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 3
The soundtrack for "Persona 3" was composed entirely by Shoji Meguro, with the sole exception of "Adventured Act", which was composed by Yosuke Uda. It was released as a two disc soundtrack in Japan by Aniplex on July 19, 2006. A selection of tracks from the full soundtrack was bundled with the North American release of the game. An arranged album, titled "Burn My Dread -Reincarnation: Persona 3-", was also released in Japan by Aniplex on April 18, 2007. It contains eleven arrangements of tracks from "Persona 3", as well as an extended version of the song "Burn My Dread." Meguro stated that the development of "Persona 3" was one of his first opportunities to fully realize his music in video games. The soundtrack features a high use of vocals, though Meguro did not consider this as special or exceptional. A tune from previous "Persona" titles he rearranged was "Aria of the Soul", the theme of the Velvet Room. The game's battle theme, "Mass Destruction", was originally just a prototype, but the reception to it was so positive that it went into the final game. In the past, the hardware limitations of the original PlayStation required him to compose music in 100-200 kilobyte samples, which he felt made the music sound "pretty cheap". The move to the PlayStation 2 allowed for real-time streaming of music. Meguro considers this "the point at which [he] was finally able to express [his] music without making any compromises". He was also worried about the pronunciation of the English lyrics.