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 5
The first character sketches were submitted in 2012. Soejima worked closely with Hashino so the characters and environments reflected the game's themes. Due to being high school students, Soejima found it difficult to make each main character's uniform design distinctive, instead expressing their individuality through their thief costumes. Joker's design was cited by Soejima as his most challenging recent work. Joker needed to both convey a taste of the game's overall artstyle, and to act as an avatar for the player. As the main theme and narrative of "Persona 5" revolved around crime and vigilantes triggered by Joker voluntarily choosing that path, Soejima needed to convey this while allowing the character to suit whatever dialogue choices the player decided upon. Due to these difficulties, Joker was given multiple designs in a trial and error process to find the best one. As the "phantom thief" premise was a common stereotype in fiction, Soejima initially drew Joker and main cast in a style similar to shōnen manga, but these designs were scrapped as they clashed with the "Persona" series' realistic aesthetics. As with previous entries, Joker was a silent character, so as with previous protagonist Soejima had to work out a way he could communicate without dialogue. His solution was to imagine the "Persona 5" protagonist as the type of person who made plans but did not share them with others. The Persona designs, being based on characters from literature, were intended to evoke both familiarity and surprise from players. Once the names were chosen, Soejima designed the Personas based on that character.