Cognition Dissemination: Atlus Makes Some Peculiar Porting Decisions
Some publishers make peculiar decisions regarding the platforms they port their titles to. Not a single one of them does this more often than Atlus.
The company was, at one point, consistent with the platforms on which they released games. They primarily provided games for PlayStation and Saturn when they were the dominant systems in Japan in the mid-to-late 1990s, and have largely stuck by the most popular systems in that country following those platforms, including the PlayStation 2, Nintendo DS, and Nintendo 3DS. “Largely” in the sense that they’ve also released titles from their internal development studios and development partners like Vanillaware for other platforms along the way. Since Nintendo bid adieu to the 3DS, they’ve been more inconsistent about their platform choices outside a few exceptions.
The most recent examples involve the three recent Persona games. It was confirmed during the Xbox & Bethesda 2022 Briefing that Persona 3 Portable, Persona 4 Golden, and Persona 5 Royal will be coming to Xbox One, Xbox Series, Windows 10, and Game Pass on Xbox and PC. The mainline Persona series that has eluded Xbox for years will no longer do so. It was eventually confirmed that P3P will also come to PlayStation 4 and Steam, P4G will come to PS4, and P5R will come to PlayStation 5 and Steam. You will notice a platform peculiarly absent here: Nintendo Switch.
You’d be forgiven for thinking a port of at least P5R was inevitable for Switch after Joker made it to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. But it hasn’t come to pass, with the character reportedly representing Persona Q2: Shadow of the Labyrinth, which released for 3DS in Japan shortly before Joker’s arrival. All three games could easily run on Switch, with only P5R requiring some effort — but seemingly not much. We are talking about a game that originally ran on PlayStation 3 here. There are rumors swirling about the games will indeed come to Switch, and might be announced on a Nintendo Direct that could come in about a week. But those are all “ifs,” “coulds,” and “maybes,” that shouldn’t be taken as anything close to certain.
The same somewhat applies to the upcoming Soul Hackers 2, coming to each platform except Switch when it releases in August despite the original Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers only being ported to Switch years ago (after originally releasing on Saturn and then PlayStation only in Japan). There’s a question as to whether the game can run on the system, though everything they’ve shown suggests that exploration will be less ambitious compared to Shin Megami Tensei V and more on par with Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE, both of which ran on the platform despite the former having iffy performance at times.
Contrary to the direction this post is drifting in: This is not a place for me to rant about the lack of Switch ports for the Persona games. Not solely, anyway. There are other peculiar porting decisions they’ve made.
Take earlier this year, when Persona 4 Arena Ultimax was ported to PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and PC via Steam. It’s good that the game is being preserved on newer platforms, and will have rollback netplay for the PS4 and Steam versions in the summer. But the lack of an Xbox version sticks out. Ultimax was previously released on Xbox 360, but the game never received the final balance and UI update from the arcade version the new port came with, and it’s too late to update releases for systems two generations ago now. Not to mention that only the original Persona 4 Arena is backwards compatible and not Ultimax. On the same note: It’s peculiar that it’s on Switch when they’re not porting P4G there, but it’s not as if that game was on PS3 and 360 either.
On the same note, Persona 5 Strikers is on Switch despite neither the original nor Royal being on it. There’s no telling whether it will come to Xbox, and the chances of Atlus doing so are lower than they should be considering the lack of Ultimax on the system. Catherine Full Body, meanwhile, is still missing from Xbox and Steam despite the original game launching on the former back in 2011. The original was, in a truly nonsensical twist, ported to Steam mere months before Full Body released in Japan. Nearly anyone who wanted to play the game on the platform would have had no issue waiting until Full Body arrived on the platform instead, but it’s clear they have a reputation to uphold here.
Plenty of their releases do make sense. The new Persona games largely stick to PlayStation, where Atlus gets assistance with promotion from Sony. The new Shin Megami Tensei games stick to Nintendo platforms with promotional assistance from Nintendo themselves. But as the post shows, they’re wildly inconsistent in several other places, more than any other publisher around. These inconsistencies have been around for so long that it’s tough not to think they’re all part of the plan. If a company is so fully committed to a bit, they have to ride it out.
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Geoff
News Editor | Geoff is some nerd who writes for a blog and thinks he's knowledgeable. He write a lot about video games, but is capable of writing about other subjects, too. Twitter
