You can't even legally play the games you are trying to "buy" anymore thanks to the eShop's closure, so rather than make all the minigames free, the game just gives you the story of the game for free, but keeps you from accessing the games since you technically never paid for them, which is a bummer as I don't think Nintendo would lose much sleep by letting players preserve the experience of this game in full if they downloaded it before but haven't finished it.

The haggle system is a neat idea and the game's real inventive with it, making the monetization method a core part of the character while not using a made-up currency, which I don't think I've seen done anywhere else. (even if you still pay $15 or so if you wanted to play the whole thing so Nintendo still makes a profit) I don't remember much of the games themselves, other than that they were fine. But Rusty is the star here, and while his world can't function the way it used to anymore, everyone will remember this game for him and his haggling mechanics.

This is a game I've had a lot of conflicted feelings on, ever since my playthrough of it over two years ago. Not helping matters is how its become basically inseparable from the heated debate over how it handled LGBT issues, which has resulted in the speaking over and harassment of trans people. But you know, I get it. Not the speaking over and harassing trans people part, please go fuck yourself if you do that, but I get Persona 4's appeal. It's a game about coming terms with truths about yourself that you don't feel like accepting and if you play it as the teenage demographic it's aimed towards, that's a powerful message. So I'm going to be extremely charitable and separate Persona 4 from its politics to see it for what it is: a mechanically dull/pathetically easy RPG with boring procedurally generated dungeon design and a poorly paced story that's as repetitive as those dungeons

Calling something "good with friends" is often the cruelest thing you can ever say about a multiplayer game. Yeah, you can have fun with friends in basically anything, it turns out friends are good, not Phasmophobia. And it's so easy to see that in Lethal Company, especially from the outside looking in - some bullshit lame horror coop horror game to scream at, acting as the new steam flavour of the month game to merely moisturise the slip and slide of socialisation.

Despite the resemblance, Lethal Company is not that. Flavour of the month, maybe, but versus the thousand souless PC games out there of it's breed it's truly closer to something like Dokapon Kingdom and hell, Dark Souls, for the kinds of emotion and socialisation it brings up.

Because truly, Lethal Company is a game about having a really shit job. There's no real sugarcoating it. It's a game about being explicitly underpaid for dangerous, tedius work salvaging objects from ugly factories, where the corporation you work under and the true majesty of visiting planets and experiencing it's fauna are so stripped back and corporatised that you don't even notice it. This setting and the gameplay really sets out a very clever vibe for the game, as frankly, it on it's own, is almost deliberately not fun, but it is a wonderful way of building up a camraderie between players and really get into the boots of a worker in a bad job slacking and goofing off a bit. On my first playthrough with friends I found some extraodinary catharsis in one of the gang spending some of our quota on a jukebox playing license free music and just having a jam for a while, and likewise, a good haul which takes some of the pressure off others is appreciated, and the "man in the chair" - the guy left behind at the ship to deal with doors, turrets etc, feels both valued as part of the team, but also themselves lonely, tense, awaiting their friend's safe return.

It is also, as a more obvious point, very funny. Basically every run of this game you'll make something funny will happen. A comrade fumbles a wonky jump to their death based on bad information. You walk just inside the range of your comrade's voice to hear them screaming for help for half a second. You watch as the man in the chair as a giant red dot slowly bears down on your comrade, try to warn them and then see the red dot taking delight in eating them, and there's so much more. It's surprising really as a game with so little going on in gameplay and so limited in variety of stuff that it keeps on bringing up new stupid shit to happen.

Its rarely legitimately scary, even in the rare case you're alone amongst monsters with all your friends dead. The stakes established are just set too low, the animations a bit too goofy for the intensity to ever feel too much. And that kinda folds back in on that "shit job" thematic of the whole thing. Being almost indifferent to the surprising variety of monsters, seeing them as much as obstacles as hell demons that want to eat your face, is ultimately part of the job. Yes, the fourth angel from Evangelion wandering around whilst you slowly crouchwalk across the map to your ship is tense, but almost amusingly tense. Gotta roll with it.

It's a delightful experience, really. If you wanted to you could linger on how cobbled together the whole thing feels right now and how limited the actual gameplay really is, but they do nothing to take away from the truly great times Lethal Company sparks. The closest a game will ever get to being on the last day of your christmas contract with debenhams and just slacking with the other temps, giving people discounts on their items for no good reason and occasionally the weeping angels from doctor who come out with a giant spider and they're in the ONE hallway that leads back to the exit and Ernesto is dead, damn.

i think i like persona 4 less than persona 5 because at least persona 5 at least pretends for a little bit that it cares about going against the status quo, and it gives you the illusion that its going to actually do anything good. both games struggle with almost all of the exact same issues, the main difference being 4 doesn't have much style to prioritize over substance so you just don't get much of either.

i don't really care about 90% of the games writing or characters but i will directly point out that kanji and naoto's character arcs are some of the lamest things i've seen in video games, and no it is not because of any "headcanons" i didnt even have for these characters being contradicted. for kanji and naoto specifically i take a lot more issue with the queerbaiting and using queer identities as a stepping stone for their incredibly tame messages than the idea that they aren't actually queer. anyone who is upset about them not being gay or trans isn't necessarily wrong for feeling that way, but it obviously wasn't the intention of persona 4 to make those characters that way and i'm not going to act like it's fair to have problems with the game because of that specifically. the investigation team also do not at all feel like they are friends to me and it sucks, the way that most scenes that wouldve been used to develop SEES in 3 just aren't really there and it makes me care about the group way less

i liked adachi a lot though, he's a really good character

5 FUCKING YEARS WHERE THE FUCK IS SAIN FIRE EMBLEM YOU FRAUDSSSSS

Edit: Greatest game of all time I'm afraid.......

Edit 2: THEY FUCKING ADDED MARK FIRE EMBLEM THIS GAME IS SO BALLSY ITS PEAKKKK

The lyrics of english Persona tracks never sound particularly idiomatic. It never gets into incomprehensible territory but more often than not it sounds a bit awkward. Persona 4, however, uses this to it's advantage to have the lyrics really mirror the contents of the game's themes and narrative. The vocal tracks in P4 tend to have a clear aim but when you actually look into the lyrics you realize how little it actually says about what it's trying to cover.

Let's take the main battle them for example. "I reach out to the truth of my life" is one of the first things you'll hear every time you enter a battle so clearly the song is meant to resonate with the game's themes of truth and lies. However if you actually read the lyrics to Reach Out to the Truth, you'll quickly notice that a majority of the lyrics are nonsense that only connect to that core theme of "truth" through some pretty extreme mental gymnastics. This connects to the game as a whole because Persona 4 is very clearly trying to make a statement on topics such as truth and identity but when you actually read into the text at a deeper level you'll find that the game actually has fuck all to say on any of these subjects.