Katsura Hashino, the director behind the Persona series, spoke with Famitsu in a recent interview about the upcoming 3DS dungoen crawler, Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth, which will be coming out June 5th of next year in Japan. According to Hashino:

This will be the first title the Persona team will be making for Nintendo 3DS, and we also have Etrian Odyssey that represents Atlus for the 3DS, and we’ll be using its system as part of a "festive" collaboration mindset in the development for Persona Q.

He them went on to explain the idea behind Persona Q, as well as why it shares gameplay mechanics with Etrian Odyssey:

While we are implementing Etrian Odyssey’s system into it, just as the name implies, Persona Q will be a completely new title, but first and foremost, it’ll be for the fans of the Persona series. However, since next year will be the 25th anniversary of the Atlus brand, we’d also like to use this opportunity to spread the essence from other titles apart from the Persona titles.

He later on stated that the reason for the cutesy artstyle was because it is unique to the Persona series.