There has been a lot of Persona 4: The Arena news recently so I’m here to give the low down in one swift post. Firstly the huge topic is the inclusion of region locking in the game. If you purchase Persona 4: The Arena in the US since it comes out sooner than in Europe, you will not be able to play it on your European or Japanese machine. This has caused lots and lots of backlash as the PS3 was praised for it’s non-region locked games meaning people could import to their hearts content, Persona 4: The Arena will be the first ever region locked game.
Fans of the game have been threatening boycotts and cancelled purchases because of this region locking but ATLUS has responded with a press release stating their reasoning for it’s inclusion. Since the game will be virtually the same in terms of content in every region they wanted to make sure there wasn’t any importing of the game since it will hurt the sales of the home country the buyer is not purchasing from. As of right now the difference in value between the dollar and yen makes for a large difference in prices meaning Japanese consumers are more inclined to purchase an American copy than a Japanese one. However this would not affect the online play of Persona 4: The Arena so Mr. Smith can still play against Mr. Sawada after work. Finally ATLUS has stated that this is not going to be a continuing business practice and will not be included in their future releases.
For EU Persona-maniacs Persona 4: The Arena will be seeing a much later release than compared to our Yank counter parts as the publisher Zen United still hasn’t set a release date, only the vague year of 2012. As a representative of Zen United had told Siliconera:
“It’s always our intention to keep the delay between US/JP and EU to a minimum and we appreciate people’s patience,”
“We don’t have an official release date to confirm at this time, but we hope to be able to do so soon.”
And with the region locking in place we might not see a fighting Persona until this holiday season at the latest. Hopefully they will reward our patience with some awesome EU only pre-order/limited edition goodies like a replica evoker or a tarot deck with the fighter’s moves list or better still a pair of Persona 4 glasses!
Finally ATLUS has been releasing lots and lots of videos onto their youtube channel showing off the special moves. Every fighter has their own elemental attack which affects their opponent in different ways e.g. Mitsuru uses her ice attacks to freeze her opponents so they are frozen for a few seconds. If you have some time you can check them all out here.
