Persona fans rejoice. It seems Persona 4 is next in line for a remake. That's great and all, but whatever happened to a Persona 5 Arena?
Listen, I know what you're saying and I hear you — "b-but Persona 6!?" It's true that the much-anticipated follow-up to the most popular entry in the franchise is long, long overdue. But don't you find it bizarre that Atlus, who loves milking P5, hasn't even bothered with a new fighting game?
Persona 5 has had so many spin-offs already: dancing games, hack-and-slash action games, tactical RPGs, dungeon crawlers, and even gachas. Joker himself showed up in Smash Bros Ultimate. Boot up a gaming YouTube video and there's a 50/50 chance you'll hear the P5 OST as background music.
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+ 2The game is massive, and yet, despite all the spin-offs, all the popularity, we've not seen even rumors of a P5 Arena. The last we saw of Persona Arena was the release of P4 Ultimax, an enhanced version, in 2014 (the game was ported to Steam and Nintendo Switch in 2022, so there's that).
If you've never played P4 Arena, it's an anime fighter developed by Arc System Works, the team behind the Guilty Gear series and Dragon Ball FighterZ. The game features a brand-new story following the events of Persona 4 and 3, with characters from both games a bit aged up.
Arc Sys manages to incorporate game mechanics from the original games to perfection. Each character can use their persona a set number of times. Status ailments also play a part in your core gameplan depending on the character you've picked.
As you'd expect, P4 Arena is an incredibly fast-paced fighting game, with plenty of flashy moves to make the sickest combos. If you're a Persona fan, it's an absolute treat that's worth playing even now.
Playable fighters include plenty of beloved characters from P4 and P3, such as Akihiko Sanada, Mitsuru Kirijo, Junpei Iori, Chie Satonaka, and P4 protagonist Yu Narukami.
Funnily enough, fans recently discovered files in P4 Arena that hinted at a possible Joker inclusion in Arena Ultimax. Of course, going by the timeline, this would've been a very early version of Joker Arc System Works would have been working on.
Persona 5 was released in 2016 after multiple delays. The game was initially set to come out in 2014, the same year as P4 Arena Ultimax, so it's entirely plausible Joker would've been one of the new characters in the game. Sadly, as the project was continuously pushed, the idea was scrapped.
It's still rather bizarre we haven't seen a Persona 5 Arena, though. P4 Arena's success is what eventually pushed Atlus to branch off and tackle other spin-offs like the dancing or Persona Q series.
It could have been a matter of scheduling. As Atlus was wrapping up development on Persona 5 ahead of its 2016 release in Japan, Arc System Works was already working on Dragon Ball FighterZ, which was released in January 2018.
click to enlarge + 2Soon after, it's not unreasonable to think that a portion of the team shifted tasks to work on what would eventually become Guilty Gear Strive, launched in 2021. That's not even taking into consideration projects such as Granblue Fantasy Versus (2020) or DNF Duel (2022).
During that time, Atlus continued work on P5 and released the enhanced version Royal in 2019 in Japan (2020 worldwide), while also launching plenty of spin-offs including Persona 5: Dancing in Starlight (2018), Persona 5 Strikers (2020), and Persona 5 Tactica (2023).
Timelines for a spin-off title sadly didn't seem to match. Arc System Works has had a very busy last few years and now that their schedule is a bit more open it looks like it might be too little too late for a project like P5 Arena.
At this point, the general consensus is to sit tight and wait for an eventual P6 release. Maybe, the stars will align this time to give us a much-needed follow-up to the Arena series. Hopefully featuring Joker and the rest of the Phantom Thieves alongside all the Persona 6 newcomers.