Persona 1 & 2 Remakes 'Have to Happen' — A Handheld Dream
Persona 1 and 2 have always been handheld games at heart. Their most-played versions lived on the PSP — Revelations: Persona received a full remake, both Persona 2 chapters followed on the same hardware, and Persona 4 Golden later turned the Vita into a JRPG destination. That history is why Persona 4 Revival producer Kazuhisa Wada’s latest comments should perk up anyone who plays Atlus on the go. ‘At this point, I can’t say for sure, but personally, I think it’s something we should definitely do,’ Wada told GamerBraves. ‘I think we have to do it.’
That’s not a greenlight — Wada keeps it at a personal conviction rather than a project announcement — but it’s the strongest signal yet that Atlus sees its pre-Persona 3 catalog as something its modern audience actually wants. That audience lives on Steam Deck, Switch 2, and Windows handhelds. The question is whether Atlus can remake these games without sanding off what made them weird.
The PSP Legacy Atlus Can’t Walk Away From
The original Persona games have spent more of their life on portable screens than on home televisions. Revelations: Persona received a full PSP remake, both Persona 2 chapters followed on the same hardware, and Persona 4 Golden turned the Vita into a JRPG destination. That portable DNA carried into the modern era: Persona 3 Reload, Persona 5 Royal, and Metaphor are all Steam Deck Verified, and Atlus has repeatedly shipped its catalog to Nintendo hardware. A Persona 1/2 remake wave wouldn’t be Atlus discovering handhelds — it would be returning to the territory where these games always played best. Anyone currently replaying the originals through PSP emulation on one of the best retro handhelds for emulation gets it: this series’ past has been portable by necessity for decades.
The session design fits the platform too. Modern Persona’s calendar loop begs you to play one more day, which is a trap on a commute. The originals are old-school SMT — random encounters, grid-based crawling, and grinding you can stop mid-step. That structure suits a 15-minute train ride better than almost anything in Atlus’s modern catalog. Wada’s comment that these remakes ‘have to’ happen reads less like nostalgia and more like a producer recognizing exactly where his series’ legacy actually lives.
The ‘Make It Persona 5’ Trap
Here’s the wrinkle: Atlus’s remake playbook has been to pull everything toward Persona 5 Royal’s presentation and quality-of-life. That worked for Persona 3 Reload because Persona 3 shares the modern skeleton. Persona 2 does not — it’s closer to early Shin Megami Tensei, with first-person dungeons, a rumor system built into the story progression, and none of the social sim scaffolding. Forcing the P5 template onto it would sand off the exact quirks that make Innocent Sin’s narrative so celebrated. GamesRadar’s phrasing — like wearing shoes as gloves — is the right image.
For handheld players, the stakes here aren’t technical. Even a lavishly rebuilt Persona 2 isn’t the game that stresses the Steam Deck’s APU or Switch 2’s battery — it’s a PS1 dungeon crawler at heart. The real question is session design: does Atlus aim for long sit-down play, or does it respect the pick-up-and-play rhythm that made these titles portable icons? Trust the weirdness and you get a triple-A spotlight on a genre handheld audiences already adore. Homogenize it and the result will still sell — but it’ll play like a Persona 5 expansion wearing a Persona 2 costume.
One Install, Two Games, Zero Excuses
The biggest structural call — and the one with direct consequences for handheld storage math — is whether Atlus finally ships Innocent Sin and Eternal Punishment as one combined release. They never have. On PSP they arrived as separate games released years apart, and Innocent Sin only reached the West in 2011, more than a decade after its original launch, meaning Eternal Punishment’s Western PS1 release asked players to follow a story they couldn’t legally play in English. A dual-game package would be the definitive version — and on devices where storage is a constant negotiation, one install instead of two matters more than it might on a desktop — the same reason multi-part Final Fantasy remakes are a handheld storage story. It would also let players experience the full arc without tracking down a PSP copy or resorting to emulation. If Atlus is serious about bringing these stories to the people who keep asking for them, a combined release is the least it can do.