Revelations: Persona was the first Shin Megami Tensei game released in the West. No, Jack Bros. does not count. Sorry guys. I had thought this was the only game with the weird “Revelations” surname, but I recently found out a GBC port of the first Last Bible game was released in the west as “Revelations: The Demon Slayer." It's kind of weird to think that there’s an alternate timeline where SMT3 would’ve been called “Revelations: Nocturne” or something like that.

This game has a notoriously bad localization job, and I’m sure most have at least seen some things about it. The game's script was altered to take place in America instead of Japan, and Atlus tried to make it seem that way, but it's pretty easy to see through since the characters are clearly wearing Japanese school uniforms and the song playing in the pharmacy has Japanese lyrics. Character names were also changed to sound more standard. Nanjo’s name was changed to Nate, and Maki’s name was changed to Mary, to name a few. Character designs were also changed, most notably Mark being changed into a racist stereotype. It also seems that anyone who had black hair had their hair color altered to blonde or something. Why is this? No idea. And I thought Working Designs was shit at localizing.

Well, firstly, about the gameplay, Persona 1 struggles with its balancing. Most enemies will barely do any damage to you, let alone even hit you. Paired with how slow this game is, it tends to get pretty dull at times. Most of the boss fights are also complete pushovers that never challenge your wits. The only time I was really strategizing and switching personas was the final boss, which can be RNG-reliant, is held at the end of the final dungeon, and can take 2-4 hours to get through with no save in between! Nonetheless, it still serves to make you use everything you can at the end.

About the personas, though, unlike later entries in the series, this game actually lets you equip 3 personas for each character. It requires a lot more planning than just fusing for the main character, as you’ll need to have personas that are better suited to the whole party’s traits. Mark should get personas with high strength, Mary/Maki should get dexterity/agility, stuff like that. You’ll also have to level up the personas by using their moves in battles in order to unlock their full moveset. So, I was switching them around and getting all their moves, which at times can prove very useful. At the start of the game, I had gotten a persona with a Heal All move that only cost 7 MP, and that carried my ass through the entire game and helped tremendously on the final boss. It’s super fun fusing in this game and getting oddball broken shit when it feels like you’re not even supposed to a lot of the time. It never really breaks the game, though, since traditionally with Megaten games, a lot of enemies are going to repel certain attacks, so you’ll not be able to really use the same move the whole time.

There’s also this kind of cool SRPG formation mechanic in the game too. You’ll have to move your party of 5 around on this formation grid to best suit their strengths. If they’re in areas in the back, they’ll take less physical damage but will also not be able to reach enemies with their physical attacks. One of my characters, Brad/Brown, had good reach with his spear, so he was able to be placed in the middle and still attack most of the enemies with his physical attacks. You also don’t want them all to be placed too close to each other, since there’s area magic in this game that extends to other party members when hitting someone. Truthfully, it’s not super important, and you can kind of use one formation the whole game and it’ll work fine. I only found myself really using this mechanic on the final boss for the most part.

My favorite aspect of Persona 1 is how it absolutely nails its atmosphere, mostly due to how outstanding this game's soundtrack is. There are these really creepy songs that fit super well when dungeon crawling, and then some of my favorites in this game are these ethereal and relaxing tracks that play during cutscenes or downtime. There’s barely any misses, and it definitely became one of my new favorite OSTs.

Also adding to this game's atmosphere is its first-person dungeon crawling. Many would call it dated; I would call it a different perspective. Honestly, design-wise, it's kind of boring. Most RPGs would have treasure at the end of dead ends, but Persona 1 doesn’t. Instead, you’ll rarely find these rooms with a few treasure chests in them, which, for the most part, have nothing useful in them. I would have really liked to see more of these rooms, as they really would have given me more of a reason to fill out the map. Thankfully, this game has a map that fills out as you progress in dungeons, so you’ll not need graph paper or anything like that! Accompanying this map is a mini map at the top right of the screen that will show you pieces of the map that you haven’t been to yet from the radius of your character. I didn’t realize until my friend pointed it out, but I was literally just staring at the mini map because it just shows you the dead ends so you can completely avoid getting lost. It’s a huge quality of life thing, but a little bit too much in my opinion, and it made the dungeons effortless since combat is also very easy.

Besides the gameplay aspect, I think the dungeons are really cool. They all have their own designs and music, and strangely enough, they have different walking sound effects to accompany the different terrain. I really like when you’re walking around the school and it plays these recorded sounds of someone walking on the tile. It's kind of a weird thing to point out, but it really just added a level of immersion for me. There’s also surprisingly great sound design in this game, too. In combat, there’s so much reverb and punch to attacks, and that makes them feel effective.

When going into different areas in the overworld, the characters in your party will all be present, and you will be able to speak to all of them. When different story events are taking place, they will all have unique dialogue for all the areas in the game, that being stuff like the clinic or shops. This was a level of care that I was surprised to see, and it helped me get attached to the cast of characters. I really wish more games would do stuff like this.

Lastly, I love the UI in this game. In the menu, there’s this blue and orange grid, and on top of that, your options are all allocated to an orb on what looks like a solar system. Then, in combat, your options are these metallic-looking boxes that, when highlighted, glow orange. It looks a lot cooler than I made it sound though, I promise. I didn’t really know where to throw this in either, but in battle, there’s multiple of these psychedelic moving backgrounds that look like they're straight out of Earthbound and look really sick.

Persona 1 does a great job at using all the PS1’s new bells and whistles. It excels in so many departments and looks great in both its 2D and 3D sections. There’s so much effort in areas that didn’t even need them, and it works great as a horror RPG of sorts. It’s tough to recommend this game though, since it’s honestly pretty inaccessible. But, if you can look past how dated and slow the game is, it is one that will not be forgotten.

possibly my favorite game of all time, the localization here is a meme so it's not exactly this version that i'm talking about, but everything about this game just comes together for me. it's got the most impeccable atmosphere i've ever seen in any game, and i think it expresses its themes better than any other game in the series, it just sticks in my mind and has done so for the past 2 years straight. and yes i even find the gameplay pretty fun.

it's the one and the only, Record of Another Goddess: Persona.... wish i lived in a world where it was called that and the PS1 version had a decent localization lol

played snow queen on psx. god i love this game, sure it's janky as hell but it's got something special. idk if it's the weird ass atmospheric ost or the frankly amazing graphics and design, but i'm completely sold.

revelations: persona is just so likeable. the sebec translation, while obviously cringeworthy nowadays considering how hard it wanted to be some working designs type localization, doesn't really ruin the game for me. what is a dealbreaker tho is the lack of the snow queen quest, which is an alternate storyline present in the game which for some reason has been left out. it is still in the game disc tho: you can re enable it with some cheatcodes, but none of the dialogue is translated. but trust me when i say there's some cool shit here they removed from the psp version. i love for example that the sqq final boss just screams the spells they're casting. like "MAHAZANDAIN!!! DIARAMA!!! MAHAJIODAIN!!!". it's so cool lol, while in the psp version it's just a boring ass grin.

if you want to play the original game, as the designers intended, i recommend playing the PS1 version with a walkthrough. yes, it's slow, yes the psp remaster has more animation, and yes, it does have some really weird design choices/mistakes corrected in the psp version. but still, the soundtrack is probably my favourite from megaten, and playing this on a PS1 is just magical man. it's no secret that i've had some sort of weird fascination with old, janky, and overly ambitious video games, which is why i'm so drawn to games like koudelka, phantasy star 2, megami tensei 2., or pretty much all from software games prior to demon's souls, but this game man. it's so different than all other rpgs of the era i've played, specially in the artistic design department. also the music is amazing, sometimes it sounds like something out of a modern indie game or something. in a way, revelations: persona is the anti rpg, it does absolutely everything to be annoying (slow ass battles, janky localization, maze-like dungeons, etc) but somehow it manages to charming and emotional, in a way which few games have made me feel. somehow, a lot of it's design is incredibly forward-looking, which is amazing coming from a game dev who was previously making the wizardry-like snes smt games.

in conclusion, i gotta say this game is among my favourites. it just hits something within me, idk what is it, but it completely fullfills my thirst for weird PS1 games. if you can play this on a real psx with a crt, definetly go for it, but don't expect a persona game, it's just not. it's not even like persona 2 or soul hackers, in a way it's a lot more old school, but in others it's a lot more modern.

i can't really say if you'll like this honestly, i think it's more approachable if you grew up with a PS1 or a W98 pc and played games of that era. all the hate for this game kinda reminds me of when i showed a friend from school, who said he loved re4, old resident evil 1 on my psx. he thought it looked horrible, he felt it was clunky, hated the tank controls, and said the music and dialogue were so muffled they were incomprehensible (keep in mind this was in the early ps3 era), and honestly i do understand him. but at the same time, all this jank just resonates with me in a way i can't explain. i'll leave it at that i guess.

i think when you play this game, you really have to go into it with a certain mindset. yes, the PS1 version's translation is dogshit (there are several typos and just outright awful translations, and some things were not vetted (i.e. the art director being listed as "Kazma Kaneko" instead of "Kazuma Kaneko")), there's a very large lack of conveyance for what the game mechanics are and how they function, and a lot of mechanics, such as demon/persona management and demon negotiation, are very, very rough here.

but, i still enjoyed it. i think a lot of it has to do with the fact that persona 1 lives and dies by its tone. there's a much greater emphasis on feeling out of place, on abandonment, on vulnerability (including the unwillingness to embrace it), and on human fragility. i don't think everything in the narrative is done perfectly, but for 1996? this is very complex, intricate, heady, and intimate.

i will disclose that it took me a while to warm up to this game. there were several points where i debated dropping it, and i'd be outright lying if i didn't state that it was one of the games i looked forward to the least in my game rotation for a good deal of time. i think a very large part of this is in the lack of conveyance i mentioned earlier. it felt like only about 75% of the way through the game that i actually got a competent grasp of the mechanics (mostly because the game never explains them to you, the translation is awful, and decent persona 1 guides are hard to come by).

that should also inform you of the fact that this game is very lop-sided with its difficulty. i was able to essentially brute-force my way through the lion's share of the game because SP recovers as you navigate in the overworld. this means that you can basically use healall (mediarama) in every fight and barely feel any cost. i can name the two instances where i saw a game over screen, but for the sake of keeping this review spoiler-free, i'll just say that they didn't feel like organic points of challenge and were sproadically unfair moments. i suspect that regenerating SP was a late addition to the gameplay formula because of how utterly broken it is and how it invalidates the need to use healing springs. i can't say i blame them. i shudder to imagine how much more agonizing navigation would be in this game and its dungeons without it.

also, this is an aside, but i extremely dislike the way this game distributes experience. instead of dividing it evenly amongst all party members, they base it on how active party members are and what they do during battle, but it's completely arbitrary and will just result in 1-2 characters being experience hogs while everyone else falls behind. it's very clunky, and although it's intuitive, it makes the game needlessly tedious. it's a missed opportunity. i could see them doing something similar to Final Fantasy II with it, but it's just not transparent enough for the player to figure out to be worth doing, at least in this state.

if you go into this game with "overlooked PS1 JRPG" expectations, you will probably enjoy this. again, it's very rough around the edges, but it's enjoyable, and it did a lot with very little. this game has a very specific feeling to it that a lot of games haven't given me, and part of it is probably 90s iconography nostalgia on my part, but it's also something unique in its favor. honestly, if the translation were better, i'd probably have bumped this rating up higher. all i can say is that i am now extremely interested in getting my hands on the PSP remake of this game, because i would love to see what this looks like with better execution.

Played the old localized ps1 version on my ps2 console, had to put it down near the end after an absent-minded loss to a boss after about a 4 hour run of playing where I couldn't make it to a save tree. Realized I had to move on if I ever want to get to the more intriguing Persona 2 games(Innocent Sin and Eternal Punishment, both having either fan or official translations for ps1). Saw how the story finished out, and I'm curious now about the alternate storyline, which to complete I would have to pick up the PSP version of the game, so if I ever return to this that's probably how I'd do it.

The rest of this is very aesthetically pleasing. It's interesting how this was the evolution of the series after SMT If... the characterization was more ensemble and casual, something that would continue on with future Persona games and SMT as a whole. The town map was the only thing hard to navigate at the beginning for me, and the dungeons too strain you to go on a bit to long with that slow, flashy sprite combat(another reason I couldn't trudge through after losing so much progress). Despite the slow pace and combat which is so true-to-form for this series, the strengths of the world still came through here in the personality of the world, the characters, the monsters(including a basketball ghost and a demon toilet), the gambling minigames in the shady mall, the twin-peaks inspired velvet room(with one of the more interesting methods for fusion), the charm of the ps1 textured marble floors in the corporate building, the memorable soundtrack, and the hokey parallel-world story that's just campy and kindhearted enough for me to still look up the finish. Though I'm moving on in this series out of necessity I can say definitively that I did enjoy my time with this one, and I'd recommend it to all curious SMT fans, especially if you have the patience to get on board with the more dated elements.