Ragnar Blackmane
Member
I think what really made Persona known in the west was Golden and also the Persona 4 anime and Persona 3 movies that were hard to miss if you were even remotely keeping track of new anime releases in the last few years. Catherine probably managed to attract a few new people as well. The niche of people that like anime might be a niche, but it still is a very big niche and if you are part of it you probably heard the name "Persona" at some point and remember it, something that definitely wasn't the case when the PS2 version of Persona 4 released. Meanwhile P4Golden really profited from the lack of games on the Vita, it was omnipresent on any "must play" Vita game lists and very visible to anyone looking up Vita games too thanks to the very high critical reception and metascore (isn't it still one of the top 3 best rated Vita releases).Persona 4 really did put this series on the map.
Well deserved of course. P5 is fucking great so far.
That all added on top of the super impressive trailers, word of mouth (also a result of above factors) and the extremely impressive critical reception. Considering how rarely JRPGs score in the 90s or even high 80s when it comes to metascore nowadays (the most recent one I can remember is FFX with a 92 score), a 94 score is massive (is there any JRPG with a higher score at the moment?) and instantly puts it on the radar of everyone who even remotely likes JRPGs.
I was hoping that this would lead to a considerable increase in sales over Golden and Catherine, but I absolutely didn't expect it to be this much.