Commenti:
- Storia molto buona, ma con ritmo altalenante
- Personaggi principali scritti benissimo
- Gameplay ripetitivo fino alla nausea
- Averlo giocato dopo P5 non ha aiutato nell'apprezzarlo fino in fondo.

Persona 4 Golden
Developed by: Atlus
Published by: Atlus USA

Where to start with Persona 4 Golden? Well, let’s start with the story. In Persona 4 Golden the player controls a transfer student who moves to a rural town known as Inaba for a year while his parents have gone overseas to work. The transfer student moves in with his uncle and his young daughter and early on during his stay in Inaba learns about an urban legend by the name of the “Midnight Channel.” The legend goes, if you stand in front of a television that’s turned off at midnight, on a rainy night, the image of your soul mate will appear on the screen. The transfer student quickly learns that isn’t exactly true. Instead of your soulmate appearing on the screen, the Midnight channel displays someone that will turn up dead. The transfer student discovers they can enter the television through the screen and in doing so can save potential murder victims. The story of Persona 4 is complex is extremely engaging.

Let’s move on to the graphics. While this game is over a decade old the anime like cutscenes, and visual novel style of game play graphics hold up extremely well. If you play Persona 4 Golden after Persona 5 Royal the graphics will be a bit jarring at first but if you’re like me you’ll become so utterly engaged in the story that you’ll quickly get used to the graphics and appreciate the visual style of the game for what it is.

When it comes to the sound, like Persona 5 Royal, Persona 4 Golden has an INCREDIBLE soundtrack. The sound effects, and overall sound design is on point.

On to the gameplay. Like in Persona 5 Royal, 4 Golden is split into two parts. There’s the “everyday life” aspect of the game and the “Midnight Channel” or simply put TV world part of the game. In the everyday life aspect of Persona 4 Golden, the player will attend school, spend time with friends, read books, fish, or work at various jobs to make money. On to the TV world part of the game. When the player enters the TV world they will enter different style of dungeons that are procedurally generated to rescue other students that upon rescuing can be recruited to join the players cause. Inside the dungeons the player will encounter “shadows” which are enemies on the floor. If the player hits a shadow they will begin a battle and have advantage to strike first, but if the shadow runs into the player a battle will begin but the shadow will have the advantage. Shadows are completely avoidable but avoiding them is not something I would suggest as the experience gained from fighting shadows is highly valuable. On your first run through a dungeon I’d highly recommend fighting every shadow in order to gain experience to level up your character and party members. Battles in Persona 4 Golden are like Persona 5. Battles consist of the the player attacking shadows with a weapon or magic based attacks via “Persona’s.” Shadows will have elemental weaknesses that will take player experimentation to figure out.

There’s more I could type up but if you’ve played another Persona game this game won’t be too complicated for you to play. The same basic DNA that exists in other Persona games can be found all throughout Persona 4 Golden. Persona 4 Golden is a masterpiece. It contains a great story, that is accompanied by a brilliant soundtrack and engaging combat. I loved my time with Persona 4 Golden. I played through the story twice and unlocked all but one achievement. It’s hard to not recommend this game to anyone that’s a fan of JRPGs and that has Xbox GamePass. PLAY IT!

Played on: Xbox Series X via Xbox Game Pass
Review Score: 5/5

In so many ways, Persona 4 Golden takes only a half step towards anything it seems like it wants to do.
The setting is meant to be a small, quiet, isolated town where the main hang out spot is the newly opened department store. This might seem like a cool place to set an RPG until it just so happens that an idol, celebrity detective, and a newsworthy politician and reporter also just so happened to be from this small town. And that the beach, the big city, and a ski resort are within spitting distance to the point that teenagers can hop on their scooters, hang out and be home in time for dinner.
The characters are mostly fine. The structure of the game fucks over the main cast a lot in that they get their character conflict displayed front and center before being pulled to the S.Link dimension where any and all development is delegated. Outside of that, much of the character interaction is limited to basic story progression and slice of life+comedy scenes where the girls can’t cook, Yosuke/Teddie try to pull a fast one and get punished for it, and/or Kanji gets called gay.
The social links for this game are split between your main party and the citizens of Inaba, and it honestly feels like not that much happens across the lot of them. The Hanged Man and Death S.Links got to me as stories of people dealing with death, but a lot of the rest are just there for me. I’m sure a lot of these might have been good for a lot of people to hear, but overall I can’t think of much that actually was said other than “follow your dreams” and “stay true to yourself.”
To touch on the controversial characters Kanji and Naoto, I don’t think P4 was a particularly special case to worry about. Kanji’s shadow is something that can easily feel like a bait and switch around him being gay to him feeling insecure about his masculinity. The game is still fairly homophobic in how it continues to poke fun at him with a character acting like he’s gay. Which is something P4 does one or twice around making a good point around teenage insecurity then kneecapping it for the sake of an attempt at comedy. The other example that comes to mind is how the Moon social link has a character who very explicitly was fat and was made fun of for it, but now can’t interact with normal people now that she’s the peak of beauty. The game also has a fat girl where the joke is that she’s fat and ugly and likes to eat a lot. For Naoto, I don’t think she was meant to be transgender. For her, the intent is meant to be about someone feeling inferior due to an adult male dominated field. At the same time though, a lot of lines and concepts around her end up coming off as being close to the Trans Experience even if that wasn’t the point, I suspect. Ultimately, I feel like they are both a victim of being written in the 00s and aging to a time when a larger audience is going to receive them differently.
The actual dungeon crawler segments of the game are pretty basic, being the Persona “spend a day in the dungeon, try and manage your SP & Items to get to the end.” But that’s about it. It doesn’t have much of the interesting, open mechanics of Tartarus or the gameplay and design of Palaces. It’s pretty much only the Press Turn System in long hallways with garish designs that don’t do anything interesting except for two of them. Now, party members now get new skills and abilities from doing their S.Link, but the problem is that battles don’t split EXP between all party members. So, unless you’re purposefully making sure to level everyone, it’s really easy to stick with one party and have everyone else stuck at their starting levels, getting abilities you’ll never use. The game is also fairly easy, so if anything the option that is the easiest and takes the least amount of time is to go with one party and only change it if you get a new party member that can replace an old one.
Enemy design gets old real fast. You’re gonna end up fighting basically the same enemy models the whole game just with different colors. The enemies themselves are also just copies from Persona 3. Bosses could be said to be better, but they aren’t that special or uniquely designed. Even stuff like UI design just feels cheap or garish.
The story is serviceable. The set up is that it’s a mystery where you’re trying to find a killer. The problem is one, that it’s glacial, you’ll basically go 50 hours without any single meaningful development, and two, it suddenly drops a ton of info and twists that basically can’t be picked up on at all throughout the game. It is just not a good mystery. I went into the game knowing the killer and the final big twist when I first played it and got nothing interesting as build up or larger mechanisms leading up to it.
After all this, I would think, it’s whatever, if you have time to kill, want to see what the hype is, or feel like you might get more out of it, it’s fine. But then you compare it to Persona 3 or 5 and it looks much worse by comparison. P4 doesn’t really have the unique art or writing or gameplay that will leave a lasting impression like those two or pretty much any other Atlus RPG. In a lot of ways, it isn’t willing to not pull punches. At so many points where it could have felt like it could have something cool to do or say, it just doesn’t. There isn’t the kind of care for the characters or story seen or a desire to just speak about something of deep weight.
Persona 4 came out just about 2 years after Persona 3, which makes a lot of sense with how much of it is a basic, meager game that was pumped out after its predecessor's success.

Nach meiner ersten Erfahrung mit Persona 5 Royal habe ich mich sehr auf den Release von P3 und P4G auf der Konsole gefreut. Und was soll ich sagen, das lange Warten hat sich gelohnt.
Die Geschichte und Charaktere bieten immer genügend Abwechslung und Tiefe das es nie langweilig wird und man immer das Gefühl hat, dass man so viel mehr machen könnte, als es möglich ist. Die Social Links sind einer der Highlighta des Spiels, da hier jeder Charakter nochmal für sich glänzen kann. Dazu kommen die authentisch und gut geschriebenen Dialoge in den Gruppenszenen, die dem Team eine Freundschaftsdynamik geben und einem das Gefühl verleiht, Teil der Gruppe zu sein (und auch sein zu wollen).
Das Spiel ist im Grunde schon sehr alt, deswegen muss man beim Gameplay Abstriche machen, dennoch hält es sich wirklich gut und nicht zuletzt die Persona fusionen bringen immer wieder neue Anreize zu experimentieren.

Es gibt hier und da ein paar Längen in der Geschichte , die aber verschmerzbar sind da die Charaktere so sympathisch geschrieben und vertont sind. Auffällig ist aber dennoch, wie horny die Jungs (und ein Mädchen) die ganze Zeit sind. Natürlich geht es um die High School , das Erwachsenwerden auf dem Land , die erste Liebe usw. aber es gibt durchaus Szenen in dem Spiel ( die sich typischerweise auch sehr langee ziehen) die sehr unangenehmbar zu schauen waren - zumindest wenn noch andere Leute anwesend sind.

Davon abgesehen kann ich jedem JRPG Fan Persona 4 empfehlen, für mich ist es sogar besser als P5R , da ich die Charaktere einfach ins Herz geschlossen habe.

Awesome game, and I think i enjoyed it slightly more than P5. Cant wait to dive into P3 now!

Only thing about these games is the INSANE amount of dialogue, like my first playthrough was over 100 hours, second playthrough i fast forwarded all the dialogue and it cut about 50-60 hours off the game time. Thats crazy! Thats like 5 seasons of televisions worth of dialogue and cut scenes. And lets not pretend the dialogue is like super clever or funny, a lot of it is straight filler.

Also, the dungeons are pretty boring and grindy. But it didn't really matter because the actual gameplay is so amazingly fun and addictive.

This is a truly amazing JRPG. It's kinda crazy this is around since PS2 era.

Aside from the fact that the game finshes 3 times (depending on some choices), it was a great time, gripping story and nice characters.

There is some cringy and kinda problematic takes, but overall the characters are very solid and the game does a great job making you care about them.

I wished the persona fusing system was a bit more streamlined, but overall it was fun. Sad that I took so long to play this even though a friend bugged me for years to try it out

A year in the country with your uncle and his daughter turns into a desperate hunt for a serial killer whose unique method appears to be taking victims and throwing them into televisions....will the power of the friends you made along the way be enough to bring this killer to justice, or is high school truly condemned to be the worst years of your life?

Originally released doomed to obscurity on the Playstation Vita, the rebuild of the 2008 Playstation 2 role playing game Persona 4, Persona 4: Golden, has finally been issued digitally on every single major console platform. With this, this major JRPG has finally been given the availability that its massive scale, intimate storytelling, and accessible turn based combat truly deserve.

Spread across the length of a Japanese school year, you role play as a teenager who's moved into the small rural town of Inaba; Inaba faces a series of relatable problems; its teenagers are messy and unsure of themselves, a Walmart synonym, Junes, has moved into town and begun suffocating local business, and several of its members have been recently found dead without any leads. Ooops. Over the course of this school year, not only will you have to develop the JRPG skills necessary to stop and apprehend this killer, but you will also have to master life's greatest barriers - successful socialization with peers, getting a girlfriend, and making sure you pass your high school midterms. It's this added component that makes the Persona series as popular as it is relative to other JRPGs of its pedigree and size. There's a wonderful balance between dungeon crawling and turn based combat and interacting with friends and family alike. The emphasis on socializing is presented through the social link mechanic - the more time you spend with the people you care about in Inaba, the more you level up their social links, which expands their ability in combat if they're party members, or your ability to collect and create personas, the constructs you bring with you into battle to exploit their abilities, based off of the arcana those particular people are linked to. Each time you clear one of the game's dungeons and the story progresses, you're given a distinct number of days in which you have to decide whether you're hoping into the dungeons to build towards a clear, or chillin with your buds. Spend too much time dungeon crawling and you won't make any friends. Spend too much time making friends and you won't clear any dungeons; also you have to devote time to building other skills, such as your knowledge rating and your expression rating. Figuring out how to juggle all of these just right is the game's secret sauce. Its incredibly compelling.

When you're not spending time hanging out on the streets of Inaba, the game compels you to enter a TV in order to seek out and save the potential victims of our mysterious serial killer; referred to in game as the TV World, this is where the meat and potatoes of Persona 4 is stashed away; here is where you collect and develop the titular personas in order to build a wealth of abilities, both physical and magical, to allow you to progress through the game's many dungeons. These dungeons, largely procedural, are filled with enemies. The design is straightforward - climb to the bottom or the top in order to defeat a powerful enemy. Rinse. Repeat. Its simplicity, combined with the wonderful Press Turn combat system that rewards you for learning the weaknesses of each enemy to allow you to exploit them, makes for a wonderful dungeon crawling experience. Within each dungeon is a set of personas that you can catch and develop, as well as fuse together to create vast amounts of new personas. It makes each pass through a particular dungeon feel fresh and exciting as you continue to collect every persona it has to offer.

Sporting a wonderful structure, excellent character writing - some of it incredibly dated and potentially uncomfortable depending on the player, and a brilliantly constructed battle system, Persona 4: Golden is a nearly perfect game.

What takes it from a five star dish to a four star classic is its myriad of endings and the Golden bonus content.

Persona 4: Golden, like its non golden predecessor, has multiple endings. Golden has more than vanilla of course, and each of them have convoluted ways of triggering them that requires you to approach certain scenarios with an element of trial and error in order to successfully attain them. This feels weak. I feel this way towards any game that offers these kinds of hoops to jump through in order to obtain what the creators feel is a "true," or "canon," ending. The process of obtaining the most ideal ending in Persona 4: Golden exhausted much of the good will that the previous 65 hours of solid, rich video game built up within me. What a shame. Also they shove a new character in there to explain some weird contrivances and give her an accompanying dungeon that feels like its from a different game? Weird stuff.

This being considered, I still find Persona 4: Golden to be one worthy of consideration for being part of the video game canon. When its good, its incredibly good. When it isn't, it isn't enough to full dim the greatness on display. You should probably play this excellent video game, even if it does take a good 75 hours to complete. Its worth the time.