GAME Watch Marks 30 Years Of Megami Ibunroku Persona
The retrospective reads the series' identity back to its first game: Jungian persona theory and mythology applied to ordinary high school life, an approach it says carried forward across three decades of Atlus releases.
Reporting from 1 source: GAME Watch (Impress).
A GAME Watch retrospective marks September 20, 2026 as the 30th anniversary of Megami Ibunroku Persona, which Atlus released in Japan on September 20, 1996. The piece traces the series from that first title through Persona 2: Innocent Sin and Eternal Punishment, Persona 3, Persona 4, and Persona 5, which the article notes now reaches its 10th anniversary.
The anniversary date is September 20, and the piece ties the first game's 1996 release to a specific period of PlayStation-era role-playing games. It describes Megami Ibunroku Persona borrowing the mythological scale and demon battles of the Shin Megami Tensei series, then setting them in Mikage-cho and St. Hermelin High School.
The story begins with an after-school charm called Persona-sama performed in a classroom, followed by a lightning strike and a meeting with the masked figure Philemon in the mental world. The article follows the series onward through Persona 2: Innocent Sin and Eternal Punishment, Persona 3, Persona 4, and Persona 5.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.
Sources
- GAME Watch (Impress) ジュブナイルRPGの金字塔「女神異聞録ペルソナ」30周年