BEGIN DANTIS' P4D THOUGHTS.
First of all, there seems to be a lot of confusion about when the game takes place. P4D was announced to take place six months after the P4 incident, putting it in September 2012 (As an aside, I think September is probably around when the game was originally intended to be released). The epilogue has to be before this, because (aside from the date slider fading out in July), they make reference to the epilogue being the first time that they've met up since the incident in May. Even if we assume that this is because P4D wasn't planned at this point, it's still relevant because there's no way the P4 crew are only meeting up once per year.
Secondly, the developers. DINGO aren't credited, Wada is now the director and the producer and Koduka is now the composer. Meguro would have likely only contributed a small amount of new music, but even so, it's still a disappointment, particularly considering my dislike of Koduka's music. Hashino not being the producer is kind of a wild card in that we don't know how it will go. There's never been an original Persona game since P3 that he hasn't worked on. It could be disaster or it could be fine. I also have a feeling that he'll be involved to some degree, because he has a funny habit of showing up in credits lists for Atlus games (Like Radiant Historia, for example). DINGO's departure concerns me though, because their presence was almost a seal of quality, similarly to how you knew that Arena would be a mechanically sound fighter because Arc were behind it. P-Studio have never made a dancing game.
Now then, here's where things get somewhat interesting. Here's a comparison between the old and new trailer:
There's a lot of differences in how it looks, and it carries throughout the trailer. I'm pretty sure that Narukami's and Rise's models have been either redone completely or heavily modified, the lighting engine looks completely different and the animation style is also different. There's a much heavier emphasis on facial expressions and everything isn't animated as smoothly as it was before (I like the new look a lot more, the faces are great).
But that's not the really interesting bit. The really interesting bit is what's there that isn't different. Which is... kind of everything. Everything in this trailer was announced or shown back in November. They're on the original trailer's stage, featuring all the original trailer's announced characters and a song announced in the original trailer...
On top of that, the game actually shows less gameplay than the first trailer. The original trailer showed footage of Pursuing My True Self, where this was all just promo stuff, with no in-game to speak of.
This is complete speculation, but I think either a) nothing has been done on the game for quite some time or b) Atlus has restarted the game from scratch, and has only just reached the point that they were at last year with DINGO. Whichever, I am fairly confident that development was at the very least stalled and only just restarted. Wada has been working on Ultimax, so presumably P4D only restarted once work on Ultimax was (at least mostly) completed.
