Persona Magazine Advertisment

Notes:

An American advertisement for the original Persona, released in North America December 1996.

This advertisement is unusual in that it appears in in the December 1997 issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly, released roughly a year after the game's American launch. Furthermore, Revelations: Persona," as the game was initially called, was not widely reviewed in the USA; for example the magazine with this advertisement never reviewed the game.

In retrospect, it seems likely that the success of Final Fantasy VII, released in September 1997 in the USA, might have led to publishers like Atlus scrambling to capitalize on the popularity of the JRPG genre by highlighting an already released game. After all, although the PS1 is today remembered as a JRPG powerhouse, the genre was absent from the American PlayStation lineup until Beyond the Beyond's release in August 1996.

What record I could find from old NPD data seem to indicate that Persona sold roughly 37 thousand copies in the USA.by 2003. Persona 2 would sell even less. It is thus understandable that the series would not leave Japan again until Shin Megami Tensei III was localized in 2004, and even then used the inclusion of Dante from the Devil May Cry series as a major selling point.