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"Yosuke's Eye" is an urban legend revolving around the 2008 role-playing game Persona 4.

Description

Soon after the original game's release, numerous players began noticing a strange, animated eye-shaped symbol shrouded in a translucent purple with light blue squares coming out of it as it blinks appearing on certain Personas’ status screens, first and most commonly being reported to be found on the Susano-o, Ultimate Persona belonging to the party member Yosuke Hanamura. Potential explanations began sprouting like wildfire, ranging from potential foreshadowing of an upcoming sequel to being an indicator that the Persona’s stats are not completely maxxed or the eye simply being a glitch.

The eye typically first appears after Yosuke's Social Link is maxxed. However, not all players are guaranteed to encounter the eye. Some have claimed that players must max out a character's social link on that character's canonical birthday, but this claim was disproven. Because the eye isn't present in the game’s updated version, Persona 4 Golden, the eye was dismissed by many as a glitch.

Eventually, an anonymous person who claimed to have has direct involvement in the game's development stepped forward and claimed that the eye was indeed a bug that wasn't properly removed from the non-Japanese versions of the game. There is evidence that the eye can still appear in the Japanese version of Persona 4 as the oldest GameFAQS post regarding the eye does predate the US version’s release date, so the anonymous individual may have meant that it was a known bug found in the Japanese version of the game that wasn’t dealt with for international releases. However, the eye has never been specified to have been found in PAL versions of the game, which released in 2009, a year after every other release and many reports of the eye being seen in already-released versions of the game.

Although the symbolism of an eye’s relevance to the Persona series (due to its themes of awakening and cognition) and especially Persona 4 (due to its themes of truth and one of the bosses being a humongous eye), the eye in this glitch is visually distinct from anything else in both the game and the series as a whole, suggesting that the eye is an old asset meant to be unused and it may have even been intended to be the indicator of a game mechanic revolving your party members’ Personas, hence where it is found in the game (said mechanic may have been similar to the Heart Items in Persona 3 which also display an out of place icon in the status screens of certain Personas used by the protagonist).

The graphics for the eye are called "awakening eye" in the game’s files and although most people assume that it can only happen with Yosuke, there is video evidence of the eye appearing on the status screen of Chie's Ultimate Persona, Suzuka Gongen, and people have additionally claimed to see the eye on status screens of Kanji and Naoto's Personas, meaning that the eye may be able to appear on any party members’ (Ultimate?) Persona. It is unknown what causes the glitch, as nobody has been able to find a way to guarantee the appearance of the eye and it seems to be random.

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