In an interview with godisageek.com, Atlus’s John Hardin reaffirms their plans to release Persona 5 in 2015 for North American gamers. Incidentally, they also acknowledge that Europe has in the past seen releases that lag behind North America to varying degrees (Shin Megami Tensei IV!)
The interview offers a variety of other tidbits. For example, Persona 4: Dancing All Night is canonical. Hardin also offers some thoughts on the impact of voice acting on the localization process and the delicacy of changes in voice actors for a character. He also speaks at length about the Etrian Odyssey series and comments on the necessity to provide review copies as early as possible to reviewers (especially for lengthy RPG’s like the Etrian Odyssey series.)
Atlus also mentions that they are working on bringing Stella Glow and Legend of Legacy to North America. The company is excited to be handling these projects, and considering Atlus’s tendency to keep an eye out for RPG’s with old-school sensibilities in their blood (especially so with Legend of Legacy, which is frequently compared to the SaGa series from Square-Enix) this makes sense. A first-print edition of Legend of Legacy with certain physical bonuses may be in the works, too.
One of the most interesting exchanges in the interview involves Hardin’s personal philosophy on DLC, towards the end of the article. He spends a lot of time elucidating his rationale regarding certain talking points on the issue of how companies and consumers handle DLC. In essence. In general, Hardin takes an affirmative stance on how DLC tends to be handled and is skeptical of certain criticisms of DLC practices.
I’d love to hear what other people think about his ideas on DLC! It’s a long interview and quite substantive, so please check it out.