LogFAQs > #885504458

Point 6: One interesting thing many may want to know is that he doesn't personally consider much of his DC/PS2 work to be very successful. Maken X, for instance, sold poorly. To hear him tell it, the Atlus house style coupled with then still new FPS view limited the player base. Even more interesting, he feels that even SMT3 and the DDS games didn't ultimately deliver, either. Hardly bad games, but not smash hits. Digging for sales figures for SMT3 in particular at the indicates that it didn't set sales charts on fire. It was decent, but that's it. This isn't just about cynical capitalism for capitalism's sake, either. The lack of real, substantial success was hurting the company. It's more well known among JP fans, but pre-P3, Atlus was starting to approach a do or die point. It was getting harder for it to make games.

Knowing that... Point #7: Persona 3 turned out so differently from the previous games in part because Atlus needed a new lease on life. One impetus was a conversation that Hashino had with the chairman of Atlus at the time that started out innocuously: "How old are you?" Hashino told him 30, to which the chairman, of all things, compared him to Che Guevara because that was the age his activities took off. "If we have just one revolutionary in our ranks, the company can change." And so, Hashino, not really in a position to say no, got to work.

So this is all well and good except... Point #8: Persona 3 didn't exactly light the world on fire at first when it came out in Japan. It didn't bomb, but it didn't have an ideal momentum. The team had worked so hard, people were talking about quitting games if it flopped. Hashino is not unaware of why this was, especially with respect to it being a very different game from Persona 1 and 2. Ppl were ambivalent. Word of mouth from people who played it is ultimately what helped salvage it and keep Atlus in games. Still not a blockbuster, but decent. Research indicates that at the end of 2006, it had broken 150,000 copies sold. ~60th place. Not bad, but not great for a company Atlus' size.

Point #9: This drama with P3 changed how Hashino and Atlus approached presented their subsequent games moving forward. Previously, he was of the mind that as long as they made interesting games, they'd ultimately find their way to the right people somehow. As indie devs can attest, that's hardly guaranteed and Hashino came to this conclusion. It was crucial to think of "context" in many senses. Part of this means situational, like series legacy. Part of it is also evolution (ie: P3 took place in city, P4 takes place in the country). But most interestingly, part of his idea about context involves how games are presented and discussed, especially pre-release. This is why P5 had crazy promotion stunts. It helped keep the game in people's minds, even if the conversation wasn't always about the game. By design, part of the conversation was just about how and where the game would show up next. I can agree it def succeeded on that front. The end goal for him wasn't to just improve sales numbers. It was about making a game that would more easily resonate with people up front. The situational narrative surrounding a game and its development, it seems, is as important to him as the actual narrative inside the game.

And finally, Point #10: This is why his next big game is a fantasy RPG, rather than another one set in a modern day setting. Again, context. The "context" here is Atlus until now made games set in modern times in response to popular tropes at the time from games we all know. Going into fantasy RPGs in earnest NOW after all that time, adds a twist to that narrative in terms of what Atlus can bring to the table. What that entails specifically, he's not saying, but essentially, he's aware that all eyes are on him and wants to make the most of it.
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