LogFAQs > #970838377

Zikten posted...

they need to do another version of 4 and 5, adding girl mode. Or just make the whole game girl mode. If you want to be a boy, you play the older versions. If you want to be a girl you play these new ones

I hate that you could be a girl in 3, and then they downgraded the series by removing a key feature in the sequels

I think it's less that they downgraded the sequels, and more that they went above and beyond for the port.

Persona 3 Portable came out after Persona 4, so the gameplay was brought up to scratch with that game. afaik they re-recorded voice lines that referred to the protagonist with masculine pronouns to change them to feminine ones, and they re-wrote social links. I heard you can save Shinjiro, or at least extend his life if you complete that social link by a certain date.

And what made it manageable is that Persona 3 Portable doesn't have the anime cutscenes that the console version does. Because they would have had to re-animate all of those cutscenes with a new protagonist.

I don't think Persona 4 Golden got rid of the cutscenes, being on hardware that could not only run full PS2-scale games but exceed that benchmark. Like P3, I can only assume that there were lines referring to the protagonist as a guy - once again, requiring rewrites and new voiceovers if the characters called the main character a guy, on top of the anime cutscenes they'd have to re-animate. P4G also made plenty of positive changes to my knowledge, and set the standard for what a handheld port could be.

The same conundrum befell Persona 5, where the game has a bunch of anime cutscenes with the main character that would have to be re-animated, and where voice lines explicitly refer to the main character as "him". And that's on top of the additional Royal campaign you get after you beat the main game. And while I didn't play Royal, I hear they voiced previously unvoiced dialogue throughout the game, which is already a pretty big undertaking. Every port from Persona 3 Portable onwards has gone above and beyond in polishing those games even further, which is no small undertaking and has taken each of the base games to a whole new level.

The lines are one thing - re-recording individual lines, or replacing entire voice actors if they aren't free to reprise the role, is already a labor of love that most games wouldn't do. Re-animating cutscenes are a whole other story, and the lack of cutscenes is probably what made the FeMC route in Persona 3 Portable possible in the first place. They were able to turn a technical hurdle into an added bonus for players. It would be really good to have that whole second rejiggered playthrough in each subsequent Persona game, but is it practical? I don't think it is, unless they started development on a new game with the idea of creating two sets of assets from the start and referring to the main character in gender-neutral terms to alleviate the workload.