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
Shigenori Soejima, who had worked on the last two main-series "Persona" titles, returned as character designer. The game's art director was Masayoshi Suto, whose most notable work on earlier titles included the user interface (UI) displays. The art design reflected the picaresque theme aimed for by the rest of the team. As the team considered previous "Persona" games to "fun" but not be well marketed, they designed the UI in such a way as to attract a larger, more mainstream audience. According to Soejima, he was working on prospective designs for the game while "Persona 4" was still in development, with his designs evolving as the story for "Persona 5" came together. Aesthetically, the team felt that they were picking up where "Persona 4" left off. Its styling presentation was an unintentional reflection on the hurdles the team needed to overcome during development. Following the respective thematic coloring of "Persona 3" and "4" blue and yellow, "Persona 5" used red, which was chosen to a harsh feeling. Because of this, Suto tested multiple font colors until settling on black and white, as it stood out best against it. There was also a wish, especially in the teaser image used for the game's announcement, which represented the main characters' being chained down by the rules of the modern world. Soejima designed the logo to convey the high-speed existences of the young cast, while elements such as Joker's Persona Arsène were designed to appear old-fashioned by comparison. This presented challenges as Soejima needed to balance this with a strong sense of style. The main aim for the game's environments was to create a sense of realism, with Tokyo being modeled after real locations. When creating the UI, Hashino wanted to demonstrate how a shift in perspective could alter a dull life into an exciting one in the context of the story. Early UI designs were so "aggressively animated" that it obscured what was happening in the game. Because of this, the animations were toned down and text orientation was altered, toning down the UI's graphical elements to present a balance between user-friendliness and style. Rather than the use of sub-colors for earlier entries, the UI used only the primary red, black and white colors aside from health and magic point meters, with the menus using a special moving 3D model of Joker which would change position depending on the selected menu.