Persona 4 Revival is bringing a nearly 20-year-old game back into the spotlight, and that means not only that it’s bringing a great RPG about the power of friendship and accepting yourself for who you are to modern platforms, but that it’s got to contend with the ways in which the game failed to live up to that idea. Yosuke, one of the party members in the game, is pretty notorious for his homophobia, berating characters like Kanji, whose distorted shadow doppelgänger appeared as a promiscuous gay bath house patron, and even mocking protagonist Yu Narukami if the player so much as gestures at femininity or being attracted to men. However, it sounds like developer Atlus might be ironing out some of those wrinkles in the remake.
In an interview with Anime Corner at Anime Expo, producer Kazuhisa Wada talked about potential changes to the characters and storylines in Persona 4 Revival, and while he says that Atlus hasn’t drastically altered much “about the story or the character’s thoughts or how they act or anything,” Yosuke specifically was getting a bit of a tweak in the remake.
“He’s a little bit insensitive in terms of how he treats outsiders sometimes,” Wada said. “So we wanted to lighten that up and make it a little bit more fitting for the world we live in now.”
Obviously the interview doesn’t get into specifics, but the most obvious example of Yosuke being unkind to “outsiders” is in his treatment of Kanji, who Yosuke goes as far as to insinuate might assault him and the protagonist when he’s staying inside their tent during one scene in the original game because his shadow self in the distorted “TV World” the party explores was depicted as a gay man.
This characterization followed him into the anime adaptation, and though it was framed as more an internal discomfort than an external one, it also came up in Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth when he was “forced” to marry the player in a fake wedding. Outside of the wedding scene, Yosuke also says “Who cares if a guy looks at another guy? The problem comes when you freak out about it,” which could be viewed as character growth, given Persona Q takes place midway through the original Persona 4 after some of the Kanji drama has concluded. But overall, Yosuke’s status as an honest-to-god homophobe has stuck with the community over the years.
The original Persona 4 doesn’t go out of its way to condemn Yosuke’s actions, and Kanji and the possibly gay version of Yu, if played as such, end up just being the butt of his jokes and homophobic freakouts. At one point, there appeared to be a planned romance route for Yosuke that would have contextualized his actions as an insecure queer guy lashing out as he struggled with his own feelings, but that didn’t make it into the final game. However, fans have created mods to restore it because some of the dialogue can still be found in the game’s files. Wada’s words may have some fans crossing their fingers that this romance could come back around in Persona 4 Revival, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up on that front.
Simply replacing Yosuke’s homophobic scenes with something else would be in line with how Atlus has been treating queerness in recent Persona games, with the studio having altered existing scenes through localization in Persona 5 Royal, straight up rewritten interactions that were deemed transphobic in Persona 3 Reload, and at least gestured at the existence of queer characters in Persona 5 Tactica, though it doesn’t actually manifest as a queer relationship. These approaches have let Atlus make the series more inclusive across the board, but also usually get away with not taking that next step to actually allow players to engage in same-sex relationships, and I would be very surprised if Persona 4 Revival did anything more than cover up the needless homophobia.
Persona 4’s relationship to queer identity is incredibly messy, and I frankly don’t envy Atlus the position it’s put itself in trying to remake the RPG, warts and all. Though the game is ostensibly about accepting oneself and embracing the parts of ourselves we want to hide, Persona 4’s reading as a queer text is still largely up for debate because the way it handles these ideas is inconsistent and its allegories are imperfect. However, it remains to be seen just how the remake will handle some of those storylines, as it appears the company is already making some changes to Kanji’s character; images from the remake have shown his shadow holding giant male and female symbols as weapons, rather than the two male ones he used in the original game. What does this mean? We don’t know yet, but I’m sure it’s going to be really thorny and complicated to navigate, like Persona 4 has always been.
Whatever happens, we’ll find out when Persona 4 Revival comes to PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S on February 18.
