What is Revelations: Persona, the first Persona game?

Revelations: Persona was released by Atlus for the PlayStation in Japan on September 20, 1996, under the name Megami Ibunroku Persona, and in North America in 1996. It was a spin-off of the Shin Megami Tensei series, built on the If... branch idea of moving the demon summoning formula into a modern high school setting, and it became the founding game of what is now one of the biggest Japanese role playing franchises in the world.

The story follows a group of students at St. Hermelin High School in Mikage-cho who play a fortune telling game called Persona and are visited by Philemon, a masked figure who gives them the ability to summon Personas, manifestations of their inner selves. Two routes branch from the setup: the SEBEC route, which investigates the corporation reshaping the town, and the hidden Snow Queen route, a harder alternate campaign locked inside the school.

Mechanically it is a game of its era: first person dungeon crawling on a grid, moon phase negotiation with demons, and a formation system where each character's position on a battlefield grid decides which attacks can reach which enemies. Guns sit beside swords, and contact with demons can earn spell cards that are fused into new Personas in the Velvet Room, overseen by Igor, who has appeared in every main entry since.

The physical game matters to collectors because the North American version was heavily altered, and its print run long predates the series becoming famous. A PlayStation Portable remake, Shin Megami Tensei: Persona, arrived in 2009 with a new translation, restored Snow Queen content and a new interface, and it is now the easiest legitimate way to play the game in English. The original disc, the PSP remake and the Japanese original are three genuinely different objects, which is exactly why this entry exists.

For the collector angle: complete in box PlayStation copies, the PSP release and the Japanese Megami Ibunroku original each tell a different part of the story, and condition of the long box era packaging and manual matters as much as the disc. Strategy coverage sits inside this entry below, because the game's two routes and missable content made printed help unusually valuable.