Whilst the region lock is a major dick move by Atlus, let's not absolve Zen/PQube of any guilt here because of it.
If they made sure games had a timely release, the region lock wouldn't even be an issue for 95% of people. Most import to "get the game early"; nobody's interested in scamming local distributors out of a few bucks by getting it cheaper from America. It's certainly been less of a problem this generation than it was last gen, and PS3 being region free has been less of a godsend than it would've been last gen due to the fact that most publishers understand that global releases are important nowadays.
Still, Zen are incompetent buffons. All they do on the "Official Persona Europe" Facebook page is post pictures of Woody raping Aigis, fan art of Pokemon (as SMT arcanas), and photographs of the game that people with foreign consoles (or living in other continents) imported, as if they're rubbing it in.
Assholes.
Either way, I hope someone from Atlus is reading the butthurt about this. If you're going to region lock your games, at least make sure you're hooked up with a competent European publisher. Ghostlight seem to do a good job in getting this stuff out timely, and even if it's delayed they're very open about the process unless they're under NDA. All Zen seem to care about is spamming people's Facebook feed with stupid (and in some cases, offensive) pictures and rubbing it in that we can't play it right now. At the very least, can those clowns. They're completely fucking useless.
A question for those of you who've purchased other recent Atlus and Arc System Works titles released in Europe: Do they bother to do full text translations into common languages other than English for these releases? Or are they typically the same English-only release as the one we Americans purchased months previously?
Recently I've bought European versions of:
- Persona 3 Portable
- Persona 2 Innocent Sin
- Persona 4
- Persona 3 FES
All of them were identical to the US version, save for the local publisher's logo displaying on boot, and any PAL optimisations made in the PS2 games.