The original Persona 4 is my favorite video game. When I refer to it as I did in my review here, I am not exaggerating or over-simplifying - that's really my understanding of the game, at least as it applies to me. I played it at a time of my life when I most needed it, it taught me a lot of important life lessons, it expanded my worldview, and it continues to inspire me to be a better person to this day. Frankly, I don't expect that I'll ever connect with another game as intensely as I did Persona 4 (and that's okay). By way of example: I am neither someone who frequently plays long games, nor someone to frequently replay games without a good reason to do so. Yet as of this writing, I have played through the original Persona 4 three times in full, with a fourth run in-progress (and several abandoned partial attempts over the years - though I waited a good decade before this current one. Persona 4 is a sometimes food).

...I don't love Persona 4 Golden as much. I still love it to an obsessive degree, like, you have no idea. Golden didn't stop being Persona 4, after all, and silly as it sounds, I still tear up every time I watch that "Shadow World" opening. But there are a few changes that I think muddy the specific tonality I cherish from the original, and while I totally get it if this is someone's preferred version, it isn't mine. This write-up more than any other is going to get pretty nitpicky, so bear with me.

(Hey, that's not a bad joke! Hee hee.)

Good stuff first, though. There is a ton of bonus content through the "TV Listings", enough so that the game feels like a Special Edition DVD. A bonus extra-canonical quiz show, trailers for related media released around the same time as Golden, concert clips, concept art galleries with commentary, interviews with the voice actors (in the original Japanese release), educational segments explaining some of the game's theming... this is super rad stuff to have access to. Honestly, I think this sort of thing does wonders to justify the existence of an updated rerelease. If a game ends up being a megaton hit, enough so to warrant a port a couple years later, this is a shining example of what the creators should reach for. From a collector's standpoint, worth the price of admission alone.

This is without getting into the actual gameplay adjustments. I generally find that the game has been made to be a lot more user-friendly, and while I'll explain where I'm not so fond of that in a bit, I do appreciate things like making it so the player can assign inherited skills during Fusion. I didn't have access to this in the Vita release, but I really appreciate the Steam and subsequent ports' modular difficulty settings. I don't think it's something the game needed, strictly speaking, but I've also played this story four times in full and can claim no objectivity whatsoever. Vox Populi is a neat feature, one I appreciate was rolled into Persona 5, and SOS (while minor) is kind of a nice effect, too. There's also a general attempt to give party members more to do in combat, and while I don't get all of it (Bike Skills feel a bit silly, like, what is it about riding a bicycle that gives Kanji the ability to cast healing magic), stuff like the Tag Team attacks, additional S-Link skills, Cavalry Attacks, and Rise being able to contribute to All-Out Attacks is nice. Also - additional Personas are always a treat, and I appreciate that access to elements has been rebalanced so the player has access to Hama and Mudo through Chie and Yukiko; always felt like Light/Dark's distribution felt too limited for how prevalent it's meant to be in SMT games.

We got two new Social Links, too! Marie is kind of a love-her-or-leave-her character, but I like her myself. I think my buddy Gooms puts it best - that she feels superfluous to the adventure is sort of the point, like her very existence is a meta commentary on updated rerelease extras. Anywho, she leads to a lot of fun moments, like the discovery that Chie is inherently incapable of not-wearing green. And I like the tsundere poet angle, sue me. Meanwhile Adachi getting an S-Link feels like the game patching a conspicuous omission in the first release, given how often the player interacts with him throughout. Of the two, Achy-baby's S-Link is way more interesting for obvious reasons, though I do think the bonus dungeon tied to Marie's S-Link is pretty neat. I appreciate that Hollow Forest is designed around its gimmick rather than a specific level curve - means that it slots neatly between the last two dungeons of the original game.

The other most obvious thing to this game's release is the change in voice actors, with Tracey Rooney being replaced with Erin Fitzgerald for Chie and Dave Wittenberg being replaced with Sam Riegel for Teddie (among a few other smaller roles). I do personally prefer Rooney and Wittenberg respectively, mostly since their takes are the ones with which I'm most familiar, but Fitzgerald and Riegel do great jobs themselves. I think for Chie, it comes down to whether your preferred take on Chie is warm and understated (Rooney) or spunky and in-your-face (Fitzgerald). Teddie meanwhile feels like an extremely natural character for Sam Riegel to play, like I listen to Critical Role and think, "Oh, no, Sam Riegel just is Teddie" - but at the same time, there's a tiny bit of nuance to Wittenberg's performance, a little bit of melancholy he gives to this dopey bear, that I don't feel with Riegel's performance.

I suppose I'll need to get into theming and criticism of Persona 4 Golden's changes to explain what I mean. The easiest way to approach it is probably to explain that I've never shared the common objections to Teddie as a character. I generally make a point not to seek out Persona 4 discourse (*ahem*), but if I have the right of what I've seen - Teddie is an annoying little weirdo who is abruptly and randomly pervy and just doesn't know when to shut up and go away. I've never quite agreed with this take on the character, because my headcanon has always been that Teddie doesn't actually understand any of what he's saying. Teddie is someone who gloms onto sexual things like Yukiko's "scoring" line, Kanji's undetermined orientation, and the girls' measurements because he finds people's responses and discomfort funny, not because he's someone who actually gets anything out of it. I didn't know the word "asexual" when I first played the game, but that was probably how I understood him, and I still think that take generally holds.

I think part of why I came away with this perspective on the character is because I connected with him through Dave Wittenberg's performance. Like I said, the overriding emotion I get from Wittenberg's Teddie is quiet fatalistic melancholy. Like you hear it a lot more early on - when Teddie makes jokes, there's a sense that he's trying to crack through his own miserable veneer. As he starts to make connections with the Investigation Team, he starts to grow more confident and bold with his completely ridiculous comedic offers. Shadow Teddie is so striking because it's unexpected in the moment, but an examination of Teddie as a character makes its development obvious: Teddie learned to project an identity, and when confronted with the reality Rise needed to accept ("There is no real me"), the idea was so abhorrently accurate to Teddie that he couldn't accept that about himself. These are the sorts of things that I can easily believe through Wittenberg's take. Because the overriding emotion I get from Riegel's Teddie is him as a comedic goofball, I think the character becomes funnier, and I think the range Riegel shows as Shadow Teddie is a lot more striking, but there's less of a sense of Teddie pretending he's more than just empty inside.

Hanako is another character that comes to mind, where the criticism of her in popular discourse feels like a consequence of people knowing the character through Persona 4 Golden. Hanako is not a complicated character - she's an overweight classmate who acts like a belligerent boor in the few interactions she has with the party; an extremely minor antagonist in some of the game's silliest scenes. I've read that it seems hypocritical, to have a game themed entirely about self-acceptance and self-actualization where one of the characters is just a fat joke, but I don't think that applies to the original game. The joke of her is that she has no self-awareness whatsoever; her being chunky is less the punchline and more visual shorthand for the type of person she is (saying this as someone who's overweight himself). Where it DOES apply is in Persona 4 Golden, which gives her two extra scenes. In the first, she attempts to mount Yosuke's brand new scooter, and like a Vogon mounting a gazelle-thing, her fat ass snaps the thing in two. In the second, she comes onto Teddie and squishes him off-screen like a pancake, with her general rotundity. NOW she has become fat joke, the destroyer of good form.

I think a lot of the incidental scenes added throughout the game outside the new S-Link stuff do more harm than good. Like, there's that scene of the party putting on a concert at Junes. Don't get me wrong - it's cute! I love spending more downtime with the cast, and it's a fun way to incorporate "True Story" from the anime into the game. But! The scene makes a point to highlight Namatame watchin' from the shadows, and the revised dialogue with him after avoiding the Bad Endings makes it clear that this was ultimately the purpose of the scene: to expand upon Namatame's muddled role as the kidnapper and red herring. I suppose this is fair, but I also think it makes the reveal too obvious. Like, even with Adachi's true nature made obvious through spin-off material, the surprise reveal of Namatame as the kidnapper remains a strong twist in the original, since it's only subtly foreshadowed. Having Namatame actually show up in a scene, and having the game be all like "ooooo what's with thiiiiis guyyyyyy" sorta spoils that.

...also, did Golden really need to add a second Hot Springs scene? Marie just straight up having magic lightning powers in the mundane world feels like it breaks some rules, though hell if I know what exactly.

Since I mentioned gameplay adjustments before, I do find that there are a few points where the difficulty has been too flattened. Shadow Yukiko has been made considerably easier with her new Ice weakness, on which I'm sorta of two minds. On one hand, she's the first end-of-dungeon boss, so the player should probably be afforded some clemency; anyway, she's not a complete gimme and still keeps the player on their toes. On the other hand, I've always been fond of just how thoroughly Shadow Yukes bodies an unprepared player. I love the harsh difficulty spike! Really forces the player to make sure they understand the game's disparate systems, how combat can be extremely challenging in spite of how straightforward it is. Shadow Yukiko is the main place this manifests, since the game catches up with itself around Shadow Kanji, but a downstream effect happens with the final boss. Because there's now an extra dungeon's worth of leveling wedged in before the final dungeon, and because the final bosses' stats go unchanged, an only-kinda-challenging final boss has turned into more or less a complete stomp in the player's favor. Still mechanically and thematically compelling, but you spend way less time with it this go-around, and that's a bummer.

You can also kinda tell that the game's not balanced around some of the new side events you can do. I love being able to explore at night, but because the game wasn't designed around all that extra S-Linking time, it's generally less important for the player to make difficult choices in terms of who they're spending time with and when. Also, being able to grow veggies is a cute side activity, but hot hell on the Chesapeake Turnpike, was the game not designed to handle the player being able to have a replenishible stock of SP-recovery items, particularly Bead Melons! Yeah, I know they take a while to grow and you only get one at a time; doesn't matter! SP management is such a fundamental part to pacing out dungeon exploration that having easy access to anything that completely restores SP, even just the player's SP, is like getting a full 'nother day of dungeon-crawling for free. This sort-of becomes a slippery slope that goes on to inform decisions made with Persona 5's difficulty scaling, which I'll eventually get into in its own write-up, but the skinny is that this is where the Persona series went from "unapologetically difficult" on Normal to "not-braindead" on Normal.

...like I said at the top, this is ultimately pretty nitpicky. The intent is clearly that this is offset by extra higher difficulties, especially the modular difficulty options introduced in the Steam release. Now, I am someone who generally goes for as "Normal" a difficulty as I can, out of the idea that that represents the dev-intended challenge, so these changes tripped me up as being strikingly different from the dev-intended challenge of the original. But it does make it more accessible to more people, and that's ultimately the thing I care about more, so... I guess I can't grouse too much.

That's really my takeaway for Persona 4 Golden as a whole: the most important thing to me is that any version of the game exists for people to experience. Persona 4 is the game that changed my life for the better, and I want people to have the ability to experience that. Yeah, that's not gonna happen for everyone, and that's okay, too. Even if it just exists in a capacity where folks who connected with Persona 5 can see how we got there, I think that's fine as well. If Persona 4 Golden must be the means by which we get there? Well, hell, it's still a good version of an absolutely incredible game. By all means, go for it.