image: http://gematsu.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/pmag_header.jpg

Last week, Atlus and Dengeki put out another issue of the Persona Magazine in Japan to commemorate February’s Persona 5 and Persona 4: Dancing All Night-related announcements at the Persona Super Live concert. As the publication has previously been home to exclusive interviews with Atlus staffers that aren’t without some intellectual substance —my translation of one such interview around this time last year is how I got a job with this very site, in fact— I had a friend of the site ship me a copy of this new issue and, as expected, it’s home to three new interviews with four prominent members of Atlus’ Persona Team.

These interviews have all been translated in full, as per usual, but given the bulk of the content, we’ve decided to split it up across several pages. This initial introduction constitutes page 1. Page 2, meanwhile, sees Persona 5 director and producer Katsura Hashino talking with character designer Shigenori Soejima about the production and reception of the recent trailer for that game, as well as some of the game’s overarching thematic inspirations and why the team is going with a thief motif this time around. Then, on page 3, we have an interview with Kazuhisa Wada, producer and director of Persona 4: Dancing All Night, where he discusses a variety of things about the development of the long-awaited rhythm game spin-off ranging from gameplay philosophies to character and dance designs. Finally, on page 4 is the last interview with Ryota Kozuka, a major internal composer at Atlus who’s also done a lot of work on Dancing All Night. His interview specifically focuses more on the actual music of the game; key points of interest include his inspirations for making the game’s opening theme, “Dance!,” disco-themed, as well as what it’s been like to recruit outside talent for the myriad remixes, among other things.

That’s about the long and short of it. To get started on the interviews themselves, feel free to use either the table of contents immediately below this paragraph or simply click a page number at the very bottom, the latter of which is present throughout the entire article should you wish to read the whole thing from start to finish without coming back here.