While we’re talking about Persona, I thought I’d share something that I haven’t noticed until recently. This is regarding the enhanced port of Revelations: Persona for the PSP (under the name Shin Megami Tensei: Persona). I looked around to see if anyone else has reported on this, but it seems to have gone over everyone’s head. If you look at the image above, you’ll see that my play time so far is 276 hrs, 37 mins. To some, this may look par for the course for a Persona game, let alone a MegaTen game. Except I don’t think that’s the case. I’m up to Deva Yuga, and so far it didn’t feel like I invested over 200 hours into the game. Then it hit me: The game counts the time you put the PSP system into Sleep Mode!

I tested it out to see if the game doesn’t read the time right by letting it sleep for three minutes. Normally, the time counter should stop. Upon waking the PSP, lo and behold, three minutes were counted. Now when I play a game on the PSP, I don’t really quit the game. I just put the PSP into sleep mode to tackle it later. I do this a lot, sometimes leaving on sleep mode for days. So the game was counting many 24 hours bursts when I wasn’t playing it at all. So I thought I’d try this on another Persona game, Persona 3 Portable. I let it sleep for 5 minutes. And with that one, the time did stop (and my final time on that was 111hrs). Even for non-Persona games, like Dissidia Duodecim: Final Fantasy, the time counter did stop when it was in sleep mode. Granted, something like Play Time is not really big; just a statistic to show your fellow gamers how much free time you have. But to those brave enough to suffer (yes, suffer) through Persona 1, it might look like you have too much free time.

If you too have noticed this or know if Atlus has this as a feature (instead of a bug), comment below. It’s already been two years since this port was released (so no patching), but just thought I’d let you guys know.