In a recent interview Katsura Hashino reveal some very few info's about the theme of the game, its focus and motivation which sounds really intriguing to say at least. Her are 6 headlines he chooses to talk a bit about.

• Persona 5 is a game about freedom
• The shackles are a motif for the game
• Persona 5 is thematically red
• Persona 5 will be more approachable than previous games
• Keeping the core idea simple
• Don’t sweat the philosophical stuff

Full Article here:

http://www.funstock.co.uk/news/persona-5/

All in all it sounds interesting especially from a perspective of the Japanese society and culture but also about life in General. I am pretty sure many people experience or experienced times in their life they could not move forward on. It will be interesting to see how they will handle the whole "I want players to come away from this game feeling they have the power to take on the world around them.” feeling in the game. Also he especially notes that people should not take this thing too seriously and rather enjoy the story. There will be no deep Philosophical meaning behind it. And do not interpret too much in it or do not be upset if something making you upset.

But all in all I really want to see how it looks and I want to see the setting of this game. Giving this interview I somehow doubt it will be school related after all.But we will see about that^^

He said nothing of the "don't look too deeply into this" sort.

Also, Pepsiman translated this and posted it on GB long ago.

@believer258: According to the interview he does:

Persona 5 is first and foremost a work of entertainment and we want it to just simply be enjoyable on its own terms. It’s my hope that people will not get too anxious and worked up about how all of these things are going to pan out in the end.”

as for the rest. Yes it comes from Pepsiman I apologize but it was not in the Persona 5 forum...

Edit: Scratch this it was indeed posted a month ago but I somehow never saw it and the article was just posted today so thought it was something different....

Yeah, I think this was already posted, but still, I wonder why we haven't gotten a look at the game yet...They've been working on it for so long and it's coming out in 9 months.

Hm, part of me is a little concerned about that "more approachable" remark. Mostly because I feel like Persona has already become quite approachable. I sure hope they don't overcompensate and lose something important in the process.

Also I'm hoping the remark about people not getting worked up is because they already know it's potentially going to be controversial, and people need to keep perspective that it's just a game, not because it's going to be shallow. Philosophical subject matter is kind of the point of Persona.

Atlus has always taken their time with their reveals. As I recall, it was barely 6 months from when Persona 4 was publicly revealed that it came out in Japan. I suspect we'll start seeing stuff in the next few months.

You seem to have misconstrued that as

There will be no deep Philosophical meaning behind it. And do not interpret too much in it

and that's not what he means. He doesn't mean that he doesn't want you to think about it, he means that he wants you to enjoy the game. "Enjoy" does not mean "turn off your brain and never give something thought".

Hopefully approachable just means "get rid of some of the bullshit UI stuff"

The fact that the player stats and the persona stats being under two separate sub menus should not be anything more than a minor inconvenience (it's two seconds worth of button presses), and it always boggled the mind that Jeff seemed to hung up on it.

While it's always good to smooth out UI and make it as user friendly as possible, nothing about the UI in P4 made the game "unapproachable." It was never like Dark Souls UI where you often couldn't understand what it all meant without outside help.

Literally none of this is new and was all posted here a long while ago. It's disappointing.

My guess is, they are going to simplify or explain some of the game mechanics that are not really explained all that well, such as persona-attributes. For example, P3 had three different types of melee attacks based on weapon type and while that had some "old-school" novelty value, it didn't really make the combat better and so in P4 they ditched that idea. Also they could make the abilities bit easier to understand for new players and overall make it more approachable to those new to this series so they don't accidentally cast Bufu. For example, under the persona menu, they could have had small icons on the ability list to describe the spell so you can see at a glance what element that particular spell is or of it's buff or debuff spell.

I need to learn to relax when I see a new P5 post, because it's almost always nothing.

@crommi: The removal of the 3 physical types was actually one of the more disappointing changes from P3 to P4. It added a lot more depth to how you used physical skills and its removal made way too many physical skills completely redundant in P4. And it's not like it was remotely hard to understand if you were able to grasp the weakness system.

Also, skills did have icons from what I remember.

If the red colour used throughout the game is the same as the poster is says the game should be dark and violent (as red is the colour normally associated with violence).

They had icons under the weakness bar when you look up a persona/enemy's stats. The skills themselves didn't have accompanying icons, but you had the ability to highlight a skill and it told you want to do. No, you wouldn't realize Zio was electricity and tarukaja was a physical buff immediately if this was your first SMT game, but the jargon isn't exactly that hard to grasp in all honesty. The prefixes and suffixes were always consistent in meaning.

@turambar: Maybe I was thinking of SMT4 then. I assume that will be in P5 in any case.

Yeah, in combat you could see them clearly but I think it was during fusing or something like that when I really struggled with the odd names early on since P4 was my first game in Persona series. You eventually pick up on it and playing P3 and P2 afterwards was much easier.

More Waifus is what I want.

Not exactly that but I want way more social stuff an minimal battles to be honest. I never played a Persona games because of the battlesystem that was only a chore for me.

You could have just pushed square when fusing and the game would tell you what anything does with perfect clarity most of the time.

Persona 3 FES didn't have that function when fusing, though.

What made the last games work was its ability to balance the two sides of the game. If they cut most of the combat and cram it full of endless text boxes it might make for a better Endurance Run, but it would be a shitty Persona game.