Persona 5 Royal lead says the JRPG series' growth might have "contributed to the recent spread of turn-based combat," but for Atlus, it's just "an expression of our game-design philosophy"

Call it a turn-based resurgence. Call it a “rediscovery of things that had fallen outside our field of view.” Call it whatever you want, but one thing’s for sure: turn-based games are hot, hot, baby, and they have been for, like, 10 years now. 10 years happens to be roughly the length of time between now and the release of Persona 5, which arguably catapulted the long-running turn-based JRPG series to mainstream status, and Kazuhisa Wada, head of Atlus’s Persona team P-Studio, says that may or may not be a coincidence.

“I suppose the growth of the Persona series may have, in its own way, contributed to the recent spread of turn‑based combat – but I’m not entirely certain,” Wada tells Game Informer. “Whether turn‑based combat was in the mainstream or had fallen out of favor, we continued to use [it], so it’s hard for us to feel that shift firsthand.”