While Persona 4: Reloaded stays highly faithful to the original overall, developer Atlus has decided to make one major adjustment to this classic RPG: a complete overhaul of the English voice cast. What lies behind this decision? Series producer Kazuhisa Wada explained that it was essentially a dilemma of “either get everyone together or recast the entire lineup.”
“The English voice recording for the original game took place a very long time ago,” Kazuhisa Wada stated through an interpreter in an interview with GamesRadar+ at Gamescom 2026.
For instance, Yosuke Hanamura was voiced by Yuri Lowenthal in the 2008 original—he is now best known for his role as the protagonist in the Marvel's Spider-Man series. Kanji Tatsumi was voiced by Troy Baker, who has since lent his voice to protagonists in major titles such as The Last of Us and Bethesda's Indiana Jones games. Rise Kujikawa was voiced by Laura Bailey, whose extensive list of game credits is too numerous to mention.
“So we realized that assembling the full original cast was simply impossible,” Kazuhisa Wada explained. “We discussed it and said, ‘Alright, it looks like we need to start from scratch. Let’s build a brand-new voice team and do our best to make it great.’”
This decision also stemmed from the Atlus development team's “respect for the work of the original voice actors.” After all, bringing back only some of the original voices while mixing them with new ones might not yield ideal results. “Too many actors were unreachable, and coordinating schedules for others proved extremely difficult. In the end, we thought, ‘Forget it, let’s just restart Everythinggj.’”
At least one voice actor from Persona 4 Golden expressed “deep regret” at being unable to participate in next year's remake.