Catherine celebrated its 15-year anniversary on July 26, 2026. Below, we examine how this game was an early, if awkward, pioneer in trans representation in video games.
When Catherine released in 2011 it was a step outside of the box for developer Atlus. The RPG powerhouse team wasn’t as popular as it is today, and while it had built up a solid reputation from developing the Shin Megami Tensei and Persona series, Atlus had yet to quite break through into mainstream gaming. When the team decided to develop Catherine, it did so with the mindset of exploring more adult themes and identities. Chief among them was one of gaming’s few examples of trans representation. Though the intention of this character was well meaning, cultural divides caused a bit of controversy in the West.
After the long development of Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4, the team decided to branch out into a wildly unexpected direction for its next title. The project would reunite Persona series director and producer Katsura Hashino, character designer Shigenori Soejima, and composer Shoji Meguro, and take them into an entirely new genre of game that allowed for more mature storytelling.
Catherine tells the story of a man named Vincent. Vincent lives a happy life as a bachelor. He has a one-bedroom apartment, goes out drinking with his close friends nearly every night, and has a beautiful girlfriend named Katherine that he’s lagging on marrying. But his life gets upended when he meets the beautiful Catherine, a woman who is temptation made flesh. Soon after their encounter, he is haunted by nightmares every night in his sleep.
The gameplay takes the form of controlling Vincent in his day-to-day life, making decisions in his relationships. This feels like a natural progression of Persona’s school and social systems. But the real bulk of the gameplay happens when Vincent goes to sleep and he’s besieged by nightmares that force him to climb an ever-falling tower of blocks in a puzzle-game fashion. It’s a great inverse of the Persona series–in that series, the gameplay ends at night, and in this one, that’s when the bulk of the gameplay begins.
Breaking away from the high school setting of the Persona series allowed the team to tackle more mature themes of infidelity, alcoholism, marriage, and adulthood. It also allowed the team to depict characters that you wouldn’t typically see in a high-school-set game such as Persona.
Vincent goes to the bar each night to drink with his friends and decompress after the nightmare from the previous night. This allows players to progress the story and get some opinions from his friends that they can use to influence their future choices, or just get drunk and listen to some good music on the in-game jukebox.
One of the characters at the bar is a waitress named Erica. Featuring a very feminine design, she acts as the one female voice in the game that remains a neutral point to Vincent’s problems, often lending an ear to him and his friends in a flirty manner and providing a point of respite in an emotionally draining situation. Yet the game hints at her harboring a secret–something that was taboo in video games at the time.
Erica is transgender.
The game doesn’t go about this reveal in a tactful manner, though. Over the course of the game, Vincent’s friends begin having the same nightmares as he does. Erica chalks it up to a woman’s wrath curse, but when she strikes up a romantic relationship with Vincent’s friend Toby, she begins to have the same nightmares: nightmares that only men have. In addition to this clue, there’s subtle hints dropped throughout the game, but the reveal doesn’t fully happen until the “Katherine True” ending of the game. In this ending of the game, Toby discovers Erica’s true past and the game even refers to her as her deadname (her former name).
This portrayal is problematic for a myriad of reasons to Western culture, but is exemplified in the “Full Body” version of the game, which features a detransitioned Erica in flashbacks and in one of the endings of the game.
While Catherine doesn’t attempt to portray Erica in a malicious manner, the cultural divide between Eastern and Western cultures and their acceptance of trans people is on full display. Japanese culture views gender and sexuality through a wide and varied spectrum that results in various forms of gender expression. For example, in the West when someone is transgender, it is socially expected of them to go through medical and physical transition in order to “pass” through society. Sure, drag subculture is a thing for non-trans people to gender-express, but this isn’t always tied to personal identity.
This is not the case in Japan, as gender expression often results in crossdressing communities or those who do not decide to medically or physically transition. To them, dressing and presenting as female will suffice. In fact, this could be a result of a law passed in 2003 that will allow a trans person to get a legal gender change only if they pass the hurdles of being unmarried, over the age of 22, undergo gender-reassignment surgery, and have no minor children. One cannot even have gender reassignment surgery if they’re on hormone replacement therapy.
This results in Japan’s transgender subculture being more fluid. Perhaps that’s why Erica’s portrayal in Catherine relates so much to her past and not who she is in the moment. While she’s accepted by those around her, in-game it comes with a caveat. In Western culture, perhaps she would be portrayed as her true self with no regard to her past and only looking to the future.
That’s what makes Catherine such a complex game. It’s a game that tackles adult themes and issues but never makes light of them. It’s a look into Japanese social culture and how it differs from the West. It’s a game that’s well meaning and never feels malicious despite arguably problematic elements, and it allowed Atlus to venture into uncharted territory.
