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.
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.