This was where the team’s efforts were their most concentrated: the narrative premise formed the core around which the rest of the game was built, and the abundance of anime cutscenes produced by Studio 4☌ to convey that narrative. Yet at least in the beginning, Catherine‘s appeal was meant to derive from its narrative. Ultimately, the game’s position of simultaneously existing both outside Persona and within it has come to be its most defining feature. Hashino and others saw Catherine as an opportunity to explore subject matter a high school setting wouldn’t allow, like adult life and extramarital affairs. They have vastly different play styles, with Persona being a mix of a life/dating sim, and Catherine being a puzzle game with a strong accompanying narrative, comparative to a visual novel.

Of course, there are also some important distinctions between the two works. The developers even used Yukiko Amagi to test/show off some of the gameplay features, and Vincent makes a cameo appearance in the PlayStation Portable version of Persona 3 ahead of the actual game he starred in. Hashino remarked the game, being their first time working in HD, served as a sort of test site for how they would later develop Persona 5 (although that’s as far as the connection goes). There are the obvious connections: many of the creative minds behind the Persona (artist Shigenori Soejima, composer Shoji Meguro, designer Katsura Hashino) worked on the game, and many of the motifs they’d developed in their previous work made it into Catherine. Despite the lack of gameplay and narrative ties with Persona, Catherine is inexorably tied up with Atlus’ flagship franchise. It’s difficult to approach discussing Catherine, Atlus’ PS3/X360 narrative-focused puzzle game, without also discussing the Persona series.

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