview
Revelations: Persona (1996) is Atlus's first Persona game, in which high-school students in the town of Mikage-cho gain the power to summon Personas after playing a fortune-telling game.
Deep Dive
In 1996 a group of high-school students in Mikage-cho play a fortune-telling game and are drawn into supernatural events. Philemon grants them the power of Persona to fight demons and the SEBEC conspiracy. Battles take place on a grid, the party can talk to demons to provoke emotional reactions, and Igor fuses new Personas from spell cards in the Velvet Room. A second route, the Snow Queen quest, follows a separate story about a cursed mask.
Developer Story
Kouji Okada directed and produced the game, with Kazuma Kaneko designing the characters, Tadashi Satomi writing and Shoji Meguro composing. Atlus released it in Japan on 20 September 1996 and North America that December, and it sold 391,556 copies in Japan in its first year. Persona 2: Innocent Sin followed in 1999.
Did You Know?
- The North American version changed names, hairstyles and ethnicities and cut the Snow Queen route; the 2009 PSP version restored it.
- The Velvet Room was inspired by the Black Lodge in Twin Peaks.
Sources & further reading
- Revelations: Persona — Wikipedia
