Persona 3 Team Recalls Do-Or-Die Rebuild At The Tenth Mosaic
The roundtable is the first time the three staff who shaped Persona 3 through Persona 5 have described together how Atlus's RPG business was framed internally at the time as a do-or-die project rather than a routine sequel.
Key Facts
- Katsura Hashino, Shigenori Soejima, and Shoji Meguro held a Persona series roundtable at The Tenth Mosaic on September 22 and 23, 2026, at the Institut francais du Japon in Tokyo.
- Persona 3 shipped in 2006, Persona 4 in 2008, and Persona 5 in 2016.
- Persona 4 Revival is set for release on February 18, 2027.
- Atlus announced Persona 6 in June 2026 with a teaser trailer.
- Meguro spent about a year on the concept for Persona 4's music after Hashino gave him only the work's atmosphere rather than a specific music order.
Reporting from 2 sources: GameBusiness.jp, Game Spark.
Katsura Hashino, Shigenori Soejima, and Shoji Meguro spoke about the making of Persona 3, Persona 4, and Persona 5 at The Tenth Mosaic, a game culture festival held September 22 and 23, 2026, at the Institut francais du Japon in Tokyo. Hashino, who took over Atlus's RPG output after the Devil Summoner and Shin Megami Tensei teams, said the situation around Persona 3 was conveyed to him as the last chance for Atlus to make an RPG if the game did not produce results. Persona 3 shipped in 2006, Persona 4 followed in 2008, and Persona 5 arrived in 2016 after a direction change delayed its release. Persona 4 Revival is set for February 18, 2027, and Atlus announced Persona 6 in June 2026 with a teaser trailer.
The roundtable was billed as a look back at all three games, but the panelists approached it from three different jobs: Hashino as director, Soejima as character designer, and Meguro as sound creator and main composer.
Hashino recalled the brief that reached him after his work on the Devil Summoner and Shin Megami Tensei teams. Asked what direction to take, he said he looked at "what should we do to liven up the next Atlus?" rather than how to continue the series, and built the project from zero. The setup traced back to Atlus's Saturn era, when the Devil Summoner team was formed for core gamers and the Persona team for the lighter PlayStation audience.
For the artwork, Soejima said he chased "good things I found myself" and designed typography and UI for visuals that gave players a sense of superiority. Meguro built the soundtrack around the keyword "future pop."
Persona 4 aimed at Kindaichi Kosuke. Hashino wanted the outsider detective's habit of breaking open a closed village's customs, and asked for a concept illustration. Soejima returned an incident scene of a girl floating in a river, badly beaten, and Hashino found it promising. Production switched from Persona 3's complete division of labor to shared team reviews of plots and character roughs. Music took about a year of concept work and landed on a pop and rock sound.
Persona 5 began as "a juvenile story about traveling with just one backpack" before the concept was dropped. Hashino's phantom thief motif returned after he noticed a new Lupin III anime, which fed big band and acid jazz into the score.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 2 cited sources below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.