Its main character was a high school student who, along with his friends, was granted the power to use Personas. In addition to overall battle system tweaks, Innocent Sin also introduced a rumor system — appropriate for high school teens — that players could use to influence events.
Because Atlus loves its complicated web of games, the developer next released a direct sequel to that sequel called Persona 2: Eternal Punishment Eternal Punishment is set a few months after its predecessor and follows Maya also from Innocent Sin as the lead. Notably, the PSP version did not include the extra campaign, The Answer, but did add the option to play as a female protagonist.
Atlus has yet to release a package that includes all these elements, so to get the full Persona 3 experience you have to invest in more than one game. Persona 3 starred a group of high school students charged with defeating powerful enemies, called Shadows, every full moon.
The game was heavy on the social simulation side; players spent their time outside of dungeons bonding with classmates and building different personal skills. Where the previous games were more like siblings to Shin Megami Tensei games, Persona 3 is the first time the franchise felt unique — not only from its predecessors, but from other games in the genre as well.
Persona 3 is a plus-hour experience, easy, but it rewards players patient enough to dig into its world. In , Atlus returned with Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 for PlayStation 2 — another tale of high schoolers with extraordinary abilities. This time around, players spent a year in a small town investigating several mysterious murders. Although Persona 3 and its variations were well-received upon release, Persona 4 remains the more critically successful of the two.
Combat and dungeon crawling are tighter; characters are written with more confidence; and the game has more style and color than those that came before it. With Persona 4 Golden , the definitive edition of the game, Atlus further tweaked its already successful formula with additional content and storytelling.
The connections between the Persona games are a little twisted, as many of these games are not exactly direct sequels, but they often feature cameos or references to characters or happenings from past games. Persona 5 is due out in Japan this week and set to arrive in North America on Feb. The game is launching for both PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4, making it the first entry in the main series to hit both systems at launch.
Given what we already know about the game, it appears to be following in the footsteps of P3 and P4. If this concept rings a bell, you might be familiar with psychiatrist Carl Jung.
Jung, whose work was popular in the early s, explored this theory extensively. In fact, the Persona series is rife with references and ideas — Personas, Shadows, even characters — taken directly from Jungian psychology.
In the Persona series, Shadows are major foes. Characters rely heavily on their Personas in battle, using them to perform more powerful attacks. The ability to summon a Persona at all, however, is a mark of special individuals, typically limited to a core cast that varies with each title. These protagonists also had the power to create new Personas through fusion — combining existing Personas into something new.
In Persona 3 , a game that dealt with themes like death, depression and loss and some clear gun control issues , characters used an Evoker … which was basically a special gun they shot themselves in the head with. In Persona 4 , which was notably more, uh, upbeat, characters used tarot cards. It looks pretty brutal. Rewatching the Persona 5 trailer. Personas are powerful allies throughout the series, but their presence is not always positive. The series has established that users can lose control of their Persona, often leading to dire consequences; this is especially true if and when Personas are awakened unnaturally.
In fact, Personas are actually Shadows that — once more for the psych nerds in the house — have been mastered by the ego of those they come from. This process sort of works in reverse as well — a Persona can revert back into a Shadow under serious distress and, in extreme cases, even attack its user. Persona has grown a lot since its initial release, but a few elements of the series remain staples. The Persona series follows groups of high school students in various settings around modern Japan.
Each story takes place over the course of a year, during which characters will attend school, celebrate holidays and confront conflicts with the help of their Personas.
A substantial part of Persona is dungeon crawling. How these dungeons appear and function is a little different from game to game, but they typically involve a randomly generated set of areas that players explore. Enemies appear on-screen as you explore, meaning you can run or fight as you wish.
You attend school, join clubs, get part-time jobs or spend your time hitting up teen hotspots like the mall or the movie theater. Speaking of building character, you also spend time leveling different personality traits — charm, academics and so forth.
These traits have an effect on different aspects of the game, like relationships with specific characters or even your grades in school. The Velvet Room plays a crucial role in Persona lore. Its appearance is also subject to change, depending on the current guest it serves; previous designs include an elevator Persona 3 , a limousine Persona 4 and a club Persona 4: Dancing All Night.
In practical terms, the Velvet Room serves as a home base. Players come here to fuse new Personas, take on side quests and more. As the series has changed, so too has the Velvet Room — or, more specifically, the beings that occupy it. In the early games, the Velvet Room housed different artistic characters such as a singer, a piano player and a painter. This was in addition to series regular Igor, perhaps the most important character in this room.
Igor is initially introduced as a servant of Philemon, an overarching figure in the series. The completed series to date has introduced three core Velvet Room assistants: siblings Elizabeth, Margaret and Theo, with Margaret being the eldest and Theo the youngest.
Curiously, Theo is introduced in the PSP version of Persona 3 as an option for the female protagonist. They also have their own social link, which means you can spend extra time with them outside of the Velvet Room.
Caroline is said to be the more ill-tempered of the two, while Atlus describes Justine as being a calmer presence. Persona 5 appears to be continuing that trend, referencing Justine Moritz and Caroline Beaufort. The Velvet Room is perhaps the most mysterious element of the series. Each assistant has a role to play in their respective stories, as well as in the Persona mythology at large. You can find more details about their individual roles for their respective games in the spoiler section below.
Ah yes, we kind of glossed over that guy, huh? Philemon plays a pretty big part in the early days of the series. Philemon has the ability to awaken Personas within people, but he is largely unable to meddle directly — hence, his servants in the Velvet Room. The series kicks around the ideas of higher beings pretty often, especially in endgame material, and Philemon is a part of that.
Being an immortal enlightened being sounds kinda catty sometimes. Fans have surmised that the blue butterflies — a strange, yet surprisingly common sight throughout the series — represent the mysterious deity in these later games. The more a researcher observes and captures during these interviews, the more realistic the persona will be.
If your product is available on the market and has real users, you can rely on customer support logs and web analytics to create a persona. A persona created using this approach is known as a provisional persona, and is a great placeholder until real personas are created.
Completely fictional stories of imaginary people based on little or no research bring no value for the design process and in fact, can bring harm. Furthermore, poorly constructed personas can easily undermine the credibility of this technique.
The next step is analyzing research findings. The goal during this step is to find patterns in user research data that make it possible to group similar people together into types of users. Quite often, researchers create more than one persona for each product.
Most interactive products have multiple audience user segments which is why it seems logical to construct multiple personas. However, with too many personas, the process can get out of hand. The personas can simply blur together. Personas have no value in and of themselves. They become valuable only when they tied up to a scenario. A scenario is an imagined situation that describes how a persona would interact with a product in a particular context to achieve its end goal s.
Scenarios help designers understand the main user flows — by pairing the user personas with the scenarios, designers gather requirements, and from those requirements, they create design solutions. George has developed a comprehensive list of all the factors that can be considered for the persona description. Tip: Avoid using real names or details of research participants or people you know. Socializing personas among stakeholders are critical in moving the design team toward action.
All team members and stakeholders should have a positive association with personas and see the value in them. As people become familiar with the personas, they start talking about them as if they were actual people. A well-constructed persona almost becomes another member of the team. The personas of the role-based perspectives are massively data-driven and incorporate data from both qualitative and quantitative sources.
In some cases, our designs need to reflect upon the part that our users play in their organisations or wider lives. An examination of the roles that our users typically play in real life can help inform better Product Design decisions. Where will the product be used? What business objectives are required of this role? Who else is impacted by the duties of this role? What functions are served by this role? Through an understanding of characters and stories, it is possible to create a vivid and realistic description of fictitious people.
The purpose of the engaging perspective is to move from designers seeing the user as a stereotype with whom they are unable to identify and whose life they cannot envision, to designers actively involving themselves in the lives of the personas. The other persona perspectives are criticized for causing a risk of stereotypical descriptions by not looking at the whole person, but instead focusing only on behavior. Engaging personas can incorporate both goal and role-directed personas, as well as the more traditional rounded personas.
These engaging personas are designed so that the designers who use them can become more engaged with them. The idea is to create a 3D rendering of a user through the use of personas. These personas examine the emotions of the user, their psychology , backgrounds and make them relevant to the task in hand. The perspective emphasises how stories can engage and bring the personas to life.
One of the advocates for this perspective is Lene Nielsen. One of the main difficulties of the persona method is getting participants to use it Browne, The fictional persona does not emerge from User Research unlike the other personas but it emerges from the experience of the UX design team. It requires the team to make Assumptions based upon past interactions with the user base, and products to deliver a picture of what, perhaps, typical users look like.
You may be able to use them as an initial sketch of User Needs. They allow for early involvement with your users in the UX design process, but they should not, of course, be trusted as a guide for your development of products or services.
As described above, engaging personas can incorporate both goal and role-directed personas, as well as the more traditional rounded personas. Engaging personas emphasise how stories can engage and bring the personas to life. This step process covers the entire process from preliminary data collection, through active use, to continued development of personas. There are four main parts:. Acceptance from the organisation and involvement of the design team steps 3, 7, 8, The 10 steps are an ideal process but sometimes it is not possible to include all the steps in the project.
Here we outline the step process as described by Lene Nielsen in her Interaction Design Foundation encyclopedia article, Personas.
Collect data. Collect as much knowledge about the users as possible. Perform high-quality User Research of actual users in your target user group. In Design Thinking , the research phase is the first phase, also known as the Empathise phase. Form a hypothesis. Based upon your initial research, you will form a general idea of the various users within the focus area of the project, including the ways users differ from one another — For instance, you can use Affinity Diagrams and Empathy Maps.
Everyone accepts the hypothesis. The goal is to support or reject the first hypothesis about the differences between the users. You can do this by confronting project participants with the hypothesis and comparing it to existing knowledge. Establish a number. You will decide upon the final number of personas, which it makes sense to create. Most often, you would want to create more than one persona for each product or service, but you should always choose just one persona as your primary focus.
Describe the personas. The purpose of working with personas is to be able to develop solutions, products and services based upon the needs and goals of your users. Be sure to describe personas in such a way as to express enough understanding and Empathy to understand the users.
Prepare situations or scenarios for your personas. This engaging persona method is directed at creating scenarios that describe solutions. For this purpose, you should describe a number of specific situations that could trigger use of the product or service you are designing.
In other words, situations are the basis of a scenario. You can give each of your personas life by creating scenarios that feature them in the role of a user.
Scenarios usually start by placing the persona in a specific context with a problem they want to or have to solve.
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