The Bonkurasu Brigade

The Persona 3 Portable Creator’s blog was updated yesterday, so here’s the translation of part 2. Soejima’s writing this time, so expect art! :D

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Hi.

This is Soejima, handling the character design of Persona 3 Portable.

And it is finally announced, P3P, Persona 3 Portable!
To present the world of Persona 3 with plenty of new elements, as a developer, there are things I feel strongly about.

For people new to Persona 3, and for people who did play the PS2 version, do give the PSP version a try and enjoy the evolution of the system from three years before!

Now, P3P has many aspects worthy of mention, but as the character designer I will talk about the character design in this installment.

Aiming to become the best school-setting RPG, the characters that appear in Persona 3 vary from robots to dogs.
It was very challenging to create and design unique characters that would hardly appear in a normal school-setting…(laughs).
But thanks to this, each character has their own charm and good points, and even now, I have a special emotional attachment to each of them.

Speaking of characters, in this version of P3, a major new element is the female main character!

In the Persona Series, the only other time there was a female main character was in Persona 2 -Punishment-, but this is the first time you get a choice between the male main character or the female main character.

To decide on how the female main character would look took a very long time, and in the end the design went through 3 to 4 revisions.

The main character is a special existence within the game, not because the character traits are what ultimately moves the story along, but because it is like one’s other self within the game and has to be differentiated from the other characters in the story. Even if the main character looks cool, if the player cannot connect to the main character, the design fails as a main character, and this is a difficult thing to overcome.

The initial design for the female main character in P3p was a female version of the original main character (laughs).

They shared the same hair color and eyes. But after drawing that, it wasn’t what I wanted so I moved on.

Because it was to be a new main character, so if she was the same as the original it would be meaningless, and also mainly because I wanted to show how the impression of the same world and story development would change with a different main character.
The female main character I had so much trouble coming up with can be said to be the main character, but not the heroine.
If I drew the ideal girl, she would become the heroine and not the main character.
That was the one point I had the most problems with, and so with the help of a female staff member I managed to finish the design of the female main character.

Till now, with only the male main character option, the school-life setting in P3 was only half-fulfilled, but with the female main character option, I feel that the school-life RPG P3 will finally be complete.

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And thats the end of Part 2. Seriously, a female version of the original? As much as it probably won’t work, I’d want to see that. Here’s hoping he puts it in the concept artbook (If they do release one).