Persona 5 Scramble devs on the game’s development

In a recent issue of Dengeki PlayStation, the magazine published a lengthy interview with the developers behind Persona 5 Scramble: The Phantom Strikers. Producer / director Daisuke Kaneda, director Mumon Usuda, director Kazutoshi Sekiguchi, and director Nobumichi Kumabe all shared some in-depth information about the game’s creation. 

Persona Central went to the trouble of sharing information from the interview. We have a roundup of the notable tidbits below.

Start of Development

– It took a long time to get started after the companies talked because the scale was so large and it was Atlus’ first collaboration with Koei Tecmo
– Development for the game took three and a half years, and it took about two years to produce the scenario
– Koei Tecmo Games has so many Persona series fans that they initially proposed the project as “Persona [Series] Warriors”
– At the end of conversations to fill out the story, they decided to delve deeply into the P5 characters

From Musou Action to Action RPG

– Following the premise of a “Musou Action” game, voices from the development team would say that, “If you want to make it an IP based on the Persona series, you want to bring out the “persona” quality more than usual”
– Atlus also gave various opinions, such as saying they would like to include certain RPG elements
– The first prototype version of the game couldn’t show off the essence of Persona characters
– Ex: weak points for attack or defense for advantages in combat were not implemented and only four skills could be selected due to the limitation of the number of buttons
– They felt like they wouldn’t be able to make a Persona game like that, and Kumabe was promoted to director in charge of combat and general improvements as a result
– The mechanic of stopping time when personas are summoned was born from this thought process
– Many fans are not great at action, and the developers wanted as many Persona fans to enjoy the game as possible
– Time stopping and selecting skills at your leisure was close to the feeling of playing an RPG, and it felt good when trying it for the first time

Story Planning

– Atlus and Koei Tecmo had a number of meetings to create a story with a Persona-like theme and message
– They thought adding new characters was an inevitable factor when proposing a new story, so they drafted it
– By adding new characters to the world of P5, there was the possibility that fans would find them to be foreign objects
– To prevent this from happening, they paid close attention to the appearance of the characters and picking the right voice actors
– Audio recording would be finalized for the story, and it would be worked on without compromise until the release schedule would be affected
– Two years of the development period of around three and a half years was spent on the story
– Even though they were developing and supervising the action portion of the game simultaneously, the volume of the scenario was considerably larger than originally planned
– In Persona 5, there were few scenes where the members of the Phantom Thieves got to enjoy themselves because it was so serious
– The idea with Persona 5 Scramble is that the group that overcame their situation will have fun while solving the case

Creating Jails and Feeling Like a Phantom Thief

– They first decided which cities the Phantom Thieves would travel to, and then proceeded with objects and level design for their Jails
– To highlight the essence of action in this game, the “Phantom Move” mechanic was added with the thought of interacting with objects in an interesting way
– There are actions like walking along a wall, so he believes that the impression is quite different from a conventional “Musou action”
– The “Phantom Move” actions were decided during the early development phase
– If they tried to create the “feeling of being a thief” only with fighting action, it’d be like they were assassins, so they tried to create more situations that made them feel more like thieves
– Since the beginning of development, they wanted to create the feeling of fighting alongside the members of the Phantom Thieves
– To achieve that are scramble attacks where you get help from allies, and baton touches to switch characters
– A considerable amount of effort was put into this

UI Planning

– Proper attention was put into the UI so that it doesn’t look exactly like P5’s
– Designers and programmers worked hard to combine 2D and 3D techniques such as for the main menu or Sophia’s shop

Creating Characters’ Actions

– Rather than expressing the skill structure as an RPG, they created character action by dropping them into an action system since it is an action game
– Each character’s action was created with the utmost care so that you would feel that, “This is the way this character should attack!” while thinking of their image from the original game and that it shouldn’t be destroyed
– This is where their love for the Persona series is tested
– It’s something that designers can’t quite express unless they know a lot about the characters
– As a result, there were very few instances where he would tell them to revise something about a character’s motion regarding a certain action

Music and Voice Acting

– Both the Persona Team and Koei Tecmo Games’ sound team worked on music for the game
– In addition to arrangements of P5 songs, there are many new songs as well
– Even during battle, the navigator Futaba conveys enemy status
– The characters that you do not control talk in real-time, emphasizing the sense of an active battle with the others

Daily Life Elements from Persona 5

– The team asked Atlus about what the Phantom Thieves would do during the real life segments
– The criterion was, “Is it possible to achieve Persona quality within this limited development period?”
– When thought that way, they talked about raising the quality of the part that most users would experience, which is the main story and event scenes, and the game took its current form
– The staff wanted to take a closer look at the peculiarities of going around the country, so they decided to implement that into the game with elements like local shops and local dishes

Other

– Kumabe says that he hopes fans enjoy the first action RPG in the Persona series, and says that he would like to make a sequel (he laughs about this)
– Sekiguchi says that it’s one of the lucky projects where both teams had a truly good relationship and that they put a lot of effort into working with each other