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| Colin Burns |
He ignored the "best girl" question.
06.15.16 - 6:15 PM
Over at the Atlus booth at this year's E3, Persona series' character designer, Shigenori Soejima, took the stage to answer questions from PR manager, John Hardin. Soejima revealed that he had designed a surplus of characters for Persona 4 and some of those designs spilled over into Persona 5. The first thing that Soejima designed specifically for Persona 5 was the new uniforms for the Syujin High School. Once he had the uniforms, he needed to work on slight variations to give the main party members a bit more personality. He made sure to emphasize the importance of working with a game's writer to fully understand the character before he could effectively design them.
As for the party members' casual looks, Soejima said he wanted players to, "get a slice of what being in Tokyo is really about." Persona 5 is set in Tokyo proper and Soejima said he drew inspiration from the people that he sees walking around there. He even studied the way salarymen shuffle through the train stations in order to capture that spirit for the NPCs.
An interesting topic that came up was Soejima's tendency to design characters who wear headphones. The way he explained it, the protagonist of Persona 3 wore headphones to emphasize his lone-wolf aura and Persona 4's Yosuke wore them to remind us that he came from the city and he is in touch with popular music. Now, in Persona 5, we get Futaba but of course, Soejima said we will have to play the full game to understand what her headphones say about her character. We will get our chance when Persona 5 is released on February 14th in North America for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 3.
