Atlus (アトラス)

Atlus long occupied an uncomfortable place: the studio whose games were too dark, too Japanese and too long to export. Its parent series, Shin Megami Tensei, blends comparative demonology, urban post-apocalypse and moral choices with no right answer.

Persona, its offshoot, broke the lock in 2016 with a fifth instalment whose interface, jazz and high-school setting won over an audience that had never touched a Japanese RPG. Bought by Sega in 2013, the studio has become one of the few to impose an art direction recognisable from the first screen — to the point that its menus are studied as design objects.