Jag_
Bio
Nothing here!
Badges
Noticed
Gained 3+ followers
1 Years of Service
Being part of the Backloggd community for 1 year
011
Total Games Played
001
Played in 2024
000
Games Backloggd
Recently Played See More
Recently Reviewed See More
I have finished Gnosia and I must inform you that there is an awful glitch in the late-game that kinda hides some of the late-game functions without you knowing. Once you notice that nothing's happening in your loops except the loop itself (and characters aren't using any special commands), do note that that is a glitch and you have to do manually reset specifically by quitting the menu. I did at least 50 or so loops before realizing this and it drove me mad.
Which is a shame cuz it's this late-game stuff that's kinda the most unsatisfying part of the game story-wise and, if you got stuck in endless not-dev-intended bugged loops like me, makes things a little sour for having put up with all that.
Like seriously, some of the "epilogue" stuff (barely existent) is so unsatisfying I thought it was bait for the True Ending, but the True Ending is real short and doesn't actually say much about most of the other cahracters.
But uhhhh yeah good game regardless. Great art, the music really grew on me, the mechanics grew and evolved over time (and you had to both play with specific round settings as well as do some different challenges to progress the story), and the way the mystery unfolded was really cool.
Neat idea, has enough depth that I'd honestly wanna see these mechanics in perhaps another scenario. The mechanics used the character writing to its advantage and you could easily port this same game to a different story.
Which is a shame cuz it's this late-game stuff that's kinda the most unsatisfying part of the game story-wise and, if you got stuck in endless not-dev-intended bugged loops like me, makes things a little sour for having put up with all that.
Like seriously, some of the "epilogue" stuff (barely existent) is so unsatisfying I thought it was bait for the True Ending, but the True Ending is real short and doesn't actually say much about most of the other cahracters.
But uhhhh yeah good game regardless. Great art, the music really grew on me, the mechanics grew and evolved over time (and you had to both play with specific round settings as well as do some different challenges to progress the story), and the way the mystery unfolded was really cool.
Neat idea, has enough depth that I'd honestly wanna see these mechanics in perhaps another scenario. The mechanics used the character writing to its advantage and you could easily port this same game to a different story.
This review contains spoilers
Okay random Persona 4 Golden thoughts I compiled from Discord, very sorry
First things first, i like fusion as a system but i dont really now how its really supposed to work beyond "oh that looks cool, I'll make that"
Like as a system, it is pretty interesting how you're straight up changing up your character and can switch between them midbattle
and is a pretty cool replacement for complicated crafting systems
I started relying on a fusion calculator later down the line and friends have been reccing me cool personas to try (my brother insisted that I use yoshitsune) but doing that just honestly felt pretty metagame-y
so I do think the natural "ohh that persona kinda looks nice" approach seems to be the way to go about the system, however, in that sense it does feel pretty RNG-y since you never really know what you can get and how to make it.
It's weird to set a goal later down the line for this high-level persona that seems pretty cool to get but you're too underleveled. i did that a few times, but every time once i reached the req level, I usually am able to fuse something nicer or better alongside it.
i dunno if that made sense but im just gonna say the fusion system is pretty cool, i just kinda dont fully get it 👍
Jag — Today at 13:46
hmm okay second thought: the game genuinely felt like it had its climax in Christmas and that the rest was all falling action, and while i'm talking about story there, it was kinda bolstered by my gameplay experience.
I thought Adachi and Ameno-sagiri was not just a cool fight but a difficult fight too which caught me off-guard. At least, it took me a second try to come up with a proper strategy to beat it despite the fact that the rest of the dungeon was pretty easy at this point due to how overlevled I was.
And story-wise, it really did feel like I caught the "killer" right then and there, the fog which felt like a really big month-long build-up was dealt with, and the themes of friendship and a love for our flawed reality were brought to fruition
January after that was like "oh hurry up and hang out with everyone before time runs out" and there was pretty snow which was fine. then the Marie dungeon comes along and as fun as it was, it definitely felt like DLC or added-on content. it shook the gameplay loop up a little bit, and I do love Marie and her story, but the whole thing definitely kinda felt like a "side-chapter", a "hey did you happen to care about what happened to this character?" deal|
Jag — Today at 13:57
Those arent really problems in itself, but then the final dungeon comes and its some guy you never once thought about beyond that initial handshake, a few explanations for why things happened, a shorter dungeon which looked nice but didnt really have any special mechanics to it, and a two-phase boss that while trivial to beat at my level didnt really seem to do anything particularly special gameplay-wise. It really felt like a bit of a middling coda rather than a climax, reiterating the themes of "hey humanity doesn't want to deal with reality most of the time" and the power of friendship making our flawed reality worthwhile.
I dunno, Jan and Feb just kinda felt like extra fluff time for doing more of the social links you missed. i dunno, it just felt like i was obligated to finish the game at that point.
i guess on social links, i think they're all pretty sweet. I think I am pretty invested in the free time aspect of Persona and I like how it intertwines and breaks the monotony of dungeon crawling.
The time management definitely felt like a game on its own, and I do like it when it got challenging and it felt like you had a bit too much to do and you had to make sacrifices or really think about how best to go about things, and I also guess that that's why I didn't like post-Xmas stuff anyway cuz it wasn't particularly time-managey anymore, it was just picking up the social links i kinda wanted to do. (same reason why I liked Citizen Sleeper at its hardest then got disappointed when the challenge went away a bit too quickly)
Jag — Today at 14:06
A part of me does think I shouldn't have metagamed by doing the Fox early (although I swear it was only cuz I heard the last Fox rank required the fishing minigame) because I do think the SP management was pretty interesting, forcing you to rely on items or physical abilities more than magical abilities OR sacrifice another day.
although in the same breath, I do think a harsher SP management system would've made grinding pretty costly which Hard difficulty kinda requires to some extent
On grinding, it was honestly just figuring out how to beat the Golden Hands which made things pretty fun. i do love when those typse of xp/money enemies bring in their own interesting "puzzles" or challenges to them.
And beyond the Golden Hands, I realized the side fetch quests are actually kinda carefully ordered to help guide your grinding and that honestly helped make grinding... i wouldnt say fun but more structured. I generally felt like grinding enough to do the fetch quests and the secret boss in the previous dungeon then not running away in fights in the current dungeon was enough to beat the boss
however, there were some fetch quests that are honestly just garbage
like actually awful
I kinda applaud the game for having enough enemy variety that it never felt like I was fighting the same thing over and over again
which made the quests where you have to fight the same thing like 5 or so times painful
Jag — Today at 14:13
I never could do those ones
I also never seem to got the wedding dress item you were supposed to get from golden chests
I did a lot of em in Yukiko's castle but never seem to got one, i honestly think its bullshit.
oh speaking of bullshit, Naoto's Shield of Justice is absolutely busted. if you're making an RPG, never make a skill that gives your whole party damage immunity and have its only cost be mana. You can literally just buy a load of SP items, set another character to load them into Naoto, and you're essentially invincible.
a similar thing happened in Trails in the Sky (which had both Earth Guard and Kevin's Grail Sphere) and that also just makes fights trivial but at least in Persona 4 it's locked behidn a social link
[Note: I did a bunch of tierlists here that I can't show]
Margaret was just an extended series of fetch quests
Yumi had some dumb melodramatic stuff that kinda distracted me from the actual core of her arc (although that said I havent finished her so maybe I'm pretty unfair)
Naoto at B kinda surprised me but I dunno I didnt find her ranks 1-10 particularly memorable
there were riddles and stuff yeah but I didnt feel all that taken by her arc over that point.
Actually, regarding Naoto, they kinda weathered away at her coolness and gave you too many opportunies to make her look shy and cute which I dunno. If you get to do that all the time, it stops being special imo.
And I liked her tomboyishness and didnt really like that they forced you to go "I like you when you're feminine" and she heightens her voice for you
but overall, b-tier ones were still okay and every social link that was actually a social link (aka not margaret) was at the very least okay
Yosuke drove me insane in gameplay and outside I generally found him annoying.
never did his social link and never wanted to, life of a hater right here
In particular, he was weak to one of the bosses that made me immediately want to switch him out. But in general and in a less meme-y sense, I just don't think he really excelled or could find a good role that fit for him in the party and just kidna wanted him gone when Kanji came along
That does mean I didn't really explore what he's capable of with his social link stuff or his higher level stuff, but again, I just never wanted to when everyone else seemed to have clearer roles
Really the only thing unique to him was wind which you can easily cover with your own Persona. Physical, he's out matched by Kanji and Chie. Magical, well Yukiko and Teddie are literally right there. And thats' before Naoto comes and kinda just becomes a required party member.
Oh I guess I do think, when it comes to putting the MC in D-tier, that there is one major "gripe" i have with the game where the whole slice-of-life elements of the story is just very wish-fulfilment stuff
A part of this is kinda a "me' problem
but also like, you are a harem protagonist who is good at everything and never makes a mistake
I hope you bear with me, but when it comes to me, I feel like these types of stories feel like drugs to me (or would've when I was a teenager) where I'd get invested into this fantasy life a little bit too much then feel a large pang of envy when I exit the fantasy and realize my high school life isn't like that at all. But I do understand that Persona 4 kinda is intentionally leaning into to that and isnt really pretending it isnt anythign but the most banger high school life you can think of.
It does feel like the themes are a bit shakier, or at least, I really shouldn't have related to Adachi as much as I did.
Like, a part of the themes of the game are how people tend to turn away from reality and wish to find solace in the realms of their own desires and fantasies.
Yeah I do realize I'm being pretty unfair to him for the memes, but I do appreciate the game gives him pretty much what he deserves every time he does yosuke stuff
and yeah honestly i dig the rural aesthetic of the whole game
First things first, i like fusion as a system but i dont really now how its really supposed to work beyond "oh that looks cool, I'll make that"
Like as a system, it is pretty interesting how you're straight up changing up your character and can switch between them midbattle
and is a pretty cool replacement for complicated crafting systems
I started relying on a fusion calculator later down the line and friends have been reccing me cool personas to try (my brother insisted that I use yoshitsune) but doing that just honestly felt pretty metagame-y
so I do think the natural "ohh that persona kinda looks nice" approach seems to be the way to go about the system, however, in that sense it does feel pretty RNG-y since you never really know what you can get and how to make it.
It's weird to set a goal later down the line for this high-level persona that seems pretty cool to get but you're too underleveled. i did that a few times, but every time once i reached the req level, I usually am able to fuse something nicer or better alongside it.
i dunno if that made sense but im just gonna say the fusion system is pretty cool, i just kinda dont fully get it 👍
Jag — Today at 13:46
hmm okay second thought: the game genuinely felt like it had its climax in Christmas and that the rest was all falling action, and while i'm talking about story there, it was kinda bolstered by my gameplay experience.
I thought Adachi and Ameno-sagiri was not just a cool fight but a difficult fight too which caught me off-guard. At least, it took me a second try to come up with a proper strategy to beat it despite the fact that the rest of the dungeon was pretty easy at this point due to how overlevled I was.
And story-wise, it really did feel like I caught the "killer" right then and there, the fog which felt like a really big month-long build-up was dealt with, and the themes of friendship and a love for our flawed reality were brought to fruition
January after that was like "oh hurry up and hang out with everyone before time runs out" and there was pretty snow which was fine. then the Marie dungeon comes along and as fun as it was, it definitely felt like DLC or added-on content. it shook the gameplay loop up a little bit, and I do love Marie and her story, but the whole thing definitely kinda felt like a "side-chapter", a "hey did you happen to care about what happened to this character?" deal|
Jag — Today at 13:57
Those arent really problems in itself, but then the final dungeon comes and its some guy you never once thought about beyond that initial handshake, a few explanations for why things happened, a shorter dungeon which looked nice but didnt really have any special mechanics to it, and a two-phase boss that while trivial to beat at my level didnt really seem to do anything particularly special gameplay-wise. It really felt like a bit of a middling coda rather than a climax, reiterating the themes of "hey humanity doesn't want to deal with reality most of the time" and the power of friendship making our flawed reality worthwhile.
I dunno, Jan and Feb just kinda felt like extra fluff time for doing more of the social links you missed. i dunno, it just felt like i was obligated to finish the game at that point.
i guess on social links, i think they're all pretty sweet. I think I am pretty invested in the free time aspect of Persona and I like how it intertwines and breaks the monotony of dungeon crawling.
The time management definitely felt like a game on its own, and I do like it when it got challenging and it felt like you had a bit too much to do and you had to make sacrifices or really think about how best to go about things, and I also guess that that's why I didn't like post-Xmas stuff anyway cuz it wasn't particularly time-managey anymore, it was just picking up the social links i kinda wanted to do. (same reason why I liked Citizen Sleeper at its hardest then got disappointed when the challenge went away a bit too quickly)
Jag — Today at 14:06
A part of me does think I shouldn't have metagamed by doing the Fox early (although I swear it was only cuz I heard the last Fox rank required the fishing minigame) because I do think the SP management was pretty interesting, forcing you to rely on items or physical abilities more than magical abilities OR sacrifice another day.
although in the same breath, I do think a harsher SP management system would've made grinding pretty costly which Hard difficulty kinda requires to some extent
On grinding, it was honestly just figuring out how to beat the Golden Hands which made things pretty fun. i do love when those typse of xp/money enemies bring in their own interesting "puzzles" or challenges to them.
And beyond the Golden Hands, I realized the side fetch quests are actually kinda carefully ordered to help guide your grinding and that honestly helped make grinding... i wouldnt say fun but more structured. I generally felt like grinding enough to do the fetch quests and the secret boss in the previous dungeon then not running away in fights in the current dungeon was enough to beat the boss
however, there were some fetch quests that are honestly just garbage
like actually awful
I kinda applaud the game for having enough enemy variety that it never felt like I was fighting the same thing over and over again
which made the quests where you have to fight the same thing like 5 or so times painful
Jag — Today at 14:13
I never could do those ones
I also never seem to got the wedding dress item you were supposed to get from golden chests
I did a lot of em in Yukiko's castle but never seem to got one, i honestly think its bullshit.
oh speaking of bullshit, Naoto's Shield of Justice is absolutely busted. if you're making an RPG, never make a skill that gives your whole party damage immunity and have its only cost be mana. You can literally just buy a load of SP items, set another character to load them into Naoto, and you're essentially invincible.
a similar thing happened in Trails in the Sky (which had both Earth Guard and Kevin's Grail Sphere) and that also just makes fights trivial but at least in Persona 4 it's locked behidn a social link
[Note: I did a bunch of tierlists here that I can't show]
Margaret was just an extended series of fetch quests
Yumi had some dumb melodramatic stuff that kinda distracted me from the actual core of her arc (although that said I havent finished her so maybe I'm pretty unfair)
Naoto at B kinda surprised me but I dunno I didnt find her ranks 1-10 particularly memorable
there were riddles and stuff yeah but I didnt feel all that taken by her arc over that point.
Actually, regarding Naoto, they kinda weathered away at her coolness and gave you too many opportunies to make her look shy and cute which I dunno. If you get to do that all the time, it stops being special imo.
And I liked her tomboyishness and didnt really like that they forced you to go "I like you when you're feminine" and she heightens her voice for you
but overall, b-tier ones were still okay and every social link that was actually a social link (aka not margaret) was at the very least okay
Yosuke drove me insane in gameplay and outside I generally found him annoying.
never did his social link and never wanted to, life of a hater right here
In particular, he was weak to one of the bosses that made me immediately want to switch him out. But in general and in a less meme-y sense, I just don't think he really excelled or could find a good role that fit for him in the party and just kidna wanted him gone when Kanji came along
That does mean I didn't really explore what he's capable of with his social link stuff or his higher level stuff, but again, I just never wanted to when everyone else seemed to have clearer roles
Really the only thing unique to him was wind which you can easily cover with your own Persona. Physical, he's out matched by Kanji and Chie. Magical, well Yukiko and Teddie are literally right there. And thats' before Naoto comes and kinda just becomes a required party member.
Oh I guess I do think, when it comes to putting the MC in D-tier, that there is one major "gripe" i have with the game where the whole slice-of-life elements of the story is just very wish-fulfilment stuff
A part of this is kinda a "me' problem
but also like, you are a harem protagonist who is good at everything and never makes a mistake
I hope you bear with me, but when it comes to me, I feel like these types of stories feel like drugs to me (or would've when I was a teenager) where I'd get invested into this fantasy life a little bit too much then feel a large pang of envy when I exit the fantasy and realize my high school life isn't like that at all. But I do understand that Persona 4 kinda is intentionally leaning into to that and isnt really pretending it isnt anythign but the most banger high school life you can think of.
It does feel like the themes are a bit shakier, or at least, I really shouldn't have related to Adachi as much as I did.
Like, a part of the themes of the game are how people tend to turn away from reality and wish to find solace in the realms of their own desires and fantasies.
Yeah I do realize I'm being pretty unfair to him for the memes, but I do appreciate the game gives him pretty much what he deserves every time he does yosuke stuff
and yeah honestly i dig the rural aesthetic of the whole game
Despite my one major complaint that it gives you a weird amount of power and influence as well as just becoming too easy in general too quickly, I do think Citizen Sleeper bangs. It probably has one of the most interesting political situation and analysis I've stumbled upon in a video game that isn't TNO, mostly because it doesn't focus on the politics itself. Rather you only really ever speak to one or two of the actual politicians, but the forces that be are always still out of reach, always playing one big game with each other, and everyone else under them suffering the consequences.
I think Citizen Sleeper was at its best somewhere between the early-game to mid-game when the world really expands for you, but you can't quite keep up with everything and may have to make a few sacrifices. You were helping people out here and there, but you're still kinda desperate to survive.
However, that phase of the game went by too quickly and then it starts giving you responsibility for much larger groups of people than you really shouldn't be able to and kinda hit at the immersion.
I think Citizen Sleeper was at its best somewhere between the early-game to mid-game when the world really expands for you, but you can't quite keep up with everything and may have to make a few sacrifices. You were helping people out here and there, but you're still kinda desperate to survive.
However, that phase of the game went by too quickly and then it starts giving you responsibility for much larger groups of people than you really shouldn't be able to and kinda hit at the immersion.