Earlier this morning, we finally got a look at the gameplay in Atlus’ hotly anticipated Persona 5.

On the game’s official website, we’ve now received a nice welcome message from the Persona team’s producer-director, Katsura Hashino:

Good evening, everyone. This is Persona Team’s Hashino here.

Today, we revealed a video for our much-anticipated game. So, what did you like about it?

At the time of my writing, I haven’t seen your reactions, so I’m a bit nervous when I think about comments like “the next Persona is about a masked thief haha” or “is that Lupin?!” and so on – but I do look forward to positive responses. Even if only a little bit of the video appealed to you, I will be very happy.

With Persona 5, we’re taking a challenge with combining a teenager school setting that is larger than life, alongside something like a picaresque romance. In the previous game, we had a story featuring a group seeking a bad guy for justice, while risking their own lives.

In this game, the story revolves around a group of highschoolers that are being “chased” by unforeseen circumstances, due to the type of justice they believe in. We’re penning [the story] to hopefully portray an everyday, yet exciting life from the perspective of these characters.

The team are working together as we progress through development phases, so as you can expect the sound and graphics will evolve, alongside party members. You can expect the protagonists to be a little bit more behaved in comparison to previous characters.

We’re all pouring lots of emotions into this game. This is a product of Atlus, who is known to embrace unique traits, although some people say that a strong personality can go against common rules or social norms – so this could be seen as chaotic as well.

Despite this, we see a person’s character as being able to affect others in both good and bad ways, and it can even affect how you might think or behave yourself. This is the potential that we see in this sort of thing.

All of us might feel a sort of suffocation in our modern world, but so long as we’re involved with other humans in varying relationships, it’s the person’s own character, or a group’s character as a whole, that will be able to transcend that feeling of being trapped.

I sincerely hope that our game will develop into something that can harbor these emotions, something that will forever remain in your hearts.

However, in order to meet all of your wishes, our development team are working very hard, so I want to say thank you for all of your support!

Katsura Hashino,

Persona 5 Director and Creative Producer.

Persona 5 is currently in development for Playstation 3 and Playstation 4.