this is one of my absolute favorite games of all time because it is a piece of media that holds a very special place in my heart. it feels like home, and not because of the ambient nostalgia it its trying to evoke; it is truly my heart's home. a lot of the specific experiences Yu and his friends have here are surprisingly similar to mine, both in that same high school period and at the time i played this game. also the general theme(s) of P4 are central to my own worldview, to the point where i cannot listen to both vanilla and Golden openings without breaking down into tears. it is incredibly simple, but that simplicity is not plainness; it is fundamentality.

there is a number of valid criticisms for P4 as a game and specifically as a game in the Persona franchise, but i firmly believe that this is the best Persona game to date. it utilizes the Persona and Social Links mechanics in the most suitable way in terms of procedural rhetoric—aka making a statement via gameplay mechanics—because the very core of it is about people and that loving others is just as incredibly beautiful, courageous and kind as is loving yourself. (one could argue that Persona 3 does it better but i am ready to die on this hill)

i was skeptical about diving in at first because i'm very picky about videogame visuals and i sternly dislike yellow, but after pushing a tiny bit i fell in love with the skrunkly low-poly artstyle, the TV effects, and the coziness that is achieved by very simple graphics.

the music was also a huge selling point; i usually don't like pop very much, but i think this game has permanently changed the way my musical taste works — i go from the thematic/vibal (is that even a word? well it is now) context in which a certain music exists now, not from the way it sounds on its own. and we all know Meguro-san just doesn't miss. never

and THE CHARACTERS. holy hell. i am a Kanji Tatsumi stan through and through; his arc and his personal growth throughout the game is one of the dearest narrative lines to me in fiction, and the Sauna theme?? best track in the OST. Yosuke reminds me so much of my closest highschool friends, he makes me feel the absolute same things as them and it makes me so comfortable and happy. but... Yu Narukami... i am so in love with him. i love this little autistic chad man so much. i want to adorn my entire existence with images of him.

i don't wanna give it a rating because i don't feel like assigning any kind of numeric values to my experience with it. it's just... something. it's beyond ten and not even close to ten at the same time. i just love it with my whole heart, and it's enough. <3