Atlus has announced that you can now preorder Persona 4 Arena Ultimax, the sequel to Persona 4 Arena, for North America on PS3 and Xbox 360. The 2D fighting game will cost $59.99 and will be released on September 30th. Its predecessor had a Story Mode that lasted about 30 hours and directly followed the events of Persona 4, and aside from the main cast of Persona 4, it also featured the return of key characters from Persona 3. Persona 4 Arena Ultimax will continue the story of the previous game, and also feature more returning characters from Persona 3 and 4.
Aside from Junpei Iori and Yukari Taneba from Persona 3 joining the fight, Rise from Persona 4 will also be a playable character this time around. There’s also a new mysterious character named Sho Minazuki who seems to be game’s antagonist. While the original game’s fight was situated inside the TV’s “Midnight Channel”, the latest game will see the battle move into the real world.
This game is but one out of four Persona games that have been confirmed for a release in North America. Aside from this game, there’s also Persona Q for 3DS, Persona 4: Dancing All Night for PS Vita and Persona 5 for PS3. It’s certainly good to see Atlus continue to bring their titles overseas, and as they’re part of Sega now you can expect to see more news about these games featured on Segalization.
For now though, no details are know for a release of Persona 4 Arena Ultimax in Europe, but we hope it won’t take them as long as with the previous game (no less than ten months between the US and EU release). The long wait for the European release was also made worse by the fact that the PS3 version of the game was the only PS3 game in existence to be region locked, something we hope won’t be repeated this time around. Back then, Atlus said they were “completely unprepared for the force with which the community communicated their disapproval”, and insisted that this was an isolated case. A quick look at Play-Asia’s preorder page for the US version reveals that there’s apparently no region protection this time around, which differs from what the page said earlier on. Hopefully this means that importing the PS3 version will be an option this time around, if the EU release suffers from the same delays as the first game. Play-Asia’s Xbox 360 version however does still list the region lock.