Persona 4 has been getting a lot of love lately.  The anime is going to air very soon, and just yesterday a handheld version of Persona 4 was announced for the Playstation Vita, with new additions like more voiceclips, more cutscenes, alternate costumes like the ones in Persona 3 FES, and a new character Mary who will be voiced by Kana Hanazawa(fuwafuwaru~).  I was hoping one of the new features would be the ability to play as a female main character, but it seems as if this won’t happen.  Persona 5 was also confirmed to be in development, with no extra details other than that the usual key members are working on it.

Beary swag

But most surprising was the announcement of a Persona 4 fighting game, which they will be producing with Arc System Works.  Titled “Persona 4 The Ultimate in Mayonaka Arena”, it has a new storyline that occurs 2 months after the events of the original game.  Kuma/Teddie, looking real baller, is promoting some fighting event.  I assume this causes the rest of the cast of P4 to investigate.  A pretty silly plot, but fighting games are never known for their great stories.

Anywho, I am duly hype for this.  I’ve always thought that a Persona fighting game would be a great idea.  Now Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure can finally get a true spiritual sequel.

From the char select screen, it seems like there’s only 10 characters right now.  You can see that so far there’s the main character of P4(who knows what name they’ll give him), Yosuke, Chie, Yukiko, Kanji, and Aigis!  Interestingly enough, all of the P4 characters in here are using their starter personas, but Aigis is using her “Ultimate” persona from P3, Pallas Athena.  She’s also aligned with the Fool arcana instead of Chariot, so I guess this makes Episode Aegis/The Answer canon.  And here I thought that P3 Portable retconned all of FES.

Rise with some words of encouragement

Seems like Rise won’t be playable, and will be delegated to be announcer.  That kind of makes me sad, but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.  I’m not really sure I want to hear Kugimiya voice a playable char in a fighting game anyway lol.  I’m assuming Naoto will be another playable char, so that leaves 3 spots left.  I hope other Persona 3 characters will be playable.  Mitsuru and Yukari da best~

You can see more scans and the original announcement at Famitsu here.