Persona 4 Revival Devs Had A Serious Debate About How Thick Chie’s Thighs Should Be

Faithfully remaking such a modern classic RPG means Atlus has to get everything right. From overhauling the Investigation Team’s looks to rebuilding Inaba, no detail seems too small — even the exact thickness of Chie Satonaka’s thighs. Speaking with Famitsu in Issue 1965, P-Studio revealed that the issue of Chie’s proportions actually came up while developing Persona 4 Revival. The dilemma seems to have come down to choosing between staying faithful to her original design or making her movement look better in 3D.

Early in development, the team decided that they had to rebuild the whole game for the remake, just like what they did for Persona 3 Reload. From giving fully voiced Social Links, adding redone and new voice lines, to even redrawing all character illustrations from scratch. They didn’t cut any corners. However, as one could expect from such huge undertakings, the project comes with its own issues since Persona 4 had more scenes and events than its predecessor. Yet among all those parts, one surprisingly specific problem sparked a debate within the team: Chie’s thighs.

“For [Chie’s] CG model, to make the kung-fu-style motion look dynamic we made it with a certain ‘thickness,’ but for the illustrations she was drawn with a ‘slenderness’ faithful to the original character design art, so there’s a gap between the two depictions,” explained Persona 4 Revival Director Daisuke Yajima. Thankfully, the Great Chie Thigh Crisis didn’t bring development grinding to a halt for too long.

“In the end, we somehow found a compromise, but regarding the bust-up illustrations […] each responsible staff member’s fixation on getting things right never stopped,” with Yajima adding that those fixations extended to minute details. Such as some thought that the original portraits made the Investigation Team look too young, while others also debated whether more ‘anime-style coloring’ would better capture the look of the original release. The team continued polishing event scenes all the way into the later stages of development.

That attention to detail isn’t limited to character art, either. Despite the series already having a strong visual identity, producer Kazuhisa Wada admitted that the team repeatedly reworked Persona 4 Revival‘s UI. They obsessed over everything from the Protagonist’s pose and camera angle to his moving hair and uniform, even agonizing over making just one lens of his glasses semi-transparent. “Yajima and the staff responsible for the UI went through endless trial and error, and since it took so long for it to come to me for review (laughs), I eventually joined in to help finalize it together,” revealed Wada.

This isn’t exactly new for P-Studio, however. In previous interviews, the developer has explained that UI now gets substantial development resources because stylish menus have become part of Persona‘s ‘selling point.’ And with every new entry, fans expected slick visuals when they scroll through skills, items, and Personas while still maintaining a personality of its own.