In the summer, ATLUS released the first trailer for Persona 4 Revival, confirming brewing fan suspicions of a remake of the beloved instalment in the Persona franchise being in development. With the release of Persona 3 Reload last year proving to be a huge success among both long-time fans and new fans, expectations for Persona 4 Revival are high. Here is what we hope will be included (or not included) in the upcoming remake.
Quality of life. This is an obvious expectation that will be fulfilled to various extents, but it is still worthy of note. While Persona 4 Golden is a perfectly playable game in the modern day, there are still QOL features they could improve upon in order to bring it up to date with Persona 3 Reload and Persona 5. For example, safe rooms (such as those in Persona 5) could be integrated into dungeons to make it easier if you need to stop a play session mid dungeon rather than being forced to use Goho-Ms or quicksaving.
Better dungeons. Persona 3's Tartarus being procedurally generated makes sense as it is one tall tower that basically works in a format similar to a Mystery Dungeon game. However, Persona 4's dungeons being procedurally generated do not make as much sense from a story perspective and can arguably make the game repetitive. Being places comprised of the perceptions of someone's true self, dungeons in the TV world should function similarly to Persona 5's palaces, being hand-developed areas that accurately reflect such perceptions, which can contribute a lot to the game thematically and in terms of providing engaging gameplay, rather than navigating mundane corridors with different skins.
Social Link Benefits. Again, borrowing from Persona 5, Persona 4 Revival's social links should provide effects and abilities to help you in the TV world. Both Persona 3 and 4 suffer from some social links being seen as pointless, so this will be an extra incentive to spend time on social links. We do understand, however, that this may require some difficult rebalancing in the TV world which could be why this was not done for Persona 3 Reload.
Yosuke Romance. This will be a controversial one. Originally, Persona 4 was going to have a romance route for Yosuke's social link however this was removed before release due to fears of an LGBTQ+ relationship impacting the game's sales and reputation at the time. For this upcoming remake, reimplementation of Yosuke's romance route remains a heavily requested idea from fans, and would serve to finally include representations of queer romance in Persona, along with adding a missing piece of repression to Yosuke's character, who is often depicted by fans as being simply homophobic.
For this upcoming remake though, reimplementation of Yosuke's romance route remains a heavily requested idea from fans, and would serve to finally include representations of queer romance in Persona.
Expectations and discourse is at a high presently, even a few months after the announcement of the remake, and fans are anticipating for ATLUS to deliver. These are just a few things that we hope are brought to Persona 4 Revival.