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 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.
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.
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