The ever popular Shin Megami Tensei: Persona series is making its way to the Xbox (or at least games 3-5), as announced in the Xbox and Bethesda showcase. Since their inception, the mainline Persona games have called Sony platforms their exclusive home for release. It wasn’t until summer 2020 when Persona 4 Golden had made its way onto the PC, surprising many fans back then in a similar way as this announcement. The games are planned to be purchasable for the Xbox, and will also be available via the Xbox Game Pass, spanning their console, PC, and cloud platforms. Persona 5 Royal, the most recent game in the series, is set to release October 21, 2022, with the other two games having unknown dates.
The Persona games are known for their traditional, turn-based RPG style of battling, mixed with running through a sort of high school life simulator. The story mainly centers around a cast of teenage high school misfits who need to band together to defeat supernatural forces that are affecting the world around them, all while trying to ace their final exams and romance each other.
This Japanese RPG franchise is highly beloved by many and with each iteration of the games, the quality has only gone up. The specific versioned Persona games that are coming to the Xbox ecosystem are Persona 3 Portable, Persona 4 Golden, and Persona 5 Royal. Both Golden and Royal are enhanced versions of their respective games. While Persona 3 Portable is somewhat an enhanced version of its base game, there is also another version not to be confused with P3P, titled Person 3 FES, which had been released on the Playstation 2, with additional content exclusive to itself.
Over the years, gamers on other platforms had only been exposed to Persona spinoff games, such as Persona Q for the 3DS, the highly rated fighting game Persona 4 Arena which released for both Nintendo and Microsoft platforms, and most recently Persona 5 Strikers, which had released for the Nintendo Switch in 2021. There is no word on whether or not Nintendo will also be providing a way to purchase the main Persona games, but this news certainly opens the door to the possibility much more than before. No word yet on whether or not these games will be present on the new Playstation Plus Premium Service, which is set to be Sony’s response to Xbox’s Game Pass.
