Every once in a while, a game comes by that just... blows me away. I play through a lot of the things, and usually, they don't leave much of an impact: a song or two from their soundtrack added to my iPod, a review put on this blog, and that's about it.
A small proportion manages to hold my attention after I play them. After playing Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, I spent a decent amount of time thinking about the game, weighing the points of the nihilist antagonist against my own views, and in general being very smart and wonderful. The Half-Life games left me thinking about game design, as well as reminiscing about the good old days, when not every FPS was Call of Battle of Honor: Gears of Warshooterfield.
And, very rarely, I'll get obsessed with a game. Pretty much every free moment for a couple weeks will be dedicated to thinking about it, wondering what happens next, trying to plan out re-plays... This is what games like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Mass Effect, Deus Ex, and, of course, Telltale's The Walking Dead did to me. As you may have gathered from both this post's title and the previous blog post, this is what Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 has achieved.
Before we start, I think it's worth mentioning that I played the original PlayStation 2 version from 2008. I don't own a Vita to play Persona 4: The Golden (The strongly expanded version that came out a short time ago), nor do I plan to. It's a great game, and I'd love to play The Golden some day, but I don't think shelling out the money for a Vita when The Golden is the only game I'm interested in on the platform is reasonable.
Presentation:
It's very difficult to divide Persona 4 into presentation and gameplay, as I usually do with reviews. This is because the story is so vitally important to gameplay. I'll discuss that, its implications, and why that's such a great boon to the game in the gameplay section, but I'll talk about the quality of the writing and the plot here.
Persona 4 follows the adventures of an unnamed, silent, protagonist, given the name of Yu Narukami in the spin-off anime, who moves into the rural town of Inaba from the big city. Soon after his arrival, a series of murders happens, with bodies being found hanging upside-down from TV antennae after foggy days. Simultaneously, rumors about a mysterious Midnight Channel, which comes on powered-off TVs at midnight on rainy nights starts circulating around Inaba. The protagonist finds out that he's able to enter TVs, into a mysterious world filled with monsters called Shadows, and that the murders are being committed by throwing people into the TV, with the Shadows becoming violent when it fogs over in the real world. With the help of a bunch of newly made friends, as well as Personae, powerful entities that come under ones control when facing their darkest emotions within the TV world, Yu sets out to discover the identity of the killer, and rescue anyone else thrown into the TV.
To someone like myself, who, despite having watched a decent amount of anime is still unused to that genre's particular flavor, this is a really crazy, weird story. I don't know if it can be chalked down to "Dem crazy Japanese", or if it's just a genuinely strange story, but what I do know is that it works. Once you get past the initial barrier of accepting a murder mystery where the modus operandi is throwing people into a TV, Persona 4 provides an interesting plot, with plentiful twists and a lot of memorable characters and moments. Going any further would require major spoilers, but believe me, this is a really damn good murder mystery storyline. It's thematically interesting, too, providing a particular take on human nature that I haven't really seen in games before, and that I think is a lot more realistic than the good people/evil people morality of some games and the gray morality of others. This isn't morally gray, but it isn't black and white either: The good guys are, emotionally, very flawed people, and it isn't as much about overcoming these flaws as it is accepting them and turning them into a positive.
But of course, what would a JRPG story be without its cast of characters? Probably, not much good. Luckily, Persona 4 backs up its plotline with a fantastic roster of characters. Just the main cast is an utter blast, and the addition of numerous side characters makes you become truly attached to this world. Whilst the storyline might be "a really damn good murder mystery storyline", the characters are, in all honesty, what makes Persona 4 good, in both the presentation and gameplay departments (more on how this affects gameplay later). Even the worst characters in the game I would describe as "pretty good". Whilst I was intrigued by the investigation, the moments when the game truly shone was in the scenes in-between rescues, where your little scooby-gang of investigators gets to chill out and goof around. This happens everywhere from a school camping trip to a party at an expensive club, and is fantastic at every instance. As cliche as saying this is, I can't come up with a better way of expressing it: These people feel real, and this makes the scenes focusing on their interactions a true blast to witness, going everywhere from side-splittingly hilarious to extremely touching.
Unfortunately, having this great a plot with this amount of fantastic characters requires some set-up. The first two hours of the game are pretty much one giant cutscene, with a couple gameplay segments thrown in where the only thing you can really do is save before progressing further into said cutscene. This causes a terrible first impression, and I was on the verge of quitting before the game finally threw me into real control. It's understandable in retrospect, setting up a lot of the story and getting you to know the characters, but it's definitely very off-putting initially.
Here's where, in any other story-focused game review I would go through the roster of characters, but that would be too long, as well as horribly riddled with spoilers. Let it be said that it's huge, and full of quality. Just the Social Links (more on them in the Gameplay section) amount to twenty wonderfully realized characters.
Visually, Persona 4 is fantastic. The technology is obviously dated, being two generations of consoles ago, but it's the design that saves it. The real world is decently boring-looking, but conveys the backwater-town feeling that is integral to the game's storyline. You'll come to love these places, and they all ooze atmosphere, from the somewhat shitty public school you go to to the crowded and shady Chinese restaurant you'll end up spending a bunch of time in.
Where the visual design shines, however, is inside the Midnight Channel. Each dungeon has its own unique look, being a twisted version of a recognizable type of building - a bathhouse, a strip-club, a scientific research facility - and representing the hidden feelings of one of the characters. These places can be genuinely disturbing, be it through the uncomfortable calm of the underground lab or the manic energy of the bathhouse. Outside the dungeons, the Midnight Channel is also extremely distinct, going for a red-and-black colour scheme that results in some very distorted and strange visuals.
The character design is also brilliant. The actual 3D-rendered models of the human characters are rather bland, though with a strange, almost chibi-like quality to them. However, the portraits that accompany major characters, as well as those you can form Social Links with, are, without exception, excellently drawn.
This is high-quality anime artwork we're talking about, and it looks sharp and stylish. This carries through into a few of the more important cutscenes, which are 2D animated, and bring the brilliant art of the portraits into motion.
The design of the enemies is also creative. I know a lot of these are carry-overs from earlier Persona or Shin Megami Tensei games, but they're fun to look at nonetheless. There's a disappointing amount of re-colored enemies, but you're constantly fed new designs up to the last couple of dungeons, so they don't get old, especially when re-colors don't tend to appear in consecutive dungeons (read: at least 10 hours in between). The bosses are quite possibly the most impressive part, however, usually being an insanely intricate amalgamation of visual symbolism.
The final thing to mention, visuals wise, is the menus, which look OK. This wouldn't be worth mentioning if not for the very distinct use of the color yellow throughout them. It's an interesting stylistic choice, and, even if moment-by-moment it has little effect, it does make the game feel a lot more energetic and vibrant. Currently playing through its prequel, Persona 3 FES, which instead chose a blue color palette, I can testify that this does have a strong effect that might go unnoticed, Persona 3 feeling a lot more mechanically somber than Persona 4, even if they are quite similar when put side-by-side. If you ask me, this use of a unified color is a great choice, making the game feel very coherent and allowing you to throw in an extra layer of design.
Seeing as how I've got nothing but praise for both story and visuals, you'd expect the game to fall down on its audio. You couldn't be wronger. This is a soundtrack composed mostly by the masterful Shoji Meguro, whose work I've been a fan of even before playing any of the games he worked on. There's also a few tracks credited to Atsushi Kitajoh, whom I did not know prior to this, all four of which are extremely fun to listen to, if completely different in both sound and use within the game from Meguro's.
The main body of the soundtrack, however, that composed by Meguro, is phenomenal, to the point where it may be my new favorite game soundtrack. It's sharp when it needs to be sharp, it's always got a great beat, and it's the only videogame soundtrack where vocals have worked for me, apart from those bits in Bastion. Meguro's work runs the entire emotional scale, and does it brilliantly at every turn. The main battle theme is, for sure, the best one I've met in a videogame to date, a fun, cool vocal track that both gets you pumped for battle and works on emphasizing the strong friendship between your characters. It's also the only JRPG battle track that I wasn't sick of hearing by the end fo the game.
The voice acting may not be quite as phenomenal, but is still top-notch in almost every respect. Every character's voice fits them perfectly, and everyone on the main cast acts out every single line convincingly. Some of the minor characters do get rather awkward, however. Luckily, they only really talk at high ranks in their Social Links, and even then, for only a text-box or two, so you'll be spared. It would have been nice to have voice-acting for the entire run, however. Social Links, even those with the main cast, are not voice-acted, which is somewhat disappointing, if understandable, given the fortune Atlus already spends on localization.
Presentation Verdict:
10/10
Persona 4 is a masterpiece of presentation, excelling in every single aspect. It's gorgeous, it sounds fantastic, and it's got one of the best stories to grace videogames. It's not quite perfect, but it's the closest any game I've played has gotten.
Gameplay:
All this talk of presentation is good and fine, but what makes a game is the gameplay. Persona 4 might not be as excellent in this department as in its magnificent presentation, but it's not bad at all nonetheless.
Persona 4 fuses two genres. For about half of its run time, it's that strange midpoint between adventure game, visual novel, and life sim that people preferring either genre insist belongs to their own favorite. I personally think it falls more on the life sim side, even if I'm not a particular fan of the genre. It's a game of routine, and as such, I think it's important to go over said routine. In the morning, you'll go to school, and occasionally get a small cutscene, where you overhear a conversation on the way there or chat with a friend. You'll spend your day at school, and occasionally get a small cutscene where you can get rewards by answering questions right in class.
After school, the meat of the game begins. You are free to walk around the town (though the areas you can go to are limited to five districts, two of which are really just entry points into your home and the dungeon), go to shops, take part-time jobs and, most importantly, talk to people. You'll be able to form Social Links with a few of these, and this means that you'll be able to create higher-level Personae of a certain class (or Arcana, as it's called in the game) to use in the dungeon-crawler section of the game (more on this later). Working on a Social Link, going on a job, or visiting the midnight channel eats up your afternoon.
After this, you'll return home, and get an evening period, where you'll be able to choose from a more limited pool of actions: a few jobs, three Social Links, the ability to go fishing, and a bed to very slightly advance a random social link. Unfortunately, you'll run out of things to do in the evening period really fast, and you'll be stuck grinding jobs every afternoon half way into the game.
Sundays are disappointingly similar to the rest of the week. There are a few Social Links that are only available on Sunday, and you can't partake in others, but all in all, they're just a normal day where you don't go to school. You do get the option of essentially taking two evening periods instead of a day and evening period, but, as previously mentioned, evening periods are essentially useless, so there's next to no reason to do this. If you do choose to take it, it's actually even more limited than a normal evening period, none of your evening social links are available, nor is fishing nor the hospital janitor part-time job.
That said, the days of the week are important. Social Links are only available on certain days, and whilst this is evident with some (like the sports club or the cultural club ones, which you can only advance on days when the club meets), it's something you'll have to figure out through trial-and-error for most. You'll end up going through a rather interesting set of scheduling decisions, and the choice between certain Social Links and others will end up being agonizing: You'll want to continue some for the story, but others will give you a bigger advantage within the dungeon at short-term. Others will come with an added benefit, advancing as part of a job, so you'll earn some cash and possibly skill increases in the process of partaking in them.
Party member Social Links are obviously more important than other characters' to the plot. To prioritize them, the game has a clever little feature where, by leveling up party members Social Links, the member in question will gain an ability: Pushing you out of a killing blow, following up on a critical hit... It's a nice little carrot on a stick, and finding out how your party member will evolve with their Link is a cool surprise, especially once combat moves with creative or funny animations come in.
However, the Social Link system is not without flaws. There are some minor inconveniences that annoyed me to no end. Within the Social Link cutscene, you'll often be presented with a variety of responses. Choosing the right choices leads you to advance the Link faster. However, there is a series of problems with this. Occasionally, the responses are exceedingly similar to each other, to the point where it's difficult to pinpoint which one will provide you with a boost. This is not nearly the case in all or even most of the Social Links, but it's common enough to be a real issue. Because of this, you may end up spending several days in generic Social Link events: When you pursue a Link, but don't advance it, you'll get a text box saying something to the effect of "You spend time with X", and move over to the evening period. This is extremely unsatisfying, and completely botches the pacing of the game when you h, since you end up spending more time in the less interesting evening periods and morning cutscenes.
Another problem with Social Link advancement is a completely arbitrary restriction. To get the most out of every Social Link, you need to have a Persona of the corresponding Arcana with you when you're partaking in the event. This'll increase the benefits you get from choosing the correct dialogue choices, and also increase the value of the "You spend time with X" scenes. There's no reason not to have it, and this means that, if you want maximum efficiency, you'll find yourself trudging over to get a Persona of the correct Arcana whenever you want to partake in a Social Link. It just stretches game time for no reason. The only real consequence beyond forcing you to do a lot of tedious walking around is that you can't efficiently work on Social Links you don't have Personae in, but this is, once again, a pointless constraint.
The way the calendar works is also problematic. If you're anything like me, you'll want to schedule your Social Links in advance, to ensure maximum efficiency and quick completion of the storylines you're most interested in. However, interruptions often come unexpectedly, be it in the form of days off school or days skipped over for plot reasons. This is reflective of real life, but is also annoying from the perspective of a min-maxer such as myself.
Despite all the criticism I'm heaving at it, the Social Link system is a great one. It provides a fun management aspect to the game, and is a fantastic wave of weaving character development together with actual gameplay. The fact that it's the only real venue of character development allows an interesting dynamic in repeated playthroughs of the game, where you perceive the actions of the main characters differently within the main plot line depending on how far you're in their storyline. It works a lot better than character development in pretty much any other game I've played.
Social Links are the primary component of the life-sim section of Persona 4, but not the only one. There's also a stats system, separate from your combat stats, that affects the game. You're ranked in five different areas of competence, including things like Expression or Knowledge. Through some actions, you can increase these stats. A few Social Links are hidden behind stat walls: You won't be able to talk to your shy cousin unless you have a certain degree of Understanding, and you'll be unable to hang out with some of your more intimidating schoolmates until you're able to muster the courage to do so. Some of the story events allow you a few extra choices if you have certain stats, though these are mostly for comedic effect or a bit of added exposition, so you won't be missing out on anything major.
There's a few ways to increase stats, and you'll often be prioritizing increases in certain stats over others. You'll likely end up with everything or almost everything maxed out by the end of the game, but it's still important for you to be able to choose when to increase certain things. Some stats are easier to increase than others, however: Answering questions at school will give you a good chunk of the points you'll need in Knowledge, and a lot of evening period events involve a Courage increase. Understanding, on the other hand, is pretty hard to boost. I'm not quite sure whether this was an intentional inbalance or not, but it's definitely there, and it can make the end-game quite frustrating if you haven't capped out Understanding yet.
It's an interesting system in theory, adding something to consider beyond just Social Links when creating your schedule, but its effects are too limited to be of too much concern. With barely even remembering these skills existed, I only ever ran into one roadblock imposed on me by this system with the exception of the meaningless checks in main plotline events. Plus, it's worthy of note: This is a stick rather than a carrot. Apart from the aforementioned plotline checks, you don't get anything for passing a skill check: instead, you loose something for failing it. It's just not enough motivation to make any major scheduling decisions around increasing skills.
The final mechanic is the weather. There's three types of weather in the game: Sunny, Cloudy, or Rainy, though only rain makes a real difference to the gameplay. The music will change with each type of weather, and that's about the only change you'll notice from Sunny and Cloudy apart from the blindingly obvious. Rainy days, however, make a significant difference. Most of your Social Links will be unavailable on Rainy days, so they're perfect to go to the dungeon on. Furthermore, a few Rainy days in a row are often indicative of fog, which marks your deadline with completion of most of the dungeons. Failing to beat the dungeon boss before a foggy day results in a game over. That said, dungeon-crawling isn't your only option on a Rainy day: the local Chinese restaurant offers a challenge that'll increase several of your stats simultaneously, making these the ideal days for stats increases as well. As previously said, I just wish the stat system was more important, as it's not a big toss-up between the two. Rainy days also allow the possibility for some special monsters to appear within the dungeon. These are often weak and give large XP rewards, so the idea of dungeon crawling on Rainy days becomes even more appealing.
The weather system is ultimately disappointing. It's made a big deal of originally, but it ultimately just ends up being a way of dungeon-crawling without avoiding progress on Social Links. I think it actually detracts from the experience, since you don't need to choose between pushing on in a dungeon and gaining power through Social Links. If Rainy days had something a bit more appealing to do than leveling up stats, or there was some advantage to going into the dungeon on Sunny and Cloudy days, the system would be much better.
The process of writing this part of the review is fascinating. I've realized just how many flaws the life-sim part of Persona 4 has, yet it's still insanely compelling. The writing carries it well, and even if the mechanics built around the Social Link system fail in places the core of the system is so solid that it's still a great experience to plan your life carefully. I just wish this component was a bit less forgiving, and that the stat system was more important. The stat system really is the biggest downfall of the life-sim component.
But enough about this pansy life-sim shit! Let's move on to the real man's part of the game, the dungeon crawling! How does that fare?
It does... pretty well. It does nothing really new, but it's a pretty good run-of-the-mill JRPG combat system. You run around dungeons, fighting monsters in a turn-based fashion, with a party of four members. Unlike previous Persona games, you can actually control party members others than your main character directly here, which improves the combat experience dramatically from previous games (an-oh-so-subtle hint at my impressions of Persona 3's in my upcoming review). The exploration of the dungeon is simple. You go into a semi-randomly generated dungeon, and move around opening doors and chest, and fighting monsters until you find a way to the next floor, you go up to said next floor, rinse and repeat. This is as basic as exploration gets in JRPGs, and the only real twist is the ability to hit a monster on the map to get an advantage in combat, a system so innovative that Super Mario RPG did it all the way back in 1996. It's a bit awkward to do, too: Your weapon swing is slow and relatively short-ranged, so monsters will often slip under it and get an advantage on you instead. This is probably intentional, but does make for some frustrating moments.
Combat, at a base level, is also pretty much what you'd expect from a JRPG: you attack in turns, you have a basic attack and magic, and it all looks a bit ridiculous. What Persona 4 does instead of re-inventing the combat system, which is something JRPGs seem obsessed with doing and more often than not end up failing at, is add a few interesting mechanical twists. For instance, the way elemental weaknesses are handled. It's a pretty standard trope that being hit by a weakness does more damage, but in Persona 4 it has two additional effects. It knocks whoever has been hit over, and gives the attacker an extra turn. Now, people or monsters who are knocked over take a turn to get back up, basically immobilizing them for a single turn. Furthermore, if they are hit, they take additional damage. But here's the catch: Hitting a knocked-over enemy will also put them back on their feet, even if it's with their weakness. And the icing on the cake: If all enemies are knocked over, you can perform an all-out attack, which does slightly above the same amount damage as being melee-attacked by your entire party to every single enemy.
These apparently small changes have huge repercussions. Everything described above applies to both the party and its enemies, apart from the all-out attack. You have to carefully consider how to prolong your chains of attacks, taking as little damage as possible by managing enemy knock-downs. Once you find out the weaknesses of your enemies, the old JRPG problem of combat taking ages per encounter is also solved: You can easily knock everyone down and finish the fight quickly with an all-out attack. Your party can also be easily comboed to death if you're not careful with weakness management and taking out enemies with AoE attacks.
The overall level of challenge is decently high and extremely fair. You have to manage your party decently well, making sure to keep healed and maintaining efficiency as high as possible, whilst working around your party weaknesses. Bosses in particular are challenging fights, and often very creatively designed. You won't see many of the typical JRPG boss gimmicks here, instead finding innovative and interesting new gimmicks. It's not the rock-hard type of game Atlus is famous for, but it's no cakewalk either.
It's difficult to describe just how much depth the weakness system adds to the combat, particularly when you want to complete dungeons in as few days as possible.
The reason time management is relevant here is that mana-regenerating items are extremely rare. You'll want to conserve as much magic as possible, as combat is nigh-on impossible with just regular attacks, but you won't be able to regain your mana between battles on a regular basis. There's a certain Social Link that allows you to regenerate mana without leaving the Midnight Channel, but until you get it to high levels (which is tricky to do with this Social Link, as it works differently from most others), it'll eat up most of your money to use it even once. This is a brilliant way of pacing the dungeon: Your characters get tired, so you leave, because you can't go on any further. It's storytelling through mechanics at its most basic.
It's leaving that's the problem. For some reason, you don't just get a button that allows you to leave the dungeon. Instead, you must purchase a certain item ("Goho M", har har, very clever, Persona) that teleports you to the entrance. You get a free one the first time you go into the first dungeon, but after that you must buy them, which led me to get stuck in my second dungeon run when I had no way back and no SP or health. It's annoying, and it's pointless. Luckily, re-entering a dungeon allows you to start back at the highest floor you reached until you beat the boss. After this, a second boss will appear in its place, who'll reward you with a powerful item upon defeat. Look out: The second boss for the first dungeon was accidentally overpowered by the developers (a certain ability of his does several times the damage it's intended to), so he may be nigh-on impossible to beat until you level up a fair bit above what they expected.
Speaking of buying Goho M's, the game also has a shop system. Buying stuff works as expected from a JRPG: you buy weapons and armor, which will affect your attack, hit chance, defense, and evasion, as well as have other passive bonuses. Weapons are character-specific: your main character uses two handed swords, your support uses two knives, and your healer uses fans. Oddly enough, armor is divided by gender, which is not something I've encountered in a JRPG before. However, the ability to buy these items is what's interesting. There's a pseudo-crafting system in the game: enemies will drop raw materials. Selling these to the metalworks, where you'll be buying all of your equipment, allows the local smith to create new equipment. It's also one of your main sources of income, along with what enemies drop and part-time jobs. It doesn't really add any depth, but it encourages finding new enemies and collecting the materials they drop. Other than weapons, most of your money will be going to Goho M, group-healing items and revival beads.
And finally, the titular element of the game: The Persona. Personae are the ones doing the magic fighting, and powering you up to survive monster attacks. Plotwise, they're aspects of your personality that materialize in the TV world, but in practice they act like Pokemon. Your special ability as Persona 4's guest of the Velvet Room is that you're able to change Personae, whilst your party members are stuck with theirs. This is why I say they act a bit like Pokemon: You have a roster of them, and switch them in or out to deal with the situation at hand. Unlike Pokemon, they're not as permanent in your party. You will outlevel them, and have to find new ones. This can be done in one of two ways: Finding them after a battle as basically loot, or fusing Personae you have into new, more powerful Personae in the Velvet Room.
This is where Social Links intersect with dungeon crawling. In the Velvet Room, you're able to fuse Personae into new ones, of level equivalent to or below your own. However, having a Social Link of the Arcana of the Persona you're creating infuses it with experience, giving it a significant level boost with more advanced links. This can provide serious advantages, as they become quite a lot more powerful than your companions or your enemies. To add to this, Personae gain abilities with levels, so if you fuse a Persona with no or little Social Link boost you'll be stuck with a very shallow move pool.
Now, I won't pretend to understand the fusion system beyond this. It has tonnes of depth and complexity, and from what I understand is taken from other games in the Shin Megami Tensei franchise. I'm sure you can create absolutely beastly Personae if you understand all the nuances, but even with the basic "I'll fuse two or three guys and get another guy, who might inherit some abilities from his creator guys" approach I took the system was complex and satisfying.
The only flaw I have with the Persona system is actually one I share with the Companion system, albeit for different reasons. Because of how many you have, and how often you switch, you outlevel your Personae quite fast, leaving them next to useless within a dungeon or two. This means you end up spending a little too much time screwing around in the Velvet Room for my liking, as you have to fuse Personae pretty much constantly to keep up. The same is true with party members. It does the thing that I despise where only active party members gain XP, which, admittedly, makes logical sense. However, what it means, is that unless you want to grind, you have to stick with the same party through the entire game, and if you want to switch to new characters, do it as soon as they're available, because an underleveled party member is pretty much useless. It's infuriating, since all of the party members have their own funny little quips in battle which you'll end up missing out on.
Gameplay Verdict:
8/10
A mostly solid game, with a few glaring flaws dragging it down. The stat system outside dungeons drags down the social element by being too easily ignorable, and there's a little too much busywork in the Persona crafting. It also seems to be a running theme to have little incoveniences in place for no good reason. Despite this, a traditional JRPG combat system with an ingenious twist, as well as a great time-management aspect outside dungeons put the gameplay in Persona 4 solidly above average.
Final Verdict:
(10+8)/2 = 9
9/10
Despite its many flaws in the gameplay department, Persona 4 manages to be a worthwhile game to play even just as a straight-up JRPG. Combine this with its outstanding in every single respect presentation, and a really cool blending of story and gameplay, and you've got my favourite game of all time. If you're someone who can really get into a detective story, and love character-focused storytelling, for crying out loud, play this. Persona 4 is an absolutely outstanding game.
A small proportion manages to hold my attention after I play them. After playing Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, I spent a decent amount of time thinking about the game, weighing the points of the nihilist antagonist against my own views, and in general being very smart and wonderful. The Half-Life games left me thinking about game design, as well as reminiscing about the good old days, when not every FPS was Call of Battle of Honor: Gears of Warshooterfield.
And, very rarely, I'll get obsessed with a game. Pretty much every free moment for a couple weeks will be dedicated to thinking about it, wondering what happens next, trying to plan out re-plays... This is what games like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Mass Effect, Deus Ex, and, of course, Telltale's The Walking Dead did to me. As you may have gathered from both this post's title and the previous blog post, this is what Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 has achieved.Before we start, I think it's worth mentioning that I played the original PlayStation 2 version from 2008. I don't own a Vita to play Persona 4: The Golden (The strongly expanded version that came out a short time ago), nor do I plan to. It's a great game, and I'd love to play The Golden some day, but I don't think shelling out the money for a Vita when The Golden is the only game I'm interested in on the platform is reasonable.
Presentation:
It's very difficult to divide Persona 4 into presentation and gameplay, as I usually do with reviews. This is because the story is so vitally important to gameplay. I'll discuss that, its implications, and why that's such a great boon to the game in the gameplay section, but I'll talk about the quality of the writing and the plot here.
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| This is Yu. Heh. See what they did there? |
To someone like myself, who, despite having watched a decent amount of anime is still unused to that genre's particular flavor, this is a really crazy, weird story. I don't know if it can be chalked down to "Dem crazy Japanese", or if it's just a genuinely strange story, but what I do know is that it works. Once you get past the initial barrier of accepting a murder mystery where the modus operandi is throwing people into a TV, Persona 4 provides an interesting plot, with plentiful twists and a lot of memorable characters and moments. Going any further would require major spoilers, but believe me, this is a really damn good murder mystery storyline. It's thematically interesting, too, providing a particular take on human nature that I haven't really seen in games before, and that I think is a lot more realistic than the good people/evil people morality of some games and the gray morality of others. This isn't morally gray, but it isn't black and white either: The good guys are, emotionally, very flawed people, and it isn't as much about overcoming these flaws as it is accepting them and turning them into a positive.
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| Ignore that horrifying thing on the left. You'll get to know it. |
Unfortunately, having this great a plot with this amount of fantastic characters requires some set-up. The first two hours of the game are pretty much one giant cutscene, with a couple gameplay segments thrown in where the only thing you can really do is save before progressing further into said cutscene. This causes a terrible first impression, and I was on the verge of quitting before the game finally threw me into real control. It's understandable in retrospect, setting up a lot of the story and getting you to know the characters, but it's definitely very off-putting initially.
Here's where, in any other story-focused game review I would go through the roster of characters, but that would be too long, as well as horribly riddled with spoilers. Let it be said that it's huge, and full of quality. Just the Social Links (more on them in the Gameplay section) amount to twenty wonderfully realized characters.
Visually, Persona 4 is fantastic. The technology is obviously dated, being two generations of consoles ago, but it's the design that saves it. The real world is decently boring-looking, but conveys the backwater-town feeling that is integral to the game's storyline. You'll come to love these places, and they all ooze atmosphere, from the somewhat shitty public school you go to to the crowded and shady Chinese restaurant you'll end up spending a bunch of time in.
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| One of the, admittedly, more visually impressive areas |
The character design is also brilliant. The actual 3D-rendered models of the human characters are rather bland, though with a strange, almost chibi-like quality to them. However, the portraits that accompany major characters, as well as those you can form Social Links with, are, without exception, excellently drawn.
This is high-quality anime artwork we're talking about, and it looks sharp and stylish. This carries through into a few of the more important cutscenes, which are 2D animated, and bring the brilliant art of the portraits into motion.
The design of the enemies is also creative. I know a lot of these are carry-overs from earlier Persona or Shin Megami Tensei games, but they're fun to look at nonetheless. There's a disappointing amount of re-colored enemies, but you're constantly fed new designs up to the last couple of dungeons, so they don't get old, especially when re-colors don't tend to appear in consecutive dungeons (read: at least 10 hours in between). The bosses are quite possibly the most impressive part, however, usually being an insanely intricate amalgamation of visual symbolism.
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| A still from the intro, showing off the 2D animation. |
The main body of the soundtrack, however, that composed by Meguro, is phenomenal, to the point where it may be my new favorite game soundtrack. It's sharp when it needs to be sharp, it's always got a great beat, and it's the only videogame soundtrack where vocals have worked for me, apart from those bits in Bastion. Meguro's work runs the entire emotional scale, and does it brilliantly at every turn. The main battle theme is, for sure, the best one I've met in a videogame to date, a fun, cool vocal track that both gets you pumped for battle and works on emphasizing the strong friendship between your characters. It's also the only JRPG battle track that I wasn't sick of hearing by the end fo the game.
The voice acting may not be quite as phenomenal, but is still top-notch in almost every respect. Every character's voice fits them perfectly, and everyone on the main cast acts out every single line convincingly. Some of the minor characters do get rather awkward, however. Luckily, they only really talk at high ranks in their Social Links, and even then, for only a text-box or two, so you'll be spared. It would have been nice to have voice-acting for the entire run, however. Social Links, even those with the main cast, are not voice-acted, which is somewhat disappointing, if understandable, given the fortune Atlus already spends on localization.
Presentation Verdict:
10/10
Persona 4 is a masterpiece of presentation, excelling in every single aspect. It's gorgeous, it sounds fantastic, and it's got one of the best stories to grace videogames. It's not quite perfect, but it's the closest any game I've played has gotten.
Gameplay:
All this talk of presentation is good and fine, but what makes a game is the gameplay. Persona 4 might not be as excellent in this department as in its magnificent presentation, but it's not bad at all nonetheless.
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| EXCITING SCHEDULING ACTION! |
After school, the meat of the game begins. You are free to walk around the town (though the areas you can go to are limited to five districts, two of which are really just entry points into your home and the dungeon), go to shops, take part-time jobs and, most importantly, talk to people. You'll be able to form Social Links with a few of these, and this means that you'll be able to create higher-level Personae of a certain class (or Arcana, as it's called in the game) to use in the dungeon-crawler section of the game (more on this later). Working on a Social Link, going on a job, or visiting the midnight channel eats up your afternoon.
After this, you'll return home, and get an evening period, where you'll be able to choose from a more limited pool of actions: a few jobs, three Social Links, the ability to go fishing, and a bed to very slightly advance a random social link. Unfortunately, you'll run out of things to do in the evening period really fast, and you'll be stuck grinding jobs every afternoon half way into the game.
Sundays are disappointingly similar to the rest of the week. There are a few Social Links that are only available on Sunday, and you can't partake in others, but all in all, they're just a normal day where you don't go to school. You do get the option of essentially taking two evening periods instead of a day and evening period, but, as previously mentioned, evening periods are essentially useless, so there's next to no reason to do this. If you do choose to take it, it's actually even more limited than a normal evening period, none of your evening social links are available, nor is fishing nor the hospital janitor part-time job.
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| Social Linking in the crappy little school |
Party member Social Links are obviously more important than other characters' to the plot. To prioritize them, the game has a clever little feature where, by leveling up party members Social Links, the member in question will gain an ability: Pushing you out of a killing blow, following up on a critical hit... It's a nice little carrot on a stick, and finding out how your party member will evolve with their Link is a cool surprise, especially once combat moves with creative or funny animations come in.
However, the Social Link system is not without flaws. There are some minor inconveniences that annoyed me to no end. Within the Social Link cutscene, you'll often be presented with a variety of responses. Choosing the right choices leads you to advance the Link faster. However, there is a series of problems with this. Occasionally, the responses are exceedingly similar to each other, to the point where it's difficult to pinpoint which one will provide you with a boost. This is not nearly the case in all or even most of the Social Links, but it's common enough to be a real issue. Because of this, you may end up spending several days in generic Social Link events: When you pursue a Link, but don't advance it, you'll get a text box saying something to the effect of "You spend time with X", and move over to the evening period. This is extremely unsatisfying, and completely botches the pacing of the game when you h, since you end up spending more time in the less interesting evening periods and morning cutscenes.
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| Congrats! You don't have to go out of your way for no reason! |
The way the calendar works is also problematic. If you're anything like me, you'll want to schedule your Social Links in advance, to ensure maximum efficiency and quick completion of the storylines you're most interested in. However, interruptions often come unexpectedly, be it in the form of days off school or days skipped over for plot reasons. This is reflective of real life, but is also annoying from the perspective of a min-maxer such as myself.
Despite all the criticism I'm heaving at it, the Social Link system is a great one. It provides a fun management aspect to the game, and is a fantastic wave of weaving character development together with actual gameplay. The fact that it's the only real venue of character development allows an interesting dynamic in repeated playthroughs of the game, where you perceive the actions of the main characters differently within the main plot line depending on how far you're in their storyline. It works a lot better than character development in pretty much any other game I've played.
Social Links are the primary component of the life-sim section of Persona 4, but not the only one. There's also a stats system, separate from your combat stats, that affects the game. You're ranked in five different areas of competence, including things like Expression or Knowledge. Through some actions, you can increase these stats. A few Social Links are hidden behind stat walls: You won't be able to talk to your shy cousin unless you have a certain degree of Understanding, and you'll be unable to hang out with some of your more intimidating schoolmates until you're able to muster the courage to do so. Some of the story events allow you a few extra choices if you have certain stats, though these are mostly for comedic effect or a bit of added exposition, so you won't be missing out on anything major.
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| This guy beats up demons for a hobby. Courage: Daring. |
It's an interesting system in theory, adding something to consider beyond just Social Links when creating your schedule, but its effects are too limited to be of too much concern. With barely even remembering these skills existed, I only ever ran into one roadblock imposed on me by this system with the exception of the meaningless checks in main plotline events. Plus, it's worthy of note: This is a stick rather than a carrot. Apart from the aforementioned plotline checks, you don't get anything for passing a skill check: instead, you loose something for failing it. It's just not enough motivation to make any major scheduling decisions around increasing skills.
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| On Rainy days, it's this or the dungeon. |
The weather system is ultimately disappointing. It's made a big deal of originally, but it ultimately just ends up being a way of dungeon-crawling without avoiding progress on Social Links. I think it actually detracts from the experience, since you don't need to choose between pushing on in a dungeon and gaining power through Social Links. If Rainy days had something a bit more appealing to do than leveling up stats, or there was some advantage to going into the dungeon on Sunny and Cloudy days, the system would be much better.
The process of writing this part of the review is fascinating. I've realized just how many flaws the life-sim part of Persona 4 has, yet it's still insanely compelling. The writing carries it well, and even if the mechanics built around the Social Link system fail in places the core of the system is so solid that it's still a great experience to plan your life carefully. I just wish this component was a bit less forgiving, and that the stat system was more important. The stat system really is the biggest downfall of the life-sim component.
But enough about this pansy life-sim shit! Let's move on to the real man's part of the game, the dungeon crawling! How does that fare?
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| A combat menu. There's more skills per character than shown. |
Combat, at a base level, is also pretty much what you'd expect from a JRPG: you attack in turns, you have a basic attack and magic, and it all looks a bit ridiculous. What Persona 4 does instead of re-inventing the combat system, which is something JRPGs seem obsessed with doing and more often than not end up failing at, is add a few interesting mechanical twists. For instance, the way elemental weaknesses are handled. It's a pretty standard trope that being hit by a weakness does more damage, but in Persona 4 it has two additional effects. It knocks whoever has been hit over, and gives the attacker an extra turn. Now, people or monsters who are knocked over take a turn to get back up, basically immobilizing them for a single turn. Furthermore, if they are hit, they take additional damage. But here's the catch: Hitting a knocked-over enemy will also put them back on their feet, even if it's with their weakness. And the icing on the cake: If all enemies are knocked over, you can perform an all-out attack, which does slightly above the same amount damage as being melee-attacked by your entire party to every single enemy.
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| Don't have anything to illustrate, so have a generic picture. |
The overall level of challenge is decently high and extremely fair. You have to manage your party decently well, making sure to keep healed and maintaining efficiency as high as possible, whilst working around your party weaknesses. Bosses in particular are challenging fights, and often very creatively designed. You won't see many of the typical JRPG boss gimmicks here, instead finding innovative and interesting new gimmicks. It's not the rock-hard type of game Atlus is famous for, but it's no cakewalk either.
It's difficult to describe just how much depth the weakness system adds to the combat, particularly when you want to complete dungeons in as few days as possible.
The reason time management is relevant here is that mana-regenerating items are extremely rare. You'll want to conserve as much magic as possible, as combat is nigh-on impossible with just regular attacks, but you won't be able to regain your mana between battles on a regular basis. There's a certain Social Link that allows you to regenerate mana without leaving the Midnight Channel, but until you get it to high levels (which is tricky to do with this Social Link, as it works differently from most others), it'll eat up most of your money to use it even once. This is a brilliant way of pacing the dungeon: Your characters get tired, so you leave, because you can't go on any further. It's storytelling through mechanics at its most basic.
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| BIG KANJI... Metal works |
Speaking of buying Goho M's, the game also has a shop system. Buying stuff works as expected from a JRPG: you buy weapons and armor, which will affect your attack, hit chance, defense, and evasion, as well as have other passive bonuses. Weapons are character-specific: your main character uses two handed swords, your support uses two knives, and your healer uses fans. Oddly enough, armor is divided by gender, which is not something I've encountered in a JRPG before. However, the ability to buy these items is what's interesting. There's a pseudo-crafting system in the game: enemies will drop raw materials. Selling these to the metalworks, where you'll be buying all of your equipment, allows the local smith to create new equipment. It's also one of your main sources of income, along with what enemies drop and part-time jobs. It doesn't really add any depth, but it encourages finding new enemies and collecting the materials they drop. Other than weapons, most of your money will be going to Goho M, group-healing items and revival beads.
And finally, the titular element of the game: The Persona. Personae are the ones doing the magic fighting, and powering you up to survive monster attacks. Plotwise, they're aspects of your personality that materialize in the TV world, but in practice they act like Pokemon. Your special ability as Persona 4's guest of the Velvet Room is that you're able to change Personae, whilst your party members are stuck with theirs. This is why I say they act a bit like Pokemon: You have a roster of them, and switch them in or out to deal with the situation at hand. Unlike Pokemon, they're not as permanent in your party. You will outlevel them, and have to find new ones. This can be done in one of two ways: Finding them after a battle as basically loot, or fusing Personae you have into new, more powerful Personae in the Velvet Room.
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| Very few of the Personae I've come accross |
Now, I won't pretend to understand the fusion system beyond this. It has tonnes of depth and complexity, and from what I understand is taken from other games in the Shin Megami Tensei franchise. I'm sure you can create absolutely beastly Personae if you understand all the nuances, but even with the basic "I'll fuse two or three guys and get another guy, who might inherit some abilities from his creator guys" approach I took the system was complex and satisfying.
The only flaw I have with the Persona system is actually one I share with the Companion system, albeit for different reasons. Because of how many you have, and how often you switch, you outlevel your Personae quite fast, leaving them next to useless within a dungeon or two. This means you end up spending a little too much time screwing around in the Velvet Room for my liking, as you have to fuse Personae pretty much constantly to keep up. The same is true with party members. It does the thing that I despise where only active party members gain XP, which, admittedly, makes logical sense. However, what it means, is that unless you want to grind, you have to stick with the same party through the entire game, and if you want to switch to new characters, do it as soon as they're available, because an underleveled party member is pretty much useless. It's infuriating, since all of the party members have their own funny little quips in battle which you'll end up missing out on.
Gameplay Verdict:
8/10
A mostly solid game, with a few glaring flaws dragging it down. The stat system outside dungeons drags down the social element by being too easily ignorable, and there's a little too much busywork in the Persona crafting. It also seems to be a running theme to have little incoveniences in place for no good reason. Despite this, a traditional JRPG combat system with an ingenious twist, as well as a great time-management aspect outside dungeons put the gameplay in Persona 4 solidly above average.
Final Verdict:
(10+8)/2 = 9
9/10
Despite its many flaws in the gameplay department, Persona 4 manages to be a worthwhile game to play even just as a straight-up JRPG. Combine this with its outstanding in every single respect presentation, and a really cool blending of story and gameplay, and you've got my favourite game of all time. If you're someone who can really get into a detective story, and love character-focused storytelling, for crying out loud, play this. Persona 4 is an absolutely outstanding game.
