Atlus Announces Persona Remake for North America

That was fast.

Atlus has just announced that the PSP remake of the 1996 PlayStation title, Persona, will indeed be making the jump to North American shores later this year as (yup) Shin Megami Tensei: Persona.

The PSP remake is, as previously mentioned, completely remastered from the original, and features new elements, the most apparent of which is the addition of cell-shaded full motion videos inserted at key scenes throughout the game.

The Atlus USA announcement has teased that the new iteration will include "that which was not carried over the first time" (presumably citing the omission of a certain dungeon that was taken out of the original PSX localization).

Atlus also claims that the game has been "fully rebalanced, visually enhanced, and completely relocalized." Good news, as a lot of fans have complained that the original localization was a bastardization of the game, and there have even been talks of fan re-traslation projects.

The game has not been given a solid release date at this time, but is slated for sometime this fall. It will be available for PSP in Japan on April 29, 2009.