Persona 4 Revival producer and Persona series veteran Kazuhisa Wada hears your cries for a romanceable Yosuke, but says Atlus cannot answer them.
Speaking with GamesRadar+ at Gamescom 2026, Wada responds to mounting hopes for Persona 4 Revival to introduce gay romance options and, in particular, flesh out an unused relationship with Yosuke that fans dug out of the original Persona 4 game files.
“I was aware that some people were talking online about, like, ‘Oh, Yosuke,’ and they were kind of hoping for that,” Wada says via interpreter. “But we were thinking, if we did Yosuke, we kind of would have to do all the other male characters as well. And if we did that, that is a lot of work. So we were thinking about our time and schedule. I don’t know if we could actually handle this, so we decided to let Yosuke float on by.”
It goes without saying that a non-trivial number of Persona fans would love nothing more than for everyone to get the same treatment.
This may sound familiar to longtime Persona fans. Wada has apologized multiple times for a similar situation with Persona 3 Reload, which did not bring back Kotone, the female protagonist of Persona 3 Portable, to the disappointment of some fans. He offered similar reasoning in 2024: it would be too expensive.
Fortunately, devoted fans took it upon themselves to add Kotone into Persona 3 Reload themselves, even redoing every animated cutscene.
Persona 4 Revival does give Yosuke some special attention in other areas. A few of his scenes and lines were revised to be, as Wada put it, “a little bit more fitting for the world we live in now.” A notorious homophobic comment to Denji is the clearest example.
Earlier this month, Wada argued that “we have to do” Persona 1 and 2 Remakes at some point, sparking hopes that the forgotten entries in what’s now Atlus’ biggest JRPG series will be revisited at some point.