Atlus comments on the omission of Japanese voice acting in Catherine and difficulty changes.

Aram Jabbari, the Manager of Public Relations for Atlus mentioned that even though that they wanted to have Japanese voice acting along with English voice acting in Catherine, it simply wasn’t possible. In the comments section of the Playstation blog, Jabbari had said “There is no Japanese audio, only English. We really, truly try to explore this option wherever possible. It just wasn’t something we could do for Catherine.”

He also said that those who must have it are better off importing the game, as the game and the PS3 are not region locked. However this would mean you would need to be able to read and understand Japanese, which is a bit of a hurdle in itself.

When responding to a comment on the demo, Jabbari said that the demo was around 45 minutes long on average (including cut scenes), saying “The demo is essentially content identical to the Japanese demo (apart from the whole language thing). We found that folks took, on average, about 45 minutes to finish the demo (assuming they didn’t skip any of the cutscenes), hence that estimate. Veteran gamers will get through faster, however.”

He also said that like most Atlus games, Catherine might not be for everyone, and this is a true statement. They cater to some rather niche audiences, such as the dungeon crawling audience with games like Etrian Odyssey and dating sim fans with Persona 3 and 4. It was also mentioned that the game’s difficulty was quite high, which by this point is to be expected from Atlus games from my experience.

I’m a bit disappointed that they couldn’t have a Japanese audio track since I’m a bit of a weeaboo in that aspect. Regardless, once I get myself a PS3 of my own this will be at the top of my list.

In an unrelated tidbit, Persona 2: Innocent Sin will be coming to stores and the Playstation Network sometime this year.