This is dependant on how the camera works during dialogue. But specifically, no. No we can not.

I've always loved the portraits and would be sad to see them go honestly.

I prefer the look of dialog portraits, but it's not going to be a big deal if they don't show up. I feel like there was a game recently that I thought did them really well, but now I can't remember it for the life of me. But I think they could do some really cool things if they used the 3D models for the portraits and animated them more.

I'd suspect that they'd take the opportunity to show off some Shigenori Soejima whenever possible, though, portraits or no.

@frostyryan: Don't really care, but I suppose fully directed feels more natural.

I hope not, they are part of the persona charm.

no reason not to have both. japanese games always kinda divided dialogue between cutscenes and textboxes anyhow. it would be a mistake to lose those awesome character portraits imo but i understand wanting to do a way with them and have a more western approach to dialogue. while it would lose some of its charm, it would feel more organic.

I made this thread quite a while ago but now that we have the new trailer, let's take note of those tears in the screen with a little portrait of the character inside. Maybe those could be a sort of replacement. I'd have to see more

From the trailers it looks like they're going to go back to the Persona 3's style of having those comic portraits, which I really liked and wondered why they never had any in P4.

I was all ready to write a whole thing about this and then I saw that I already did and I was like good job 2014 Hunter5024.

@geraltitude said:

Yeah, I think Catherine only got away with it because that game is wicked short so ultimately they could probably just barely justify doing animation and VO for basically every scene story scne. I expect a lot of P5 to be handled like P4, in that in a game of that scope, there will be some moments that just aren't that important and they'll probably skimp on the animation and VO and just do character portraits and text instead.

I doubt they're removing dialogue boxes. It's still an rpg, and if this game has the same scope as Persona 3/4, it's unlikely they will be able to voice every single cutscene, side story (social links), and NPC dialogue. Portrait-wise, they might have the cinematic presentation from Catherine for the more important scenes, but I can see them reverting to portraits for everything else (like for example, the teacher in a class talking about school stuff).

@ll_exile_ll: Have you even SEEN Chie's foot stamping animation. Conveys every emotion.