Katsura Hashino is the man responsible for directing the fantastic Persona 5, which launched earlier this year to critical acclaim and is currently the best-reviewed PlayStation 4 game of 2017. However, he revealed last year that he would be handing the series off to someone else after working on it for so many years, deciding to move to Atlus’ new internal studio named Studio Zero for a new project.
While it has remained a mystery regarding what Hashino and this new studio would be working on, we’re now starting to get a little taste of what’s in store. Hashino has recently done a big interview with IGN as part of their IGN First series, where he talked a lot about Persona 5 but also shed some new light on his new project.
Hashino says regarding the new game that “My hope is that we can, for example, look at what Tolkien achieved [in his novels] and redefine it as a very small game studio. Because we have never made a fantasy game before and we are starting from zero as true amateurs, we feel we can build a world of illusion that takes the kind of societal issues we use in Shin Megami Tensei or Persona games, make them entertaining to play and find new success. That’s our ridiculous delusion.”
He goes on to say “You can easily move to a different paradigm than our modern world. By moving away, you know, there are so many games where you play as a senior high-schooler who gets whisked away to a parallel world and goes on an adventure, because this is a paradigm with which we can sympathize. In that way, Persona can be seen as a low fantasy work, with a modern setting that makes it easier to empathize with. But on the other hand, there are probably things that can only truly be felt by moving from that paradigm to a different place entirely. So in the sense of differentiating it from previous series, that’s a challenge I want to take on.”
It will obviously be a long time until the game is released due to it being so early in development, but fans of the director and his past work likely have a lot to look forward. Hashino has a track record of delivering excellent games, and it’s exciting to see that he’s trying to deliver something completely different for his next project. We’ll be sure to report the latest on the project as soon as more information becomes available.
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