Shin Megami Tensei: Persona

Shin Megami Tensei: Persona is a reworked version of the very first game in the Persona series, originally released in the nineties on the PlayStation under the title Revelations: Persona. With the PSP remake, Atlus set out to bring the game closer to modern players – reworking the graphics, sound, and some systems, while the core of the story about a group of high school students who, after a mysterious accident, discover the ability to summon their inner personas, remained faithful to the original.

Compared to later entries in the series, the world here is darker and rawer, without the social simulator that made Persona 3 and 4 famous – instead of building relationships, the player focuses on exploring an alternate version of their hometown gripped by a mysterious entity, and on dungeon-crawling battles in which the personas act as summoned creatures with their own elemental attacks and weaknesses that must be uncovered through trial and error. The remake also added a previously unlocalized scenario for a second group of characters, which had been left out of the original Western release, and fixed some of the original's technical shortcomings, such as a clearer map and faster travel between locations.

For fans of the series, it was a rare chance to get to know the roots of the persona mythology and the tarot archetypes on which all later entries build, including today's far more popular sequels, and thus better understand where the systems that later made Persona 3, 4, and 5 famous actually came from.

Why play it: A reworked return to the roots of the Persona series, with a darker atmosphere and without the social simulator of later entries.