A Persona review bomb has been going on for the last few days, seemingly without rhyme or reason. A number of games in the series have seen severe declines in their user score on Metacritic.
The Persona series of games are a branch of the Shin Megami Tensei games. Both of these role-playing game franchises are largely handled by ATLUS, a developer & published based in Japan (and a subsidiary of SEGA) that specializes in this particular genre.
A thread on ResetEra highlights a decline in the User Scores on Metacritic for a number of titles in the Persona and Shin Megami Tensei franchises. This Persona review bomb has seen the User Score of multiple games decline anywhere from twenty to fifty percent as compared to earlier points. For example, Persona 3 was rated 8.4 in February of 2018 and currently stands at 5.9 as of the time of writing.
Strangely, the latest game in the series appears to be largely unaffected by this Persona review bomb. Persona 5 was scored at 9.1 in February of 2018 and is sitting at 8.5 as of today.
Review scores tanking – often due to irate fans – is certainly nothing new, but the Persona review bomb makes for a particularly strange situation. Nobody is quite sure as to why multiple games from Atlus are seeing their User Scores go down so severely.
There have only been a handful of announcements that may be the reason behind the decrease in score. A Japanese fragrance company recently announced a collaboration with Atlus to produce Persona 4 perfumes and the new Persona dancing games had their demos debut on the PlayStation Store. We also had a new trailer pop up for Catherine: Full Body towards the end of October.
Other than these tidbits, there hasn’t been much of significance going on in the world of Atlus games. The motivation behind the Persona review bomb remains a mystery and no one has yet claimed responsibility. Fans can certainly be fickle, but this is one instance where they seem to be upset with no just cause.
