By the year 2072, Atlus will have released Persona 4 and 5 upwards of 58 times in genres as far-ranging as musou, rhythm, fighting, dating sim, shop-management, grand strategy, and fishing. Approximately 86% of videogame characters will be Chie. If current trends continue, we'll all be killed by Exponential Persona long before biodiversity collapse gets us. I can't wait, personally.
But for as much as Atlus clearly loves releasing games featuring Joker and Charlie Tunoku, one portion of its fanbase has been neglected for decades: the poor, lonely bannermen-and-women of Persona 1 and 2, who have been after remasters, remakes, or just plain re-releases for the classic, pre-Katsura-Hashino entries in the series for literal decades at this point.
How excited they must have been when Atlus announced that "Persona and Persona 2: Innocent Sin / Persona 2: Eternal Punishment are coming to Amazon!" (via GamesRadar). How glum they must have been when it became clear the games were "coming to Amazon" in the form of some t-shirts and tote bags, a mug, a thermos, a phone case, and two baseball caps. Admittedly, it's a pretty slick mug.
But take heart, true believers, because the merch drop was accompanied by something peculiar: a surprise rebrand for the OG Persona games. The Amazon swag has launched under the never-before-seen rubrics of "Persona 1 Origins" and "Persona 2 Duality."
What could this mean? Well, nothing, potentially. But it would be a little odd to dream up a rebrand for a pair of 30-year-old games that amounted to nothing more than a new label for some t-shirts. You best believe there are already people out there taking this as a sign that Atlus is finally doing something with the beloved elder Persona games.
Punters on Reddit are already trying to figure out just what this might mean for the games, albeit with some well-earned cynicism: "It's good news so should be fake," declares one much-upvoted comment from Aardvark_Happy.
There's not much weirdness I'd put past Atlus, but I do feel pretty confident saying this is almost certainly not the last we'll see of the brands Persona 1 Origins and Persona 2 Duality. In an ideal world, that's because we'll get games using those names in the future (and remember that Atlus honcho Kazuhisa Wada has said he'd like to remake the original Personas).
In a less-than-ideal world, it's because Atlus will announce some sort of Japan-only stage show based on the '90s Personas. Keep your fingers crossed, folks. At least you can pick up a new thermos while you wait.
