While Persona 4 Revival is sticking to the original game pretty closely, developer Atlus has decided to make one fairly big change to the classic by replacing its entire English voice cast. Why? Series producer Kazuhisa Wada tells us it was kind of an all-or-nothing situation.
“The original game was originally recorded for the English cast, specifically, a long, long time ago,” Wada tells GamesRadar+ in an interview from Gamescom 2026, per a translator. A decade-plus gap means some of the OG actors “are no longer in the industry” at all, while some of them are now popular enough that it’s “really hard to lock down” their schedules.
For example, in 2008, Yosuke was voiced by Yuri Lowenthal – an actor most commonly recognized nowadays as the lead hero in the Marvel’s Spider-Man games. Kanji’s voice actor was none other than Troy Baker, who has since been in lead roles in everything from The Last of Us to Bethesda’s Indiana Jones game. And Rise was voiced by Laura Bailey, whose gameography is too wide to even begin listing.
“So we realized we can’t re-gather that whole cast,” Wada explains. “So we’re like, ‘OK, I guess we have to kind of once again roll up our sleeves. Alright, let’s start over. Let’s get a whole new cast in and let’s do our best.'”
Part of the decision came from Atlus developers having respect for “the work that the original cast did.” Having a fraction of the original cast side-by-side with a few new voices might not have been ideal either, after all. “There was quite a few people who we weren’t able to get and a number of people… we had so much trouble getting that was like, ‘OK, maybe we should just start over.'”
At least one Persona 4 Golden actor was “deeply grieving” being react in next year’s remake.