Endorph posted:

Basing all your conclusions about an entire culture off of a random JRPG company being shitheads is moronic and some of the poo poo people have said these past few pages is insanely racist and also not really material to the point. There's gay and trans positive poo poo from Japan from 1995, and at this point in Japan there is a slow but growing acceptance of homosexuality and transsexuality. There are a variety of reasons why it's not immediately reflected in all of its media ever. Atlus is an old company with heads that are old, you can see this in everything from Persona using fairly outdated school systems to, yes, its attitudes towards LGBT stuff.

Furthermore, you have to understand how these things are categorized in nerd media in Japan. 'Yuri' and 'Yaoi' are genres onto themselves - they run in magazines specifically dedicated to them, their marketing heavily features these things even if it's just implied. On the one hand, this means that there's a thriving corner of the market for independent creators who want to tell these stories - on the other hand, the stories told can be repetitive and 'safe' due to needing to appeal to fairly small demographics. Likewise, it means that companies that are bigger than those small magazines don't feel any need to pander to them, feeling that their needs are met. There is an abundance of incredibly well-written LGBT media in Japan, and this stuff has been published for years and actually made money off of, but you have to go to the places that are specifically designated for it, which means there's little cross-pollination with more 'mainstream' things. Combine that with a conservative company like Atlus and you get the situation with Persona.

Similarily, unlike in America where a series' target demographic is generally associated with the gender of its protagonist, Japan doesn't really make that assumption. This isn't even a recent thing - Gundam is and always has been insanely popular with women ever since it first aired, and its only recently that women have dropped off. List of gundam series with female protagonists: 0. List of gundam series where the women even do that much: Like, Turn-A. And when they wanted to reach that demographic again, they hired a female writer known for her dramas... who made a story where the entire main cast is male save for one character. And it wasn't a breakthrough success, but it was decently popular with women.

Likewise, sports anime like Haikyuu and Slam Dunk - things where the roles for female characters are extremely limited just because they're about male sports teams - are *insanely* popular with women these days, to the point that they've basically supplanted the male fanbase in the eyes of the people who promote and publish those series.

So a female protagonist is not a decoder ring to tapping into a female fanbase. If you spend five minutes watching video of Persona live reveals and stuff, listen to the audience. Lots of female cheering. And who do they cheer loudest for? The male self-insert protagonist. Yu, Minato, and Akira are all incredibly popular with women.

And Persona already *has* been pandering to a female fanbase in this method. Adachi was insanely popular with women, so they added stuff that gave him and Yu interactions and made him more sympathetic, and made him playable in Ultimax, and played up his tension with Yu in the Golden anime. Goro is basically a calculated attempt to achieve that kind of popularity in a slightly more marketable character - a teenage boy who does bad stuff but at least isn't a serial rapist. And it worked, from what I've seen - the male fanbase is ambivalent towards Goro or outright hates him, but most women I've seen - especially on Japanese boards - love him.

Japan is a very conservative country, I'm not arguing that, but you do have to actually understand the ways in which it is conservative and the ways in which what marketing thinks and what the audiences expect differ from the US, instead of just going 'no female main character? they must hate women and not want them to play these games!"

For the record, I want a female protagonist too, all the female characters in P5 get really shafted except Futaba, and the director of P3-P5 is a gigantic creep. also be sure to go to rainbow burrito in japan if you want a good gay burrito.

Improbable Lobster posted:

lol @ complaining about bigotry and using "transexual" in the same paragraph in 2017

8-Bit Scholar posted:

If SMTV sells well, guarantee you we'll get the Persona 5 Deluxe Edition whatever on the Switch (and all the rest). Heck, probably independent of sales, they'll wanna get it on there. I know I'd probably buy Persona 5 again if I could get it portable.

THE AWESOME GHOST posted:

I wouldn’t mind since I own both but for whatever reason Persona is only Sony and all other SMT seems to be nintendo

Nate RFB posted:

I still tried for it because no Chaos/Law ending has ever been compelling for me in SMT.

Manatee Cannon posted:

there's no way they'd choose the vita over the switch for any persona 5 portable thing in the future. I have to imagine the reasoning behind p3p and p4g being on sony handhelds had way more to do with the fact that the ds/3ds couldn't have possibly run them than anything else

Expect My Mom posted:

[in the voice of the kid from the gi joe help computer video] well i dont know much about japan other than animes i got at my house and my mom got a couple persona games on the computer and i played those

Pablo Gigante posted:

I feel like P3P and P4G could have run just fine on the DS/3DS respectively, they're not the most graphically demanding games out there

Improbable Lobster posted:

lol @ complaining about bigotry and using "transexual" in the same paragraph in 2017

Manatee Cannon posted:

both would

Pablo Gigante posted:

I’m sure they could make it work on DS if they wanted to

Improbable Lobster posted:

lol @ complaining about bigotry and using "transexual" in the same paragraph in 2017

Rinkles posted:

What a pointless statement

Manatee Cannon posted:

I mean... the psp was pretty popular in japan but there's no way p4g wouldn't have made way more money on 3ds everywhere. there's a reason they don't release their other games on those platforms

Manatee Cannon posted:

persona is not as big as you seem to think

Wark Say posted:

Didn't P4G literally made people buy like 100k units of the Vita (or maybe more? I can't remember) just because the game came out on the Vita?

Head Hit Keyboard posted:

Just port everything to Steam thanks.

Improbable Lobster posted:

lol @ complaining about bigotry and using "transexual" in the same paragraph in 2017

DrPaper posted:

Improbable Lobster posted:

lol @ complaining about bigotry and using "transexual" in the same paragraph in 2017

Wark Say posted:

Didn't P4G literally made people buy like 100k units of the Vita (or maybe more? I can't remember) just because the game came out on the Vita?

Wark Say posted:

Sylphie is a good girl!