Quote Originally Posted by Wolf Kanno View Post
Actually people do bitch about playing previous MGS games to understand the story and unlike Persona, you can potentially experience the whole franchise in the course of a weekend if you know exactly how to maximize your playtime completion. Whereas it would take a couple of weeks to blast through the entire Persona franchise. So I still feel that playing through five 40+ hour games with multiple endings and the fighting game would still be more time consuming for new players than you would think. The real issue is that if Atlus tries to continue the continuity of previous games in the series in the mainline entries, it will eventually get too cumbersome for new players. It might be manageable now but what if they throw a curve ball and make all four main stories connected? and then we add three more stories down the pipeline, you now have to play through eight different games to figure out what the hell is going on.

The real smart thing that Atlus has done is that even though there are tons of side games and spin-offs for the franchises, most of them remain non-canon so they don't dilute the main story. It's not like Guilty Gear or Xenosaga where good chunks of the plot are in Japanese only Drama CDs or cell phone games that will never leave Japan.

In my mind, it would be a bad business choice. Better to keep the main series accessible to new fans and just continue the story of previous entries as its own series. You now get two franchises instead of one, one that hooks the new kids and the other that keeps them staying. To me that is just a better business model.
Not if you shift the second series into an entirely different genre. I don't think fighters we hold the majority of the fan base indefinitely. Especially since, story-wise, it's tiny compared to most of the full Persona games, even if it's very heavy on story for a fighter. People are going to wonder why the main plot gets stuffed into this expensive, minuscule format while the main series games will become more and more irrelevant. They'll want more Persona games, not more fighters.

I think Persona Q is a good example of what you meant. A separate game built entirely for fans, on a smaller scale and a smaller system, with the main series retaining its accessibility. But I also think that the main series is going to progress in the main games. I think that the references to previous titles and recurring characters will get larger and more prominent. Even if knowledge of the series lore isn't required to understand and enjoy the main plot of Persona 5, it will be required to see how the story affects the overall plot of the series, and probably to understand the optional dungeons and bosses.