Ahead of a more formal announcement that was likely due sometime over the next few days, a couple of trailers for new Persona games have leaked online. Well, they weren’t even leaked; they were posted accidentally on Atlus’ English-language Instagram page, making them official leaks.
The first one is for a game called Persona 5 Tactica, which takes Atlus’ RPG and shifts it to a turn-based tactical battlefield, ala Fire Emblem:
The second is a full-blown Persona 3 remake, called Persona 3 Reload. I know, we only just got a Persona 3 re-release, but that was of the excellent portable edition; this looks like it’s rebuilding the entire, original Persona 3 experience using Persona 5-level tech.
That is excellent news! Persona 3's story and characters are some of the series’ most beloved, and it’s regarded as the first entry in the “modern” Persona games (older ones were quite different), but some of that older game’s design decisions—it was first released in 2006—haven’t exactly aged well, particularly its grindy tower. Persona 3 Portable made some changes there, but whether Reload also makes some more modern concessions remains to be seen, since this is just a leaked trailer; the full announcement with details on this kind of stuff is yet to come.
Persona 5 Tactica’s trailer says that it will be out on November 17 on Xbox (and Game Pass) and PC, while Persona 3 Reloaded will be out in “early 2024" on Xbox, PC and Cloud. That doesn’t mean those are the only platforms they’re releasing on, just that these trailers in particular may have been part of Xbox’s June 11 showcase. So we can expect more information on what these are doing and which other platforms they’re heading to to come after that!