Persona 4
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Persona 4 is a video game released for the PlayStation 2 in 2008. It was developed by Atlus and published by Atlus except for Europe and Australia which were published by Square Enix and Ubisoft, respectively.
An enhanced version known as Persona 4: Golden was released for the PlayStation Vita in 2011 and Steam in 2020, which was published by NIS America in Europe, with PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch ports currently on the way and being published by Sega.
Plot
Staying in Inaba for a year while his parents are abroad, a high school student must work with his new friends to solve mysterious murders and the mysterious TV world.
Why It Reaches Out to the Truth
Overall
- The game has a much more modern setting than most RPGs, often set in medieval or sci-fi settings.
- Lighthearted well-made story, compared to the previous game (which was dark and took itself too seriously at times).
- Mostly very likable (in a good way) characters, especially Yosuke Hanamura and Rise Kujikawa.
- It's much easier than the previous game. Making it a great start for newcomers to the series.
- Shadows are vulnerable to different types of attacks. When hit, it knocks the Shadows down and grants the person who knocked it down an extra attack.
- If all Shadows are knocked down, the party can team up for an all-out attack on them for more damage.
- The game's major theme is that people naturally will cling to lies and falsehoods to avoid horrible truths about themselves and others. The fog of the TV world is symbolic of people's desires to live in ignorance and denial. The climax is interesting in that the protagonists don't deny that most people are like that—but they are different and they'll fight to stop a world shrouded in fog even if it goes against what the rest of the planet wants (something Marie says is not the case in Golden).
- A more personal version occurs in Golden if you were a cheating bastard throughout the game. On Valentine's Day, you have to turn down every girl (save Marie and possibly one other) and later accept her gift in person anyway. Each heartbroken girl (who believes herself to be your only girlfriend) asks you what you plan to do on Valentine's Day without her. You give all sorts of non-answers, but each of them has a feeling of what's up. They decided to ignore the subject and half-heartedly say that they trust you (wrongfully). Naoto is the cruelest, as she says that she's a failure of a detective because there's a mystery in front of her that she doesn't want to solve because she already knows the truth is too awful. Consider the entire Aesop of the game, and this is even worse.
- Every team member's Shadow serves as a deconstruction of that character's given archetype. The team member's Social Links meanwhile go about the business of reconstructing them.
- Shadow Yosuke, for Butt-Monkey, blames his family, the town and pretty much everyone else for his failures and lack of popularity, and his prime motivation for doing anything is not to be bored.
- Shadow Chie, for Irregular Girl, hates that no one sees her as a girl, and secretly loves the fact that Yukiko continues to be shy and dependent on Chie for any confidence in herself.
- Shadow Yukiko, for Yamato Nadeshiko, secretly despises being expected to take over the family business and wishes someone, anyone, would take her away from responsibility.
- Shadow Kanji, for Delinquents, reveals that Kanji only acts ridiculously tough because he's deeply insecure about his irregular traits, and all he wants is for people to accept him.
- Shadow Teddie, for Team Pet, points out Teddie's pretty much nothing but the Team Pet, to the point that he has memories of absolutely nothing else, and his life is empty.
- Shadow Rise, for Idol Singer, hates pretending to constantly be cute and happy and wishes people would see that she's not her idol persona at all.
- Shadow Naoto, for Teenage Detective, reveals Naoto only looks like a you.
- The music is so awesome, that the game came with a soundtrack CD (only for the PlayStation 2 version). In Persona 4 Golden, you can switch between the old and new soundtrack, depending on how well you do in battle.
- Developing Social Links (bonding with characters) adds special abilities such as EXP bonuses when fusing certain types of Personas, and special attacks, adds more story, and may even help the main character find love.
- Two different sets of stats are used for both worlds.
- The stronger you get, the less EXP you get from fights. Your characters don't get "tired" like in P3, but eventually, you'll simply run out of SP and run out of ways to recover outside of simply leaving the TV World (although with Golden, by the time you get to Nanako's dungeon you can easily grind endlessly, assuming you've maxed Rise's S. Link and gotten her to Level 62, which gives you HP and SP recovery, respectively, at the end of every battle). Alternatively, there's a rare Persona ability called "Victory Cry" which gives the player (just the player) a complete restoration of HP and SP (The only exception is Marie's dungeon which your HP and SP are halved after every battle). There's also the Fox, who will restore your SP for money. If you max out the Hermit Social Link, Fox will charge only 25% of what it did in the beginning. The money you gain from battle by then covers the cost of the SP you expend.
- The real world has some very comedic moments, such as a cross-dressing event and Kanji losing his swimsuit, and Human Teddie is almost always guaranteed to provide comic relief in the real world.
- The final and true antagonist in the game, Izanami, is based on an actual Japanese myth.
- Great English (except for the Original Persona 4 Chie Satonaka voice actress) and Japanese acting/voice providing. Kanji’s voice especially matches his multi-layered tone and overall character, being much more fitting than his Japanese voice.
- Rise in Persona 4 Golden is even more helpful.
- Madhouse created the opening animation in Persona 4 Golden.
Golden
- The Golden version has the following new features.
- Updated background art;
- A new battle theme;
- Evolved Personas for your party members (each of which with a new exclusive skill);
- Team attacks and bike scenes (which allow your party members to unlock new skills that they couldn't learn otherwise);
- Everybody’s Voice” feature, allowing you to listen to the music in the game;
- A new opening movie;
- New Personas
- Additional storylines
- An extra character named Marie
- Two new social links
- The “Midnight Quiz” minigame with Teddie;
- Rise’s new support abilities (allowing her to restore your HP/SP, cast Mind/Power Charge on the whole party, increase a stat, or block two mortal blows)
- A bug-catching mini-game;
- Two new areas to visit;
- A hub where you can rewatch the anime scenes, and watch a series of lessons on the themes of the series, as well as trailers and commercials for older games in the series.
- The PC version of Golden improves the graphics from the Vita version thanks to the ability to select from a variety of resolutions and texture filtering options. It also has arbitrary frame rate support, which is a pleasant surprise from a port of an older game made by a Japanese studio without much experience porting to the PC. There are some other improvements as well, such as dual audio support and the ability to customize the difficulty from the start, which in the Vita version was restricted to New Game+. A later patch made the port even more polished, fixing issues like stuttering cutscenes and random crashes.
- Console versions are also finally coming to it as well. Those being the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X and S and the Nintendo Switch.
- A few new social features added to the game like Everybody’s Voice where you can see how other players are spending their time in Inaba. These voices, shown as cartoon speech bubbles and thoughts, can also heal your party before a fight begins if you make a Relief Request.
- A skip function unlike the original so you don't need to keep skipping text with the Triangle button every time.
- If an all-out attack fails to kill the Shadows, a pair of characters can team up to unleash a special attack.
Bad Qualities
Overall
- The beginning has a ton of text with very little gameplay, to begin with. (But at least, it still does a good job of introducing us to the Characters)
- The comedy can get a little forced at best and overly long at worst. The most prominent examples include the camping trip, the school festival, and the Amagi Inn scenes.
- Naoto Shirogane, while still an awesome character, is underutilized, not getting enough screen time until the fourth story arc of the game.
- Most of the character development only occurs in the Social Links. The most painful example was Dojima, who has a huge knee-jerk reaction to a threatening letter, which comes off as out of character if you finish his Social Link or any of the female Social Link you romanced.
- For all the buildup to who The Killer is, Adachi is a relatively easy boss to defeat. He doesn't have that much health, nor does he have any gimmicks like Shadow Mitsuo or Kunino-Sagiri did to make him more challenging. Justified, as he's simply a warm-up boss for the much more punishing Ameno-Sagiri.
- A couple of the characters have their problems in terms of their likability.
- Yosuke. He's either the most hilarious character in the game, or he crosses the line over his treatment of Kanji, which can come off as homophobic to some, and his chasing after the girls. He's more divisive in the West than in his home country, though, where opinion leans more positive.
- Chie. She is more of a normal girl compared to the other female party members, and for her irregular girl behavior, others found her Jerkass behavior annoying. One point of contention for Chie was her tendency to mooch off of Yosuke because he broke a DVD that could have easily been replaced, and then got defensive when she used his money on an expensive suit for Teddie without asking, showing that she can't take what she dishes out. Although a lot of people still like her for her fun personality, the sequels and their tendency to flanderize her have only made her more divisive with time.
- Teddie. Some find him to be an amusing Plucky Comic Relief character who has a great and funny dynamic with the rest of the team as well as interesting character development. Others can't bear his puns (or ending his sentences with 'kuma' in the Japanese version), his period as the game's Mission Control, his perverted antics, and find his blatant attempt to be a marketable mascot character annoying.
- Mitsuo is a terrible villain character. He creeps on Yukiko by asking if she would like to go out with him and getting pissed off because she rejected him. By Yukiko rejecting Mitsuo, it's revealed that he has been killing many innocent people, including Mr. Morooka (or as everybody else calls him, "King Moron") just for fame and so that people would know him. It's also revealed that he only killed King Moron to be able to claim the other two victims as well, making him even more of a prick than he already was.
- On top of Mitsuo being a terrible villain, his shadow, Shadow Mitsuo is an annoying, tedious, and frustrating boss.
- Kubo's dungeon served to only pad out the game. The only purpose it served was to kill off a certain NPC, but he was already such a minor character that it felt superfluous.
- Kubo's motivations are also absolute garbage, as his motivations are laughably bad, to the point where one simply can't take this character seriously.
- Unlike Persona 3, dungeon-crawling occurs during the day. This means the player has to choose between leveling up their Social Links (since most of them are only available during the day) and dungeon crawling, whereas Persona 3 allowed both in one day.
- The Twists:
- Naoto being a girl. None of her English voice providers try to sound like a boy, but even if that weren't the case, some figured it out just by looking at her as the way the art for her character is done makes her look feminine enough that one would be able to guess she wasn't a boy. Shinjiro in Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth slightly lampshaded this by stating he could tell Naoto's gender just by looking at her.
- It is very obvious that Mitsuo Kubo was not the killer. By the time he was arrested, the game was halfway finished and it continued to go on making the players aware that something was not right. And any savvy Shin Megami Tensei player who plays around with Fusions will notice Fusion results well above the level that their party should be for this character's boss fight.
- Chie's original voice actress in the original PS2 version of the game, while decent, felt incredibly unfitting for her.
Persona 4: Golden
- It was a PlayStation Vita exclusive for eight years. But in 2020, the game was ported to Steam. However, it also uses Denuvo, which is notorious for not allowing the game to be fully played offline and lowering the performance of games that make use of it.
- Though thankfully in 2022, it was recently announced it would be coming to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch. Which console ports don't make use of Denuvo?
Reception
Persona 4 received critical acclaim from game critics upon release. Jeff Gerstmann of Giant Bomb described it as "one of the best times I've had with video games, whether I was playing by myself or watching someone else play it." The game's setting garnered mixed reactions. IGN labeled Persona 4 as "a murder mystery set against the backdrop of familiar Persona 3 elements", and while this element adds "an interesting twist" to the dungeon crawl and social simulation gameplay, it also causes the plot to "slow down or suffer". Hyper's Tim Henderson commended the game for "willfully embellishing absurd urban legends and other ideas with such assured consistency that the resulting whole is unshakably coherent". However, he criticized it for the narrative's sluggish pace and for how he felt the game is "lacking in elaborate set-pieces". 1UP.com called Persona 4 a "stylish murder mystery", the comparison given being a "small-town Scooby-Doo" adventure.
The game is also noted for a portion of its story revolving around sexual themes. One of the playable characters given attention by reviewers is Kanji, who is considered to be one of the first characters in a mainstream video game to struggle with their sexual orientation, and Atlus has been commended for the inclusion of that character. Atlus USA has stated that they left Kanji's sexual preferences ambiguous and up to the player; however, there has been no word from developer Atlus Japan concerning the matter. According to Dr. Antonia Levi, author of Samurai from Outer Space: Understanding Japanese Animation, the questioning of Kanji's sexuality in the script is a "comment on homosexuality in a greater Japanese social context", in which "the notion of 'coming out' is seen as undesirable...as it necessarily involves adopting a confrontational stance against mainstream lifestyles and values". Brenda Brathwaite, the author of Sex in Video Games, thought it "would have been amazing if they would have made a concrete statement that is gay", but was otherwise "thrilled" with the treatment of the character and the game's representation of his "inner struggles and interactions with friends".
The release of Persona 4: The Golden resulted in a surge in sales of PlayStation Vitas. During its debut week, the game sold 137,076 units in Japan.
Trivia
- The school from K-On! is used in it.
- Persona 4 Golden was meant to be on the PSP (and therefore probably called Persona 4 Portable), however due to limitations the game cannot be ported to the PSP without cutting some content from the game (Even more so than Persona 3 Portable), so the game was remade for the Vita instead.
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