Sir_Asura
Full Member
Failure to Comply
Posts: 129
Gender: 
|
Yeah, but its those superfluous players that count. It's the people that say stupid shit on GameFAQs, like "Is this game as good as FFXII?" etc that represent the majority of the market. I think Atlus realizes that SMT was for a niche market, and it made a self-realized move to alter Persona 3 to, in my opinion, reach a broader audience. They achieved this goal. If you remember when P3 was announced, Atlus said the game would be making significant departures from its predecessors. They had given it enough time between P2 to make that change, and they chose Persona as the subseries to alter because it would be a bad decision to completely alienate the die hard faithfuls and destroy the heart of the megaten franchise by making it too fluffy.
So when you say SMT is the closest thing Atlus has to a cash cow, you are precisely right, and Atlus is capitalizing on this. They really can't change the heart of the series without losing all credibility, but they have sacrificed Persona to create a cash cow. It would not surprise me if we see a lot of Persona games and merchandise. There's a formula Atlus has been adhering to with all of its SMT games of this generation, and the Persona formula has proven to be the biggest crowd pleaser. Why wouldn't they punch out more games like this, and why wouldn't Atlus USA take this as a reason to /for sure/ localize each SMT game? I think it's ironic people were half-convinced Atlus would not localize P3 due to the evokers, and that was going on a precedent of innocent sin never reaching our shores because it had homo activity and nazis. Now the precedent has been firmly re-established, THROUGH PERSONA, that SMT as a whole and Persona specifically, will sell well in the United States.
I think if the majority of Megaten games were as dark as say Nocturne and DDS, or if they all had content like Innocent Sin, we wouldn't see every single one over here. Atlus really hasn't missed a beat since it experienced success with Nocturne and DDS, which could very well have been risks, since the majority of the market stateside, honestly, was not at all familiar with the franchise. If Persona 3 hadn't done as well as it has done, if it hadn't for instance became a giant hit on GameFAQs, which in my opinion is a good litmus test for a game's success, do you think we'd be seeing FES?
I mean, in the end, I think there are a lot of things going on here. Perhaps an overall shift in the gaming industry as a whole. I feel like a lot of people are dissatisfied with Persona 3 because of its general easiness to play through and vapid plot, yet out of all the games that have been released recently I can't think of any turn based RPGs that have posed any difficulty to me at all. Long gone are the days of "old school" FF and Lunar EB. I think people would be shocked to see a story boss as difficult as Borgan was in Lunar EB actually...
Nocturne (and DDS to a lesser extent) kind of had that old school brutality, but I think ever since gaming has become something that's more than just common but almost universal in households, developers have made games more universally controlled experiences. There is little room for the "elite" and the "old guard" in gaming when there's a lot of cash to be made and a possibility to become a big player in a fast developing industry. Why make games where only grinders and frenzied Koreans can be winners, when you, your six year old sister, and 50 year old impaired uncle can all be button mashing champions? Equally, why make games that actually have deep plots and intriguing characters, when posing the facade of that sells equally as well, if not better, because most people are going to bite it, and think it's great.
I am /not/ saying I approve of this, but I am saying it's logical. This fringes on the argument as to whether games are "art" or if they are just "designed commodities" for the household. Atlus is, in my opinion, going to still deliver us artful games. We're going to see stories like DDS again, and games that kick our ass as hard as Nocturne (and hopefully harder), but as a company, I think their priority is to develop a way to stand out in an industry where every year there's a chance to be bought out and go belly up. Instead of seeing what happened with say, GameArts, which is now subservient to SquareEnix and has not produced a decent game in a decade, I want Atlus to have the marketing prowess and stability to give us the rare gem or two.
|
Pages: 1 
Persona 4 (Read 56912 times)
