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Development

Proposal document for Persona 4

Persona 4 was first announced on March 21, 2008 in issue 1005 of the Weekly Famitsu magazine. Much of Persona 4's foundation comes from director Katsura Hashino's experiences with Persona 3. For example, a player might not know what they are getting into before they play Persona 3, so he wanted to communicate to players what kind of game Persona 4 was upfront. The resulting setup is a straightforward murder mystery in a small town that only the teenage protagonists can solve. Hashino also felt that this is the kind of thing that people who enjoyed Persona 3 would want to play. At the beginning of Persona 3, Tartarus felt like it was only for training with little connection to the story.

new section: talk about the rural setting: does a school story need to be in the big city? kindaichi. rural + murder stuff go hand in hand. [2]

In Persona 4, Atlus wanted to better integrate the real world more with the mental world so that players weren't asking why a mystical element like Shadows were running around in a murder mystery story. They came up with the idea of someone getting kidnapped, thrown into the mental world, and then having to rescue them. Having battles take place inside of a TV came from wanting to balance the darkness of the murders with something more lighthearted.

new section: talk about influences. japanese variety tv is a big one here. [3]

new section: talk about the development of the writing. e.g.: morooka characterization from writers, kido and other writers contributions [4]. yukiko glasses gag [5].

Themes

Persona 4 was made as a thematic follow-up to Persona 3, which asked questions about how to live and covered the period at the end of adolesence. Going from there, Hashino felt that, in order to live, you would need information. Furthermore, with the rise of the internet as well as Hashino's thought that Japan in general lacked media literacy, you would also need the ability to tell apart information from misinformation. And ultimately, even when you are not sure what information you can trust, you can believe in those closest to you.

While Hashino did not set out to make a game that was critical of the media, it ended up being a theme due to the usage of the TV. He recalls that during the time period when Persona 4 was being developed, there was a common trend in Japanese media where people made claims that natto helped you lose weight, and he believes there were some skeptics, some who tried it, and some who accepted that as fact without questioning it. Thus, the fog in the game represents how the truth gets obscured and how one must figure out what to believe. In the year 2008, Japan had begun transitioning from analog to digital terrestrial TV broadcasting, with the target end date being July of 2011. Atlus was conscious of this during Persona 4's development and Hashino thought that as the deadline drew closer, people would begin having more discussions about what gets broadcasted on TV.

The setting went hand in hand with this theme, with small town rumors and gossip being a form of information causing social anxiety in Inaba. Though the focus on Japanese gods had been decided early on, Hashino imagined that these local gods would be the ones fighting against this social anxiety.

maybe??? new section: expand on the small town part, maybe? i think the challenge here is to balance this with the rural murder mystery element from above.

Hashino also interpreted the tale of Izanagi and Izanami to fit this theme of information. As the tale goes, Izanagi is unable to accept that Izanami has died and he travels to underworld where he is almost killed by her. Hashino reimagined it by equating "death" with the people readily accepting what they hear as fact without thinking about it critically, and Izanami seeing this and thinking they might as well be dead.

Art Direction and Character Design

Shigenori Soejima served as both the art director and character designer of Persona 4. After being informed by Hashino that the game would take place in a rural location, Soejima began sketching scenes that he associated with a rural area. He drew images such as a pure spring, like one would find in the Japanese Alps. His mental image of a rural area was "pretty flowers, flowing spring water, and students in track suits and white helmets riding bicycles to school" due to a drinking water commercial he saw on TV. However, this kind of romanticized view of the countryside wasn't enough to work off of. And Hashino, who grew up in a rural area, told the staff that rural areas aren't idyllic like in that commercial, but more desolate and dark. To make sure the staff were all in agreement, they went to a rural city to gather data in person, observing the look of the streets and the atmosphere.

When it came to the people, the character designs and clothes of Persona 4 don't align with real life. When gathering data, Soejima thought he would see tropes and stereotypes like school jerseys and loose socks, but he found the people and students there resembled people who could be seen in Tokyo. To be cool and stylish but within the rural setting, he went with retro elements such as Yukiko Amagi's hairband, as he felt retro was a stylish way of communicating that something is outdated, and people assume rural areas are outdated. Soejima considers Chie Satonaka's design in particular to be a turning point in how Persona 4's design came together. He really wanted a character who wore a school jersey, as a caricature of the rural atmosphere, but he didn't think that a dark colored jersey would fit with the game. He wound up drawing Chie's jacket in a retro style, and it fit. From there, he realized that he could make even something as lame as a jersey jacket look cool by adding a retro flair. While Soejima generally tries to make things look "cool", he tried to balance this in Persona 4 with "un-cool" things, like not making characters look too well-dressed, expressed through elements like Chie's can badges.

During the game's planning phase, Soejima had come up with the idea of the TV World to add something graphically fun and appealing so the game wasn't just a dark murder mystery in a small city. This also added a fantastical element, justifying why the characters would need Personas in a detective story. Around this time, he also came up with the idea of the characters wearing glasses as the group's unifying element to symbolize the truth. At first, the idea was met with a lot of opposition, but he pushed on and kept suggesting glasses despite that. He also drafted the idea of having the characters wear masks while fighting. As the plot and the game's message became more developed, the existence of glasses—conceptually, not just visually—became more and more convincing. Soejima tailored each character's pair of glasses to their look and personality. He recalls that the initial reactions to the characters had people asking why they were all wearing glasses, but before long the internet started calling the game Megane Tensei. He ended up being quite attached to the protagonist's design as he designed him to look cool while wearing glasses, based on how his bangs line up with his eyes.

After sketching the setting, Soejima began designing the Yasogami High School uniforms. He went with the classic Japanese gakuran style uniform to contrast with the blazers used in Persona 3. Additionally, the visible sewing threads on the uniforms symbolize that Persona 4 is a coming-of-age story, and that the students are incomplete and still growing. Following that, he began designing the characters starting with the protagonist because the story doesn't inform his role. Then, he drew the rest of the characters in the order they appear in the story. The wide cast of characters were designed with the idea that each player would have at least one favorite. The last design made was a redesign of Tohru Adachi due to his role in the story being changed. While Soejima primarily drew the characters, he also influenced their non-physical aspects. For example, he came up with the idea of Chie doing kung fu moves to compliment her fighting with kicks, turning her character into a kung fu fanatic. For the design of the Personas themselves, Soejima designed them to look like how the characters would imagine Japanese gods and historical figures after hearing their names with Jiraiya in particular being given a lot of overlapping elements with Shadow Yosuke to communicate that a Persona=a Shadow.

Soejima chose yellow as the main color for Persona 4 to give the game a bright and refreshing image. Though it's a murder mystery at heart, the majority of the game is taken up by the protagonist's school life. He feels that, in hindsight, it's the perfect color for Persona 4 since he was able to give it a double meaning of happiness (dandelions, children in yellow bucket hats, the movie The Yellow Handkerchief of Happiness) and danger (the color on the traffic light). Furthermore, it fits the rural setting. The brightest areas of the game are the party screen and the menu with the rainbows and flowers, which were intentionally designed to be flashy since the player will be looking at them frequently. Recurring visual elements from the rest of the Persona series include the butterfly, which indicates the presence of Philemon, as well as black and white patterns, such as when the characters enter the TV World, to symbolize a person's duality and the power to wield a Persona.

Soundtrack

See also: Persona 4 Original Soundtrack § Production

Voice Acting

new section: talk about how the jp voice actors were picked, and hashinos comments about teddie's va in particular [6] the golden tv listings also include a bonus with the jp vas talking about their characters, but i i feel like its mostly fluff.

For the English voice casting, Atlus USA cast the voice actors based on a group consensus. They had set out to try and use a different voice cast than Persona 3. The exception to this was Yuri Lowenthal, whom Namba had in mind to cast as Yosuke to give him more lines than he had as the protagonist in Persona 3. Namba recalls disliking parts of Persona 3's English dub and wanting to do better for Persona 4. They worked to correct the pronunciation of words like "sempai" and "-chan", which seemed inconsistent in Persona 3. The team felt the most essential castings were the two navigator characters, Teddie and Rise Kujikawa, as the player would be hearing their voice the most often. Other casting decisions made include wanting English Chie to sound less feminine than her Japanese voice due to her being a tomboy, and Johnny Yong Bosch being cast as Adachi then also being asked in the recording booth to read for the protagonist since the protagonist is silent and only has battle grunts. At the time, other Japanese games were released in America with contextless localizations that affected a player's understanding of the characters and story. While the Atlus USA team had a Japanese ROM to reference for Persona 4, they found they still ran into issues where they misunderstood context during the translation process and had to adjust it. The localization team spent a lot of time fixing the script while recording the English dub, sometimes even writing at the recording studio.

English Localization

The North American version of Persona 4 came out five months after the Japanese version. For the English localization, Atlus USA had four translators and four editors who worked under the overall project lead, Yu Namba. The story was translated by Mai Namba and edited by Nich Maragos, James Kuroki translated the Social Links, and Martin Britton and Jensen Kamiya translated the rest of the game's text. The editors divided up the rest of the translated text, with Maragos taking over on the main cast Social Links due to his familiarity with them from working on the main story, Scott Strichart taking the four school club Social Links, and Clayton Chan and Michael Meeker dividing up the rest of the Social Links. The team estimated that Persona 4 had nearly 50% more text than Persona 3, but while they had over a year to work on Persona 3, they only had 6-8 months for Persona 4. When not counting the time the project spent in preproduction, the team didn't officially begin working until June of 2008.

Due to the Japanese setting, the team made various decisions about what should stay and what should be changed. Names like Kuma (クマ, meaning bear) ended up being changed to Teddie, as just seeing Kuma in the text wouldn't make any sense to English-speaking players like it does to Japanese players. Similarly, Kuma uses his name as his pronoun and sentence ender in Japanese which made Teddie an issue for the team to write for in English. The English equivalent of this ended up being Teddie using bear puns. References to other media were also changed when the team felt they wouldn't make sense to English players. For example, a scene where Chie references the detective Kindaichi and his grandson turned into a reference about the Kuzunoha Clan, with Namba thinking players who are familiar with Shin Megami Tensei would get it. When it came to character writing, Maragos initially misunderstood how "rural" Inaba was. Due to his background growing up in Louisiana, he had made the characters sound similar to country hicks. He quickly learned that Japan's "rural" isn't the same as America's; Inaba is still a modern city, it's just not a gigantic metropolis. Overall, Maragos felt that the main characters should talk like regular high schoolers. The game intentionally included some American slang, and Kanji Tatsumi was originally written to curse more due to him being a delinquent character before his lines were toned down.

During the localization of Persona 3, Atlus USA decided to preserve the usage of Japanese honorifics even in the English dialogue. Though it was met some feedback from people who would prefer the game without, they kept honorifics for Persona 4 as they felt it added more meaning, and it was also a way of keeping track of how character relationships change over the year the game takes place. The English version changes how the characters address one another using honorifics in ways the Japanese script doesn't: In Japanese, Yosuke addresses Yukiko as "Amagi-san". In the English localization, at the start of the game, Yosuke addresses her as "Yukiko-san", but after seeing her laughing about the gag glasses, he only addresses her by "Yukiko". To help English fans understand the usage of honorifics, the game manual for Persona 4 includes an "Honorifics" section and a "Glossary" of some Japanese words left in the script such as kotatsu and enka. The manual also included a "Mythology" section with information about the Investigation Team's Personas, as they were named after Japanese historical and mythological figures that wouldn't be as well-known to English speakers. The localization staff themselves noted it was difficult to find anything in English about figures like Naoto Shirogane's Sukuna-Hikona.

Animation

new section: hashino briefly remarks on the animation in pclub p4, prob makes a good "intro". [7] otherwise, wada and soejima talk about the op's production in dengeki [8]