i think they’re really good!! i think they got a slightly better understanding of the characters in reload, as they ironed out some flaws in voices like junpei and mitsuru and completely redid some like Fuuka and Shuji! i also like how they made ken more mature and made aigis sound more robotic yet still human and emotional at the same time. a lot of people seem to have a bit of an issue with akihiko, but i think the deeper voice really fits him and his maturity without sounding as old as some people say (imo).
Dojima-san was the earliest candidate for true culprit. I imagine him starting to kill because he believes his wife was murdered and her death wasn't an accident therefore making the murder spree a revenge tale with no good results, and the obsession with killing people would be his desperate need to "do justice" by killing the closest person to the bad guy who took his and Nanako's happy life by erasing the woman he loved so much from existance.
I had a idea for a awesome new mechanic. I call them, spirit fighters. You would get a spirit fighter once you max out a social link. The spirit fighter would be of that character you max out (except if they were already a party member). You could summon 1 spirit fighter in a battle for a large amount for you Sp. They would act as a extra party member you could use and they would work well to give you an extra advantage with enemies that are basically damage sponges. These members would have preselected weapons and personas that could not be changed. This would add some strategy because you would want to pick the one that would work the best in that battle. This would also make you want to get more characters to max social link so you can get more spirit fighters so you can have more options. They would not level up on their own but instead automatically jump to whatever level the party leader was. Now, these would not be the real characters. But instead imaginary versions of them that only become real because they are personified to be real, like the guns in Persona 5. So this would only work in a game we’re the dungeons are some sort of imaginary. In my persona 6, the palaces would be fantasy’s that the people have immersed themselves in so they can ignore their trauma. You defeated shadows so that these people are forced to face their trauma and to move on.
It was during development so anyone could be killer but we must remember Persona 4 are set to be lightheart tone so its normal main or protagonist support characters would not become killer.
Based on the comments it's an unpopular opinion, but the voice cast is the reason I didn't get the game. No offense to the new ones, I'd probably be ok with most of them (not naming who on the off-chance any of them read this) if I didn't have the originals to compare to. That and the "new graphics" just feel kinda flat to me. Maybe it's the color palette this game uses, but the P5 style just didn't hit it for me here.
I absolutely love this idea, but unfortunately it wouldn’t exactly work because although a persona user can be a palace ruler, the palace wouldn’t have a shadow if the ruler is a persona-user. It’s kinda like Persona 4 in the way that the person’s shadow becomes their persona once awakened (said by Morgana.) But, I also had a some ideas for his boss fight and other stuff in the palace, i had fun writing them but once again wouldn’t work with canon. The palace starts close to the colosseum, but then the shadows catch you and toss you into the underworld area because you planned to take down “their great Lord Akechi.” You get no safe rooms close to the colosseum either, so you're forced to work your way back up. In the underworld area, as you’re trying to get out, you could hear echoes of Akechi’s memories but the source of the voice (where you see the flashbacks and such, idk what it could be though, maybe something reflective like a mirror or crystals?) being guarded by a powerful shadow. Once you see the flashback, the echoes stop. This happens 3, maybe 4 times. You can't proceed until you see the flashbacks, think Maruki's palace. These flashbacks could be stuff like Akechi finding out his mom died (and blaming himself for it), Shido abandoning Akechi, Akechi awakening his personas, him turning to becoming an assassin. Yeah, dark stuff. When you send the calling card, and are about to sneak in and take the treasure, you’re caught again, and forced to face off against Shadow Akechi. His boss fight, would be like this: After you send the calling card, security in the palace goes way up. You are thrown into the arena by some shadows, you can’t do anything. But then, your opponent is “The legendary hero of Justice, Lord Akechi.” Shadow Akechi recognizes you immediately, and does a little monologue blah blah blah But when the fight starts, he dons golden bird-like wings, and the crowd goes absolutely wild. Everyone cheers his name. Akechi glances up at the crowds, almost judgmentally for a brief moment, before the battle begins. His attacks involve him using misdirection and deception in his tactics, I’m not sure how though But here’s where it gets interesting. As Shadow Akechi is losing the fight, the crowds start laughing at him and mocking him. They immediately changed their views as soon as Akechi made mistakes. They didn’t care about him, they never really did, they just wanted to see him win to entertain the crowd. But then, Akechi does a transformation. He shows his true colors, and has more bird-like features. His wings turn pitch black. He looks terrifying, and much more powerful than before. And the crowd goes from mocking, to *screaming.* Also, you don't take his treasure, but the palace gets destroyed by Akechi's own will. Think of Mishima’s social link (yes I’m using Mishima as an example) where you tell his shadow to go change his own heart and he actually does it, and Mishima stops what he was doing and changes for the better. Would make for some super neat character development, and would work for what he did in Royal where he decides to drop the facade and carve his own path. That could work here too. Also, the will seeds would be called the “Seeds of Treachery” and the ring you get from them would give you the ability “Gladiator’s Tactics”, which gives an automatic charge at the start of the battle and a skill kind of like Marakunda or Masukunda, or, a Tetrakarn + Makarakarn move for one target, but costs a lot of SP. Mini life wall.
There's a very specific character/Persona combination I came up with in general that I think sort of fits this idea, that would possibly work a bit better than your proposed villain (except the Mad Hatter fitting too well). I originally conceived them as The Tower, but Judgement works well enough so as to not step on Aladdin's toes: There's a semi-popular upper-classman boy, on the verge of graduating, who is known as a zany class clown who always has something crazy and fun to say. However, when one of the party members overhears him when he thinks he's alone/after some investigation into him, the party realises that he's still deeply, bitterly resentful of his mother remarrying after his father's death, and to a man who is corrupt and cruel, as well as how the town overlooks the stepfather's cruelty because of the riches his business brings the town. Eventually, they learn that this boy is so deep in his hatred that he has been planning an act of mass violence, akin to a shooting or a bombing, using the power he discovered in the hidden world, in order to both kill his step-father AND "punish the world that overlooked his wickedness", so the team has to descend into his dungeon, a twisted, cruel palace, in order to make him confront his own violent insanity, victim complex (because of how small his problems really are compared to how well off he is both materially and emotionally, since he's well liked and his mother genuinely loves him), his ego to think he has carte-blanche for vigilante justice, etc. and come to his senses. He refuses to see reason, until Cinderella directly relates to him, with the evil stepfather thing, at which point he abandons the town in shame and fear of repercussions, only to return in order to help with the final "kill god" dungeon in a strained alliance, to fight not for the rotting world as it is, but the way that the team he once resented sees that it could be, putting faith in others rather than just himself. His Shadow's boss form/Persona would be Hamlet, the mad prince who hid behind a humourously zany mask, and killed himself and everyone he cared about in an insane, tunnel-visiom revenge plot. However, when he joins the team, he would have Prospero as his Persona, a king in exile who abandoned his revenge scheme when his daugther fell in love with the son of the man who wronged him, swapping out Hamlet's Curse affinity for Wind.
then she would just turn like some Akechi character, and I bet she would be loved by the community knowing she is in a bad mental state and in the end she could do something crazy and dissapear sounds kinda catchy and weird but yea
