#this is all based on my personal recollections

[cookinguptales]

Why are Persona 1 + 2 not popular? It's always 3-4-5 that get attention.

I mean, I think it’s a lot of things. I can only talk about North American fandom, but…

P1&2 were on a different system and came out like 5-10 years before P3, plus they didn’t have the social link aspect that I think people really like about the series. They’ve got different fighting systems, to some degree… P1 and P2 had a plot shared between them, and then P3 started off fresh, which made it attractive to people who hadn’t played any of the games and only had a PS2. (Which was common in the period when P3 came out.)

I mean, to give you my own experience, I’d never heard of any of the Persona games when P3 got popular. My family couldn’t afford a Playstation growing up, and P1&2 were pretty hard to find. P3 didn’t have much to do with P1/2 other than some gameplay elements, so most people just started fresh.

The JRPG community was different in like…1996 when P1 came out, and fandom was different. I feel like a lot of the JRPG franchises didn’t really gain a permanent foothold, at least in North America. I feel like the only extended franchise with strong, serious staying power was Final Fantasy. P1 was directly competing with FFVII (ridiculously cultish fandom even still) and P2 came out just before FFX and Kingdom Hearts – and it came out right as the Playstation was being phased out in favor of the PS2.

When P3 came out, it really had a vibe to it that was unlike the other JRPGs at the time, and it was very well-received. It had very stylish aesthetics, the social links melded with dungeon crawling, the tarot-themed…almost pokemon-catching mechanic, the modern day mysteries… People were impressed because it felt refreshingly new, even if it was actually a reboot of a much more extensive series. (Note also that dating sims in general really hadn’t reached a wide audience in NA at this point, so everyone had a lot of fun with the social links.) P4 was when things started to get really popular, though, and that was very unlike other contemporaneous JRPGs. The bizarre murder mystery really helped bump it up, I think. I’m not sure people would have hung on so long for P5 if people hadn’t loved P4 so damn much. Like they certainly didn’t hang on between P2 and P3, and the gap between P4 and P5 was longer.

Honestly, I feel like P3-5 have a different feel to them and they hit on a melange of familiar (and well-loved) video game components that really went over well with an audience that was particularly receptive at the time. And then, since P1 and both P2s were on a system that was by then super outdated (not sure you could even buy it at that point; I think they ported it to the PSP at one point too but no one I knew had one), no one went back and played them.

Like I’ll be honest with you, I’ve only ever watched someone else play one of the older Persona games and that was like a decade ago. At the time, at least, they were really hard to find. Only “serious” JRPG gamers tended to have them.

Also, just… I think more people had video game consoles (especially non-Nintendo ones, which were seen as more family-friendly) by the time P3 came out. Like again, I definitely didn’t have a console growing up, and only my more affluent friends did. They weren’t as pervasive as they are now. (Probably partially because you can do a lot more with a console now; it’s easier to justify an expense like that if you can also use it for blu-ray, dvds, Netflix, exercise, etc. I know that was why we eventually got one. My family’s first DVD player was a PS2, lol.)

It’s odd… I feel like as home consoles became more and more ubiquitous, JRPGs got less popular. I guess P3 really got into that sweet spot when we all had consoles and we all still loved JRPGs more than American games. lol