6. Persona 4: Dancing All Night
One area that the series has always excelled at is music, so a rhythm game celebrating that aspect made a lot of sense. Dancing All Night works on multiple levels, as it’s not just pure fan service (although it is very fun watching Chie get down to funky tunes) thanks to a surprisingly good story mode that offers a fitting end to the Persona 4 crew. It’s not the best, or most memorable spin-off, but it does offer a whole lot of fun!
5. Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth
Persona Q is the only spin-off to stay true to the series’ role-playing origins. This dungeon crawler brings together the casts of Persona 3 and 4, who had previously only seen each other in the fighting games, and has them exploring four labyrinths in order to help two amnesiac students. The gameplay is very similar to Atlus’s excellent Etrian Odyssey games, yet retains enough familiarity in order to not feel totally different (such as using Personas in order to battle enemies). It ends up being a great blend of two styles, and it’s one of the best RPGs on 3DS.
4. Revelations: Persona
A spin-off of the Shin Megami Tensei series, Revelations continues Atlus’s trend of creating RPGs that strayed away from the fantasy titles that dominated the genre. The original game focused on a group of high school students that gain the ability to summon powerful Personas in order to fight demons. Using a school as a setting for an RPG might be common now, but it wasn’t that way in 1996, as Persona (and its predecessor Shin Megami Tensei If…) helped popularize it. It was truly unique at the time of release, and it being so against the grain established Persona‘s signature style.
