The game is out in Japan so there are probably full playthroughs out there. In this video they start it off from the beginning. You need to pick a side, which I didn't expect. It looks like you'd have to play through both sides to get the whole experience (judging by how many cut-scenes you get right off the bat). Weird stuff happening like Margaret interacting with people other than the MC. I suppose that's in the Persona Arena games right? I haven't played those so I'm not sure.

Edit: Also since this thread was bumped for this purpose, I'm hi-jacking and re-branding it as a "Persona Q is Canon" vehicle.

According to this siliconera article.

No one in the Arena games goes to the Velvet room at all, the only mention of it is the character select screen. But those are canon and this is pure fanfare.

@corruptedevil: Yu visits Margaret in the Velvet Room in Arena.

Didn't they say this was non-canon? I got the sense that they were given license to kinda just do whatever because of that. Maybe I'm completely wrong.

Yeah, definitely gonna skip this one. A silly, non-canon story probably would have been enough to make me not wanna play it, but I just cannot get into these first person grid-based dungeon crawling games at all for some reason.

@hailinel: RIGHT. Now I remember them flimsily explaining why Igor isn't there.

I love the mixing of the menu design so much.

According to wikipedia the atlus USA people claimed that this game is indeed cannon

Sounds like Shouji Meguro is still doing the music, so I'll definitely try to get my hands on the soundtrack, even if the game doesn't really interest me. Love that guy.

You're right. I found this article that confirms it. Don't know if anything else has popped up that contradicts it, but here's a quote from the article:

The biggest takeaway is that Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth is canon, a representative from Atlus USA explained. However, the representative could not explain why the game is canon, since that would supposedly be a story spoiler.

Spoiler? There's a big friggin CLOCK TOWER in the game. There's gears all over the art work. My guess from the very beginning was that it was time travel.

Time travel can make anything canon, as exemplified by Futurama and Rick & Morty.

I have no means to play it, so as far as I'm concerned it's not canon.

Having just tried to dip my toe into Etrian Odyssey IV and not being totally sold on it, I'm now mildly concerned about whether or not I'm going to be able to handle playing this. I'm going to give it the old college try and the Persona-ness of it will certainly help (the music in particular), but I'm just having trouble getting into the basic flow of the Etrian Odyssey gameplay.

A lot of it will come down to the balancing of it though. My biggest issue with EO4 is the grindiness of it all. I'm not totally averse to RPGs that require grinding, but with EO4, I felt like there was a lack of any real feeling of progression - at times it felt like I was just throwing myself into a brick wall over and over again.

I am interested in Q but man $50 is kinda a lot for an EO game even if its got all the persona trappings.

I'm sure it's canon in that it wraps up neatly and doesn't need to effect the rest of the series or ever be mentioned again. In that sense, it's either canon or not depending on if you want it to be.

Like "Whoa, both of our groups got pulled out of the timeline of our games simultaneously into this pocket dimension where we learned, laughed, and loved together and beat the big boss, but now that we're going back to our own adventures the process of travelling back will give us very specific amnesia as to what's happened in this pocket universe adventure! We may forget each other, but we'll still be bonded in our heaaaartssssss............................."

I bet that's what Professor Layton vs Phoenix Wright does too, since that also takes place at specific points in each series' chronology. Hyrule Warriors may do this too, unless they decide to just go balls out and say "fuck it". (They've said Hyrule Warriors is non-canon, but it could just as easily fit this "inconsequential mode" where you can consider it canon or not just as easily.)

The Persona 4 Dancing all Night from it's description sounds cannonical as well.

You may be right but there is already precedent for these 2 games taking place in the same world. In the re release of P3 on the PSP a younger Yukiko works at the inn that the characters stay at on a vacation event. And minor characters from P3 also appear in P4 proper. Not to mention all the cross over stories from Arena which I am pretty sure are considered cannon at least in the P4G version since Yosuke references how "things got crazy last time you visited in the spring" in the new ending that was added to P4G.

This series is getting comic book complicated with its cannon so it wouldn't surprise me that much if Q continued that. It makes me somewhat hopeful that the p3 and p4 characters will appear in some role in 5. Which they could somewhat easily pull off since all of the not original game P4 stuff has set somewhat of a personality for the main character (even if they do spell his name wrong).

@dizzyhippos: They definitely do take place in the same world, that's already established. The problem here is that 2 of the characters in this game were dead by the end of Persona 3 and both the Male and Female versions of Elizabeth are there.

@corruptedevil: You are clearly not thinking with your anime glasses on. It wouldn't surprise me if the entirety of the game takes place in the main character of P3's mind since Hes locked to some door for all time or something like that.

But then again with the chibi art style it could just as easily be happening in teddy or rise's minds

@dizzyhippos: Oh and also I hope Persona 5 is a clean break from the storylines of P3 and 4, they're done.

@corruptedevil: I dont mind ether way if they want 5 to be its own thing that's fine if they want to continue those characters in some minor "hey looks its Chie" 20 second scene I am good with that too. I just want to know what the fuck that game is going to be (other then the obvious stuff). And I wouldn't count out 3 and 4 being in 5 just yet since japan has a bad habit of running popular characters into the ground.

I'm not saying P3 and P4 are different worlds. I'm saying Q probably takes place in a pocket dimension outside of time and space, which is why people from the same world, but two different time periods (since P4 takes place a few years later) could interact simultaneously. So they both get sucked in at different points in time, but appear together, and when they go back to their own times, they "forget".

Both games already involve alternate dimensions. I'm just saying that this game takes place in one of those outside of our version of time.

Could be right its japan so who knows until someone translates that game or it comes out. But my money is still on dream sequence of ether p3's main character or teddy that the rest of the characters get pulled into.