Persona 4 Arena Is Region-Locked on Home Consoles

Publisher Atlus has announced that Persona 4 Arena, the fighting game spin-off from its anticipated role-playing series, will be region-locked on the PlayStation 3 from Sony and on the Xbox 360.

This means that gamers who were planning to buy the Japanese version of the game and then ship them to their own homes will be unable to do that unless they also have a home console brought from the same market.

The publisher has previously been more open to game imports.

Atlus has also confirmed that the servers for the game are not region-locked, which means that any player can challenge anyone else in the world, as long as the connection lacks any lag.

Persona 4 Arena will be launched on the Japanese market on July 26, gamers in the United States will be able to get it on August 7, while those in Europe will need to wait until August 31.