First I have to begin with this. Everything here is my own thoughts. I am writing what I felt when I was playing in here that comes from my experiences, expectations, priorities and my way of playing.

After seeing persona craze, I wanted to experience it myself and started with 3, after playing it, it felt like a mediocre experience, because of that I thought not playing persona 4, yet after pc release, I saw praise from everywhere for this game. I thought maybe it was better? After all persona 3 was the atlus's first try for social game rpg so why not try 4th game? Maybe they probably fixed all the mistakes from p3? And with that thought I started playing. After 90 hours finishing the game I am here and my thoughts is...

What a shame...

Story

Story starts strongly actually. main character arrives to a new town because of unfortunate circumstances. After he starts discovering the place he realizes there is strange murders going on around town. I was intrigued when i saw this because i like mystery stories.

After the 6 hours mark suddenly your friend gets kidnapped. You of course go with it and save your friend, but of course a lot of questions start appearing in your head. I am thinking wow that was exciting I wonder what is gonna be next? Then your another friend gets kidnapped, then another, then another, then another... So story completely stops after the 6 hour mark... I start to get anxious and bored... But after the 60 hour mark then suddenly story starts again! You are excited because you get more information about the killer and your loved ones in danger!

After lots of fighting and protecting your loved ones from the killer, game does a complete 180 and says the person we are after is actually wrong one, the real killer was doing his job even before we arrived... I am like... What... Then all the clues was for nothing?... Whatever at least that's something right? Let's see why the real killer started doing all this crap.

The piece of garbage villain explains his motivation and it is... Boredom... He is bored and does all this shit... I am like, what the heck are you talking about is this your damn motivation?! Then why this monsters why this things happen around town? And the villain says Idk anything about that shit, so with that game does 180 again AND I GET SUPER ANGRY. All this revelations for... Unnecessary plot twists??

Whatever I pressed on because the story almost finished anyway. We save our friend called marie in this golden version and she says izanagi monsters are the things that actually does these shadow things around town. I am like whatever lets press on. Then we found the god izanagi monster thingy and it explains it did everything because it thinks like a god. So it thinks that destroying humans is a good thing. I am like good cliche motivation right guys??? What I was expecting anyway at this point...

And we say goodbye to everyone then the credits... So sorry for people that liked this game but story is boring shit, nothing else. Also there's so many unnecessary anime cliches like sauna that falls to the girls side, girl falls on to the boy, girl and boy lost in a storm and finds an empty building etc. They were in p3 as well, Idk about you but whenever I see these things I just rolled my eyes from pure boredom.

You will say what about the social links? And they are meh... 2-3 really interesting ones. Rest is meh at best, boredom inducing at worst. At least there was no anger inducing ones like the ones in p3. But also I felt like p3's good ones are better from this game's good ones but that's my opinion. Btw idk why but they force your face that marie social link in every opportunity and it gets grating after a while whenever i go to fuse some personas. Because it forces you to listen what marie have to say...

Gameplay

So... What. The. Actual. Heck.

After playing p3 I thought they wouldn't do the same mistake with doing copy paste enemies with copy paste feeling dungeons that only difference is it's coloring and couple of exclusive floor gimmicks that are super rare. But they did it anyway...

Is there a no improvements you ask? There is one and that's a guard option... When boss charges, you can use it to save yourself from a big damage.. at least that's something...

Music

Only thing I can say good about this game is town music is fantastic, maybe if it get used for a better game it could be more memorable but who knows. But I didn't like dungeon music, compared to the town music, it's a more heavy and low kind of music, I liked the p3's upbeat dungeon music more.

Pacing

Like the p3's pacing, it's atrocious. You have to wait to things to happen like p3 again and again and again. I think game's own logic is, go play a dating minigame for 5 hours, then play a dungeon crawler 5 hours, repeat this 8 times then the game ends. But none of it feels fleshed out.

This time management thingy is just only there because someone thought it's a good idea to force player into doing side content, if they could be able to rush the story it would end in a 30 hours and no one wants that in a jrpg right? So 100 hours forced waiting is better!!!

So yeah that's my own thoughts, and sorry to say but I have not seen the super "perfect" game that everybody talking about... At this point I think I only reason for people like these franchise is just because this game throws anime stereotype girls and boys at you on a open world time management game. So weebs fell in love with it without second thought.
Or they are blinded by it's lovely soundtrack because that's only thing that is good at for me.