Bad news for fans of inventive RPG combat and teenagers in leather fetish costumes: Atlus has announced that its much-anticipated Persona 5 has been officially pushed back to summer of 2016. The announcement comes with what’s either a silver lining or a tantalizing taunt, though, in the form of a new trailer for the highly anticipated game.
Besides showing off a lot more—to an eye-rolling degree, in the case of the game’s female lead—of its cast of high-school-students-turned-superpowered-sneak-thieves, the new video delves deeper into P5’s gameplay than anything we’ve seen before. The game’s blue-haired protagonist checks his phone, explores a city, and even hits the batting cages, all under the aegis of one of series composer Shoji Meguro’s distinctive, guitar-heavy scores.
Most interesting are the glimpses we get of the game’s dungeons, which look to be far more interactive and tightly designed than the procedurally generated hallways of earlier games. Full of interactive flourishes, stealth elements, and some really eye-catching stuff like characters jumping into paintings or being transformed into mice, dungeon crawling looks to be shaping up into a much more dynamic experience. Meanwhile, the game’s enemy designs are suitably bonkers, including something that can only be described as “some sort of murderous vollyeball king.” (Fans of Atlus’ Shin Megami Tensei series, of which the Persona games are a subsection, will also notice a few foes carried over from the regular series.)
In a video interview (in Japanese), director Katsura Hashino apologized to fans for the delay, but promised that Persona 5 would be the series’ biggest game to date. We’ll have to wait until summer of 2016 to see if the hype holds true.