This week's issue of Famitsu continues to tease inform eager Persona fans. It appears some more of P4's features will be brought over and, the latest blog entry features the concept art for the Heroine by character designer Shigenori Soejima.

• Hero can't choose who appears in the Velvet Room but when playing as the Heroine, the player can choose either the new male assistant "Theodore" (voiced by Junichi Suwabe, Archer from Fate/Stay Night) or the original Elizabeth that appears in the Velvet Room. Yet another name taken from Frankenstein movies I presume as noted in the fanbook about Igor and Elizabeth's name - In this case, it should be taken after "Dr. Theodore Bohmer".
• Change party member's equipment from the status screen instead of talking to them. Also set their battle pattern.
• Skill cards are born from Personas that reach a certain level and allows their skills to be inherited by another.
• "Follow Up" attack with another party member if there are good Social Links which will always knocks the target enemy down.
• Items can be used to perform a "Mixed Raid" attack by two Personas.
• "Missing Persons Quest" available from the Velvet Room.

And judging from the screenshots...

• Amada Ken and Junpei's Social Links seem to become available when playing as the Heroine.
• When the protagonist first summons his Persona at the dorm, the scene is presented in a battle instead of the original Anime cutscene.
• New Personas from P4 such as the Neko Shogun.
• Two more Social Link battle skills from P4 - Cover and Endure.
• "Standby" is replaced by P4's "Guard" command.

Thoughts

This is pure speculation but it's looking like some of the Anime cutscenes and all the in-game cutscenes will be gone judging from these new screenshots and the video clips we've seen so far. Probably partly because you can no longer run around in the 3D environments while moving between maps during the life sim part of the game.  Some of the scenarios just won't feel the same just reading through text...

So half the game's going to be like a visual novel or, more or less like Trauma Centre with only the action parts of the game in 3D.

I'm also wondering why they decided to make finding Fuka a quest and reward the player for accomplishing it... Are they going to make her an optional party member or something?

In any case, not really liking changes in presentation but, I guess they have to cut things out to save space when the UMD format can only store less than half (1.8GB) that of a single layer DVD (4.3GB). It's kind of making me re-consider getting this when there's no collector's version revealed yet.

On the other hand, I do like having portable versions of my favourite games that I can play anytime anywhere. I just hope they don't release a P3P FES or P4P version later, though.