Persona 3: 10 Things You Didn't Know About The Manga | CBR - CBR - Comic Book Resources

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Persona is one of the most successful and popular video game franchises of the last couple of decades. Its popularity has meant that there have been several games and TV series adaptations, movies, and other adaptations.

Persona 3, one of the most popular entries in the series, is the first game to have a manga adaptation of its story, though certainly not the last, alongside its movie adaptations. Written and drawn by Shuji Sogabe, the series follows the game's main plot, with some things specific to the manga that many fans of the game, and the manga, might not know.

10 The Title Of The Chapters And Volumes Are In French

French is something of a motif in Persona 3, with one of the characters, Andre Laurent Jean Geraux, nicknamed Bebe by some of the characters, being a French exchange student. Mitsuru speaks French as a second language in the English version of the game. And some of the music that plays in the background has French lyrics. The manga helps capture some of this French vibe by calling the Volumes “Chapitres,” the French word for Chapters,” and giving the individual chapters French names.

9 It Is A Very Faithful Adaptation Of The Game

It’s tough to adapt a story from one medium to another. It usually requires quite a lot of adjustments and compromises to fit into a different format.

But Persona 3, despite having an incredibly different format as a manga than as a roleplaying game, still manages to be very faithful to the original story. Besides small changes, like the Protagonist having a name, it is fairly direct. In fact, the third volume of the manga has almost no changes to the plot.

8 The Protagonist Has An Original Name

In Persona 3, as is the case for the Persona series as a whole, the Protagonist doesn’t have a name at the beginning of the game. The player of the game is expected to name the character themselves and give him a personality to make it a more personal playing experience. But the different adaptations of Persona 3, film versus manga, feature two different main characters with different names. In the movie, his name is Makoto, and in the manga, he is Minato.

7 The Supporting Characters Have Less Of A Role

As mentioned above, the manga adaptation of Persona 3 is pretty faithful to the game itself. But a manga has less space for really expansive storytelling than a video game that takes more than 60 hours to play. So, regardless of its faithfulness to the overall plot, it’s much harder to get the smaller details of the game, and particularly the characters, into the manga as well. The supporting characters have slightly less of a role in the manga, and their individual storylines aren’t as explored.

6 It Has More Humor Than The Game

The Persona games don’t lack comic relief moments, and since there’s so much emphasis on developing relationships between the characters, there are definitely funny moments. But the manga has more room to explore the potential for humor, and the ability to draw in visual gags gives more room to play with in-jokes, especially for those who are also fans of the game, than an animated video game allows, since animating those moments takes time and money.

5 The Manga Briefly Went On Hiatus

The Persona 3 manga has many stories to cover, considering its length. And it also wasn’t the only Persona media in the works while coming out. In fact, Persona 4 was released while the manga was still coming out. While this doesn’t mean that the manga no longer mattered, the series did take a brief hiatus from being published in Dengeki Maoh's monthly magazine to let Persona 4 take center stage a bit more.

4 The Art Is Very Similar To The Game

Since Shuji Sogabe, who wrote and drew the Persona 3 manga, as well as later Persona manga, isn’t responsible for the character designs in the Persona games, it might have been expected that the characters might look a little bit different on the page than they do in the game. But they’re actually very close to the game's original character designs. This is especially important for the Protagonist since he needs to be identifiable in the manga since fans won’t recognize his name.

3 Minato Doesn’t Have As Much Personality In The Manga Than His Counterpart In The Films

The storytelling experience of a film versus a manga certainly means that things have to be different. One of the big differences is that Minato in the manga has a less well-defined personality than Makoto has in the films.

This was done to recreate the video game-playing experience for fans of the game who are checking out the manga since the Protagonist of the games has a personality mostly built by the player themself.

2 The Manga Was Released Over The Course Of A Decade

Even though the Persona 3 video game came out in 2006, almost 15 years ago, the manga has helped keep it alive for fans by being a long-form, long-running version of the story. It first debuted in 2007, just a year after the game came out, but ran for a decade, finally ending in 2017. In that time, the Persona 3 story was told in 11 volumes. And truly showing how long a run this was, two more Persona games were released before it concluded.

1 The Films And Manga Have Some Similarities With Each Other

In some ways, the Persona 3 films and the manga are more like each other than they are like the source material. The film and the manga have some moments that they don’t occur in the game, like the SEES members seeing Takaya’s Persona for the first time in August, which is earlier than in the game, and the scene when Pharos leaves Makoto’s psyche, which happens in the Velvet Room in the film and manga, instead of in Makoto’s room as in the game.

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About The Author

Liz Adler (496 Articles Published)

Liz Adler is a writer and editor based in San Diego, CA. She holds an MFA from San Diego State University and a Bachelor's of Arts from Illinois State University. Her work has been featured at Loser City, HelloGiggles, and Women Write About Comics among others. In her free time, you can find her eating hummus, riding the Haunted Mansion, or being suffocated by her cats, Moo and Mai Tai.