Persona 4’s Homage To South Park

By Spencer . November 28, 2008 . 3:02pm

You meet all kinds of comical teachers in Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4, but Mr. Hosoi is the most memorable. He lectures players on Japanese literature with a hand puppet sort of like early Mr. Garrison. I can’t say for sure if Mr. Hosoi was directly inspired by the South Park character, but the localization team at Atlus USA gave another nod to South Park by having Mr. Hosoi say Mr. Mackey’s catch phrase “mmmkay”. I don’t remember South Park ever being a hit Japan so Mr. Hosoi an unusual and interesting addition for Persona 4 considering the game was developed in Japan.

Images courtesy of Atlus.

TAGS: Atlus, Persona 4, Playstation 2, Shin Megami Tensei, South Park

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Nich

The other Japanese homage to South Park I can think of is a few snippets of Episode 5 of FLCL, where Amarao is having his hair dyed. A couple random shots are in the same construction-paper style and look at South Park.

CRIMExTHINK

Yes! I remember that part in FLCL. That anime was amazing.

matty

South Park might not be a sensation in Japan, but it does have a cult fallowing. I see a lot of fanart of the side characters and even seen a few cosplay as them over the years.

South Park itself has a lot Japanese culture references (Chinpokomon, dog commiting sepaku, etc.). Trey Parker himself studied Japanese.

Volcynika

All I can say is wow.

aj

It's good that I know about this in advance. I'd probably just turn my PS2 off and never play the game again if I caught "mmkay" without any warning in advance.

ryne11

Now if only we could get a ManbearPig Persona

ryne11

BY the way, does Mr. Hosoi have a confirmed voice actor? It would be cool if they had Trey Parker voice him. That would never happen though

GamerKT

Tha's awesome, lol.

Chow

I think the last ending credits to Get Backers may have been a homage to South Park as well. The way they made the characters look during it just screamed South Park.