Persona 4
Persona 4 is a role-playing video game developed and published by Atlus for Sony's PlayStation 2, and chronologically the fifth installment in the "Persona" series, itself a part of the larger "Megami Tensei" franchise. The game was released in Japan in July 2008, North America in December 2008, and Europe in March 2009. "Persona 4" takes place in a fictional Japanese countryside and is indirectly related to earlier "Persona" games. The player-named protagonist is a high-school student who moved into the countryside from the city for a year. During his year-long stay, he becomes involved in investigating mysterious murders while harnessing the power of summoning Persona. The game features a weather forecast system with events happening on foggy days to replace the moon phase system implemented in the previous games.
Persona (series)
The series consists of ten games, not counting re-releases and mobile games. "Persona" was the first role-playing entry in the "Megami Tensei" franchise to be released outside of Japan, as previous entries had been considered ineligible due to possibly controversial content. As examples of this content were in a milder form for "Persona", the restrictions did not apply. According to Atlus, "Persona" and its sequel were to test player reactions to the "Megami Tensei" series outside of Japan. The greater majority of "Persona" games were either first released on or exclusive to PlayStation platforms. This trend was broken with the release of "Persona Q" for the 3DS in 2014. All the "Persona" games have been published by Atlus in Japan and North America. An exception in Japan was the Windows port of "Persona", which was published by ASCII Corporation. After 2016, due to Atlus USA's merger with Sega of America, Sega took over North American publishing duties, although the Atlus brand remained intact.