Persona 3 Portable Is Coming to North America in Summer

While most of us already expected this to happen, it's nice to see Atlus offering an official announcement and setting it in stone. Persona 3 Portable will be making its way to North America in July, and it will feature some new features, compared with its previous release. Gamers will have the chance to play through it with a new character, one that promises a different experience. Playing as a female character, they will have the possibility to discover new character interactions and scenarios that will add a considerable amount of play-time to the already long Persona 3 experience, of over 100 hours.

"Persona 3 introduced a revolutionary social element to role-playing games," Aram Jabbari, manager of Public Relations and Sales at Atlus, said. "Players weren't just progressing through a story; they were a part of it, and their decisions and the relationships they chose to foster or neglect became a powerful complement to the game's satisfying combat. Persona 3 Portable takes everything that made Persona 3 such a tremendous, award-winning hit and translates it into the perfect handheld RPG experience."

P3P will also feature "numerous additional improvement[s]," which include the ability to control the entire party during combat, as well as support for "point-and-click" gameplay when interacting with other characters. The game will also see the introduction of Skill Cards, part-time jobs, and a total of five difficulty settings, raging from "beginner" all the way up to "maniac."

These alone are enough to turn Persona 3 Portable into and entirely new title, but Atlus also took the time to make sure that everything would be properly implemented and reflect that this was a release for a handheld console. The game also features one-button menu shortcuts, streamlined team equipment changes, as well as short loading times. The news is more than any Persona 3 fan could have ever hoped for, so here's to hoping that the time-space continuum collapses, and, as we wake up tomorrow, we'll see that it's July 6, and Persona 3 Portable is waiting for us.