Persona 5 Delayed to April

Playable at PlayStation Experience, and Japanese voiceover will now be available as free DLC at launch.

By Andrew Goldfarb

Persona 5 has been delayed until April 4, 2017 in North America and Europe.

In a statement, Atlus said “the Japanese release of Persona 5 smashed all our expectations, and as a company, we decided that we owed our fans the very best effort to make Persona 5 our gold standard in localization. Practically, this means redoubling our QA and localization efforts, even returning to the studio to record previously unvoiced lines.”

“We don't want to rush this game,” the statement adds. “And in this case, it meant we needed to move the release back for the last time.”

Alongside the delay, Atlus announced that the Western release of Persona 5 will have dual audio options, with the Japanese voiceover track available as free DLC at launch.

In addition, Persona 5 will be playable in English for the first time at the upcoming 2016 PlayStation Experience, which takes place next month on December 3 and 4 in Anaheim, CA.

Atlus also revealed updated art for the Persona 5 Take Your Heart special edition, which you can check out below. The Take Your Heart edition is still available for pre-order at most major retailers.

Last month, Atlus announced Persona 5’s English voice cast, which includes actors known from Super Smash Bros., One Punch Man, Persona 4: Dancing All Night, and many more. For a look at the full list, plus a trailer featuring each character (including new ones added today), check out our Persona 5 English voice cast trailer hub.

Persona 5 was originally announced in 2013 with a winter 2014 release date, and eventually delayed to 2016 at the Tokyo Game Show last year. It launched on September 15 in Japan and, until today, was expected to launch on February 14 of next year in North America and Europe.

IGN will have hands-on impressions of Persona 5 straight from PlayStation Experience next month. Until then, be sure to read our thoughts from E3 and check out everything we know so far in our Persona 5 wiki guide.

Andrew is IGN’s executive editor of news and somehow managed to beat Persona 5 despite not speaking Japanese. You can find him rambling about EarthBound and cute animals on Twitter.

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