Persona 4 Cover Story – Play Magazine

For the December 2008 issue of Play, I was given the chance to do my first cover story for the magazine: Persona 4. As a fan of the series since the original North American release of Revelations: Persona, I was super excited to do so, and not only got to play Persona 4 months beyond anyone else for the benefit of doing the cover story review, but also got to interview three of the key staff members from the development team (And—something I wouldn’t realize until later—I got the honor of doing the final cover story that a PlayStation 2 game would get in the States.)

One of the great parts of doing the cover story was that I got to handle the entirety of the cover story, from planning, to writing, to design. I was the only writer at Play that could also do their own layouts, and for Persona 4, I really wanted something that conveyed the “television” idea that was central to the game’s other world. So, all of the info boxes and screenshots were given a similar shape to CRT television screens. As well, I really liked the character art that I’d been given by Atlus, so I did the profiles for the main cast on the sides of each page in order to help introduce the new team to readers.

I’ve had plenty of design work that I’ve done that I laters wasn’t as much of a fan of anymore, but I still really like almost every aspect of my Persona 4 cover story for Play. I think the entire package turned out great, and it’s something I remain proud of to this day.

Oh, and it was also really awesome that Shigenori Soejima created an exclusive piece of Persona 4 artwork for us to use on the cover (which, so far as I know, has never been reprinted).