Cut in is a stylish animation technique used to depict character's portrait in Japanese animes and video games. It is usually presented with a sudden overlapping of the thin stripe of close-up of character's eyes over the screen to create a tense or climatic effect, used when summoning the Persona the first time or to deal Critical or elemental weakness-exploiting damage. Another type of cut-in is by arranging the characters' bust portraits stylishly all over the screen to depict the preparation of All-Out Attack (Persona 3 onwards) or Fusion Spells (Persona 2 duology remakes).
In the Japanese version, the cut-in for critical damage has the onomatopoeia, "(カッ, Ka-!)?" in P3 and P4 and "(ブチッ, Buchi-!)?" in P5, to express the sound effect of the cut-in sequence. It is replaced by a double exclamation mark (!!) in the oversea releases.
In Persona 5 Royal, all of the cut-in illustrations available can be viewed in Thieves Den. Also, the Persona 3 and Persona 4 protagonists have a slightly modified version of their cut-ins from the original games, in which the sound effect expression is styled after Persona 5. The protagonist also has a special cut-in with a unique expression in both the darts and batting cage mini-games, in which the dart hits the Triple 20 mark with the 3rd dart in Darts, and hitting a Home Run in Batting Cage.
In Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth, the cut-in style is styled after Persona 5, but the sound effect expression style is the same for all 3 respective games.
Although it was not Atlus who invented the cut-in effect, it successfully defines the style of the Persona spin-off series and derives some fair amount of fan-made tribute works or parodies of the cut-in artworks, of either media related to Megami Tensei series or not.
Cut-ins are also used in various games that have been collaborated with the Persona series. For example, in Phantasy Star Online 2, the sound effect expressions for all 3 games are used in Persona summoning emotes (Lobby Actions in the Japanese version), in which only shows the Japanese expression upon summoning, in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Joker's cut-in when summoning Arsène has a slightly modified version of his cut-in in all languages, except Japanese, where the double exclamation mark is styled after the original Japanese sound effect expression, in Granblue Fantasy, Ren's cut-in picture is styled after that said game's art design and in Kyoutou Kotaba RPG: Kotadaman, all cut-ins for the characters in all 3 games use their character animations in the cut-ins instead of their cut-in pictures.
