The Bonkurasu Brigade

Good day, Meguro here.

Japan won at the World Baseball Classic yesterday!
Actually I had the day off yesterday and stayed at home to work on the music for a certain project, but I happened to watch the broadcast of the WBC during the afternoon and couldn’t stop!
In the end I only managed to start on work when evening came…

Now then, this time round we’ll continue the discussion about the Persona PSP port, on sale 4/29. Yesterday, Takada wrote briefly about UMD load times on his column, and Growlanser and Persona started development at almost the same time, so while alternating between these two projects, the mastering was also done nearly at the same time.
On that, the loading times for battles, as it was for both Growlanser and Persona, were terrible at first.
In an unrevised state and had a despairingly slow load time, but begging our programmer Touyama and with the aid of many of our staff members, we finally got it to an acceptable speed. At that time Growlanser was in the same situation too (laughs), but even while making full use of Persona interface know-how to fix the load times quickly, Growlanser is rumored to be faster or something…

On that topic, I have a PSP with me right now as well as a test UMD with Persona loaded…
I will now proceed to report the speeds of battle loading.
The test UMD is an older version of the Persona in development so it’ll differ slightly from the version going on sale, so please understand that.

Now, switching on the PSP and loading a random save file… It started in the town map, and I have an analog watch in hand. Trying to go into battle now.
…
6 to 7 seconds?
Initial load times are kind of slow, aren’t they.

To the next battle!
…
To load the map and be able to navigate took 3 seconds? The screen darkened for around 2 seconds there didn’t it? To return to the map takes 2 seconds.

Walking around for a bit, another battle!
…
Oh! It’s faster now, around two seconds?
Is the PSP-2000’s cache kicking in place?

Going into a dungeon takes around 2 to 3 seconds to load.
It feels a little faster than the town map.
This changes according to the party formation and the demon selection.

Let’s see how long a battle takes.
I have confidence in this one, during the initial testing phase, the clear time of this dungeon on the PSP was compared to the PS version, and was planned to be possible to clear without getting frustrated. The time taken to clear a dungeon and the encounter rate were adjusted to meet this objective.

To the next save file.
It’s another dungeon, the main character is level 14.
The first battle had Afanc, Agathion and Ba-ga.
Without putting it on auto, and individually commanding all characters, and setting it to replay-auto on the third turn, the battle took 1 minute and 10 seconds altogether. It averages around this time, according to my memory.
With battle animation turned off, and skip enabled, these are the times taken per battle
First battle…30 seconds
Second battle…15 seconds
Third battle…50 seconds
Fourth battle…Managed a back-attack! 55 seconds

As you can see, a battle can be finished below a minute with auto-mode.

We’ve made it so that it can be easily played on-the-move.
If you want to clear the battle before you reach the next station on the train, do put on the skip function, but don’t miss your stop!

[Meguro Shouji]
◆Director of Persona
◆Sound Composer for Persona 3, Persona 3 Fes, Persona 4