Persona today has solidified itself as one of the biggest JRPG franchises in today's society and it mostly has all to do with the release of Persona 4 and it's many spin offs, side games, animes, etc. But it didn't always start off like that as Persona started off as a spin off series of the Shin Megami Tensei games before they were large enough to become their own series. As with many games, the Persona series has gone through its fair share of localization from the third game onward, most of them never really had any much done to them and thus they remained faithful to their original Japanese release. However, the first game released in the west, Revelations: Persona, faced many different kinds of localization changes partly due to an inexperienced Atlus USA but also due to the games heavy use of Japanese culture and the fear that a western audience may not understand many of the references used in game.
Left: Revelations Right: 2009 Remake
This line is a result of a bad translation
There's a lot to talk about when it came to localizing the first Persona game. The first one many players would most likely is of course the changes of many characters' names, redesigns to their sprites and portraits, as well as dialogue changes from translating. Many of the demons and Personas that appear throughout the game have also received a name change but nothing too much when it comes to a redesign. Most of these were done to make some of the demon's names easier to remember but in exchange removing some of mythological references of some of them. And of course because Atlus had to change many parts of the game many lines had to be reworded or rewritten altogether. All of these were done because of the idea that many western players wouldn't understand any of references to Japanese culture.
Hacking in The Snow Queen Quest leads to buggy text messed up sprites
The other big change to the first Persona game is the lack of the Snow Queen quest in the Western release. As Atlus USA had a small team of people for translating and localizing, they faced a lot of time crunches when it came to the western release of Revelations: Persona. Meaning in order to cut down on time translating the game, they had to cut corners somewhere and that turned out to be half the game with the Snow Queen quest. As the quest fairly difficult to unlock as well as the insane difficulty spike that came with it, the localization team responsible for the translation decided against translating it and instead leaving it inaccessible during regular gameplay unless the player had a cheat device or the 2009 remake on the Playstation Portable that actually remains faithful to the original release of the game.
Here is a video that goes a bit more in depth on all of the changes. There too many to list in this one article.
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