Square Enix seems a bit concerned about Persona 5

[Rune Lai]

I found this article about a big poll Square is doing in Japan.

www.siliconera.com/2015/12/17/final-fantasy-xv-might-release-around-the-same-time-as-persona-5-in-summer-2016/

One of the questions is asking if FFXV and Persona 5 released at the same time, which would you buy? For reference, Persona 5 is set for summer of 2016, and FFXV does not have anything more specific than 2016.

It sounds like Square is concerned that if they go head-to-head against P5 they actually might lose, and I'm pretty sure if that happened it would be a nightmare for them. I'm a little surprised they'd be willing to imply that in an online poll though, since now if they skitter off to Spring or Fall it will be read as being afraid of Persona.

Kotaku's also doing a poll, asking if you could buy just one, which would you get. Persona is winning by a narrow margin (52% would buy P5, 48% would buy FFXV). It's not much, but if Japanese fans are anything like English-speaking fans, Square has a right to be worried.

[Anon Mous]

Can't say I'm surprised. Final Fantasy has been costing on its name for years, while Persona has been making steady progress, turning their lesser known RPG series into a main stream hit. We put Persona 4 Arena into our demo system and we had a ton of people asking what that awesome game was. Leave it to Atlus to take a successful RPG and turn it into a good fighting game. I can think of another company that tried to cross genres like that on multiple occasions and it didn't work so well. Just saying. Going up against Persona 5 would be suicide for Square, and while I can say they've made some bad decisions, I doubt they're there yet.

[Rune Lai]

Atlus was smart enough to contract with another developer to do the P4 Arena games, because fighting games aren't what their dev teams are trained to do, so they found someone who made fighting games all the time and then supervised. That was the right way to go, and it's a fun fighting game!

I guess I'm just used to thinking of Persona as being an underdog lol... so I'm constantly surprised when so many people like it. I started playing with the first one, which is pretty cruddy by today's standards (soooooo many late nights trapped in the middle of some gigantic dungeon while starved for a save point). It doesn't even look like what people consider a Persona game anymore other than it's high school kids with Personas.

There are no shadows, no social links. Personas are interchange-able between party members as long as they have enough affinity. You can negotiate SMT-style with demons to get the cards needed for fuse new Personas, and the moon phase is dictated by time spent walking around rather than a calendar and the plot.