Draft:Persona 6

Persona 6 is an upcoming role-playing video game developed and published by Atlus. It will be the seventh main installment of the Persona series, itself a part of the larger Megami Tensei franchise.

The game is being developed by P-Studio. It will be the first main entry in the series since Persona 2: Eternal Punishment (2000) to not be directed by Katsura Hashino, following his departure from the Persona development team in 2016. Preporatory work for the game began prior to the worldwide release of Persona 5 in 2017, while full production had commenced by 2021.

Development
The game is currently being developed by P-Studio, an internal team established during the development of Persona 3 (2006) dedicated to handling the series' numbered entries and overseeing collaborative titles with external developers, such as Persona 4 Arena (2012) & Arena Ultimax (2014) developed by Arc System Works, and Persona 5 Strikers (2020) developed by Omega Force. In an interview with Chinese gaming news outlet GNN Gamer on March 11, 2017, ahead of the Chinese release of Persona 5 (2016), Atlus West (formerly Atlus USA) President and CEO Naoto Hiraoka reassured the outlet that the Persona series remained "Atlus' most important work, and that this will not change in the future", while also confirming that "the next step for it is already in preparation".

By this time, Katsura Hashino, a primary producer at P-Studio and the director of various Atlus games, including Persona 3, Persona 4 and Persona 5, had officially departed the studio following the completion of the latter game, citing Persona 5 as a "turning point" for the series, as well as a desire to "move on to another project". He would go on to establish Studio Zero, an additional development team within Atlus dedicated to the pursuit of original projects and IPs adjacent from their flagship franchise, Megami Tensei. Studio Zero would eventually release their first project, Catherine: Full Body in 2019 for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita, and in 2020 for Nintendo Switch. Atlus USA would thereby release a press statement on December 23, 2016, clarifying that while Hashino's preoccupation with developing the upcoming RPG Metaphor: ReFantazio (2024) with Studio Zero dispelled any possible involvement with the Persona series at present, "P-Studio, the production team in charge of Persona, will continue to operate at full strength to develop new entries to fulfill demand for the series". Additionally, Atlus reaffirmed that series character designer Shigenori Soejima and composer Shoji Meguro, would continue to reprise their respective duties for future Persona projects simultaneously with their involvement in Studio Zero and Metaphor: ReFantazio. Shoji Meguro, who served as lead composer on the Persona games directed by Hashino, in addition to directing the remakes of Shin Megami Tensei: Persona (2009), Persona 2: Innocent Sin (2011) and Persona 2: Eternal Punishnment (2012) for PlayStation Portable. would also eventually depart Atlus at the end of September 2021 in order to pursue freelance composing work and partake in independent game designing. However, upon the announcement he would reaffirm his continued involvement in composing game music for Atlus titles in tandem with his work as an indie game developer. Meguro would elaborate on the status of his relationship towards Atlus the following year while promoting his independent game Guns Undarkness, stating that, "In terms of doing a full soundtrack, I would only do that with ATLUS right now". However, he cautioned expectations as to whether he would remain involved with composing for the Persona games.

On July 13, 2021, following the unveiling of an updated Persona Channel website commemorating the series' 25th anniversary, Atlus posted a company recruitment page featuring various interviews with employees regarding work culture, that confirmed Persona 6 as being in active development. The page included a quote from Naoto Hiraoka, who stated, "the vision for Persona 6 is not a small one and one that can't be realized with the current staff", going on to elaborate that the intent behind publicizing the recruitment ad, was to "garner for talent to make this the game that they want to deliver". Hiraoka would describe the pressures that surrounded the development of a new mainline entry, exclaiming that "When we created Persona 4, there was the pressure that it had to exceed Persona 3. Now, we will have to create a [Persona] 6 which exceeds [Persona] 5". While concluding the Persona 25th Anniversary celebration in October 2022, current P-Studio chief director and lead producer Kazuhisa Wada reaffirmed that Atlus was developing the "next stage for the Persona series" for players to look forward to.

In May 2023, a placeholder logo used during development for Persona 6 was leaked online. The prominence of green in the logo suggested that the game's aesthetic would heavily derive from it as a thematic color, not dissimilar to the prominence of blue, yellow and red in the presentations of Persona 3, Persona 4 and Persona 5, respectively.