Developed by Atlus

Release: 2008 (PS 2), 2012 (PS Vita)

Premise

Persona 4 is the second most recent game in the Persona line of Shin Megami Tensei spin-off games. A mechanical iteration on the third entry, Persona 4 is another hybrid game that fuses time management, visual novel, and dungeon-crawler RPG systems into a cohesive experience. Though originally released on PS2, a second edition called Persona 4 Golden was released on PS Vita that featured additional story content, gameplay, and some new original music.

In Persona 4, the player takes on the role of a Japanese high schooler moving to the fictional town of Inaba. Thrust into an unfamiliar setting, the canonically named Yu Narukami slowly begins to settle into his new lifestyle, make some friends, and bond with his extended family. However, the sudden death of a classmate triggers a chain of events that sets Yu down a drastically different path.

The Good

Persona 4 mashes up a number of gaming genre tropes in an interesting way. The game takes place from the player character’s perspective over a series of sequential days, each of which generally allow the player to choose what activities they do in addition to mandatory academic pursuits. Some activities improve Yu’s overworld statistics, which allow him to succeed at various challenges and skill tests. After a certain point, Yu can choose to investigate dungeons with his friends, where he will do battle with his Personas. Personas control Yu’s combat abilities and statistics, and can be swapped around during fights. They can also be crafted, and have improved abilities and effects as they level up in combat and as Yu’s Social Links improve. This is where the visual novel aspect comes into play – choosing to spend time with NPCs, and hopefully improve Yu’s Social Link with them via choosing correct responses, improves his ability to create Personas of a particular type associated with that NPC. Utilizing the relationships between these systems is crucial to overcoming some of the game’s tougher bosses. Though it sounds complicated, the simplicity of each system makes it all flow together fairly intuitively, which is honestly an achievement in and of itself, and goes a long way towards distinguishing the series from other JRPGs.

Persona 4 offers strong replayability, which is due in large part to how it handles its content. Without spoiling too much, Persona 4‘s narrative is not set in stone, and various revelations require a decent amount of detective work from the player. Though these are few and far between, player choices often have dramatic results, such as halting of the investigation or the loss of characters’ lives. In some cases, these bad calls can even end the story outright. However, during a second run, players can continue with their failed character, allowing them to go back and fix mistakes they may have made or pay closer attention where needed. The time management system also prevents all but the most omniscient of users from maxing out their Social Links and exploring fully the character relationships during a first run, further validating the prospect of a second or even third attempt. Persona 4 is one of the few JRPGs with multiple run-ending fail states, and perhaps the only one to also contain enough content to make retrying not feel like a slog.

Unlike many stories of its time, Persona 4 delves heavily into the psychology of the characters surrounding the purposely less-developed silent protagonist. Though this would normally be less relevant in a critique than gameplay, Persona 4 actually succeeds where so many modern, generally independent, and less gamey games have failed, and integrates its themes well into gameplay. Appropriately themed audio and visual cues in dungeons lead up to memorably weird boss fights that reflect the issue the specific character is dealing with within themselves. Additionally, Persona 4 further distances itself from games that attempt to achieve similar results by humanizing its characters over the course of the story, though often in a traditionally cliched anime fashion. Normally this is where a poor translation and bad English voice actors would ruin the character development, but the translation team and dub voice actors actually do a pretty solid job of capturing the original feeling of the characters.

The Bad

Persona 4‘s weakest element is also its most traditional element – its dungeon crawling. Though visually exciting and featuring a novel Persona swapping system, the dungeon experience is pretty standard JRPG fare, requiring a non-trivial amount of repetitive grinding to improve Personas. Creating strong Personas is fairly important due to the welcome difficulty of boss fights, but the save system makes already boring grinding a dicey prospect, as autosaving is frustratingly absent and save points are purposely scarce. However, execution complexity doesn’t scale up too dramatically on trash fights as time goes on, leading to the average player farming progressively less engaging fights for progressively longer periods of time. This is enabled and encouraged by the ability of characters to eventually bypass the scarcity of sources of HP and MP recovery through various tactics.

Persona 4 also stumbles a bit in regards to its optimization strictness. Though partially there to encourage replaying content as discussed earlier, the perhaps overly tough requirements for perfect or even near-perfect playthroughs are a bit frustrating. Cleverly using the character’s newbie status to force decisions during certain points or to hide easter egg reactions behind statistic walls notwithstanding, running up against a barrier that could have been easily avoided had it been apparent it was coming is an undesirable experience. This sort of meta-analysis-based player action planning is quite common in visual novel games, but this is not a trope this reviewer really wants to see in other genres. Generally, this ends up giving a player who isn’t really doing anything wrong the feeling that they’re doing something wrong, which should be avoided when possible.

The Unique

If Persona 4 is any one thing, it is unique. Blending several game genres together itself is enough to make it stand out, but its secondary elements are also noteworthy. The Persona series is probably even better known for these elements than its gameplay. Shoji Meguro, the Persona series’ music producer and composer, mimics what Persona does with its gameplay by fusing a number of genres and styles together to create something original. The user interface for Persona 4 similarly has a flamboyant flair and clearly defined but complicated style to it. Elements that would normally be passed over are used creatively to further define and clarify what Persona 4 is attempting to do aesthetically.

JRPGs are a very niche product, but Persona 4 is perhaps the best of its era. It wouldn’t be unreasonable for this game to appear in a high position on many personal favorites lists, along with its predecessor (and hopefully its sequel). Though its time has since passed, it is more than worth a shot should the genre appeal to any readers here. It might even make you care about the characters by the end.