Persona 5 may have made the series a household name, but it was Persona 4 that broke the ice. The Persona series, a spin-off of the cult-classic JRPG alumni series Shin Megami Tensei, struck a unique niche in the JRPG genre. It managed to thread monster catching, life-sim, JRPG, and visual novel games into one complete package. The Persona series has been around since the PS1, but it was the PS2 counterparts that gained traction in the west. The odd synergy of genres, as well as their dedication to story and characters, made it stand out as a unique, niche game. It also made the games incredibly long, furthering their niche appeal.
Persona 4 released on the PS2 in 2008, well into the early years of the PS3. An updated version of the game, adding two new characters to befriend as well as more in game and post game content, was released as Persona 4: Golden on the PS Vita in 2012. The idea of PC ports for the Persona series has been long asked for by fans, and after years of waiting, Persona 4: Golden has been ported to Steam.
Persona 4: Golden follows a protagonist canonically named Yu (though you get to name him yourself), as he is suddenly shipped to the small town of Inaba from the city to live with his uncle for reasons that don't matter. Yu is forced to integrate with a new school, make new friends, and get used to the simple, small town life, when a a series of murders start to disrupt the tranquility of Inaba. When Yu realizes that he can enter a TV realm that acts as a dark reflection of Inaba's hidden and suppressed feelings, he finds the killer is using the realm to murder his victims, and Yu and his friends are the only ones who can stop them. The realm is full of shadows, unaccepted shades of people who are hostile to anyone who enters, and when the fog rolls into the floodplains of Inaba, anyone in the TV world is killed.
The game plays out like a detective story of sorts. You gather a group of friends as the plot progresses, each being party members for when you go into the dungeons in the TV world. You and your friends try to thwart the killer by saving those thrown into the TV. The killer's victims' subconscious manifests itself as a dungeon where you must climb until you reach a final boss battle that represents their repressed persona, the 'face' they use to interact with the world and the ego struggles that lie beneath it. The persona and shadow angle is taken from Jungian psychology and his theories on the collective subconscious, and the story gets some mileage out of this. The search for the killer while traipsing around in the town's repressed subconscious allows for societal and cultural reflection, albeit through the lens of (somewhat tame) anime. Subtlety is in Persona 4, believe it or not, but its a subtlety you will have to work for. The game will want to spell out most of what it has to say through its plot, but leaves gaps for you to speculate and tie in all of the themes together. Persona 4 is extremely story focused, meaning you will read easily a novel's worth of text just going through the main story, let alone finding and working through all of the various side stories tied to your social links.
Before we get into social links, however, we have to talk about how this game works in the first place. Persona follows a calendar system, where the game and some of its objectives have to be completed by a certain date or it is game over. Time passes on a given day either by story beats (which can take weeks from you, so plan accordingly) or by activities done in that slot. On most days, your mornings will be spent at school, where you may have to answer a question in class, or you may just skip forward to after school. After school is the time slot you can hang with friends, shop, take a part-time job, or join a school club. Managing your time is paramount to doing well in Persona, and is one of its many defining traits. Knowing which social links to grow, when to run through the dungeon to get it done before the allotted time (usually you have a couple weeks to finish a dungeon before game over), and when to get stats up is a majority of the game. Each one of these life-sim aspects will feed into another part of the game in one way or another. Your social stats, being courage, knowledge, understanding, etc. will help you with certain social checks when trying to grow social links. Some social links cannot be grown without having the proper stat to engage with them, meaning working on these stats is important for the early and mid part of the game.
The social links help in persona fusion, allowing for you to make stronger personas to use in the dungeons. Personas are basically Pokemon, where you can get them from battle in dungeons. You can sacrifice multiple personas together into a fusion to make stronger personas, so long as they don't exceed your level when they are fused. Social links allow you to get around this by gifting a huge experience bonus to a fused persona corresponding with the social link's typing at the time of fusion, allowing for personas to level up past you at creation if you have a corresponding social link leveled up high enough. Persona fusion also allows for unique personas, such as those of the Tower arcana which can only be acquired through fusion. The strongest personas in the game are fusion only, as well. Fusion also has the handy mechanic of allowing you to inherit certain spells, attacks, and buffs from the personas comprising the fusion. This can allow you to build personas with unique builds to better face future dungeons.
Persona 4, and the series in general, has always had a fun angle on the monster-catching JRPG. Utilizing weaknesses in a Persona game is an absolute must. If you exploit a weakness, the enemy is downed and you get a "one more" which allows you another attack. If all enemies are downed you get an "all out attack", which does a lot of damage. It's nothing terribly unique, but it makes the sometimes sluggish nature of turn based combat more involved than it would otherwise, giving you great strengths and great weakness to type exploitation. The JRPG side of the game has never been Persona's strongest suit, but it's not particularly weak either.
Persona 4 is quite a bit lighter than other entries in the series, including its follow up. There's a summery feel to the experience, of hanging out with friends and trying to hold onto youth as some psychological horror rears its head, threatening to make you grow up faster than you want to. All of the characters are rather likable, though they rely heavily on anime cliche, and largely this has to do with their chemistry with one another. Going through the social link plotlines of the characters usually gives predictable results, and is easily the most disappointing thing about the game, but when they are in a group playing off of one another there is a synergy to them that is delightful. This being anime-type writing from the late 00s, your mileage will certainly vary on the problematic content in the game, although all of it stays in the shallow end for the most part. You have your sexually confused masculine character the game can't seem to just call pan (or bi, in this case, as it was the 00s and that's what they would have said), and sexism is, of course, played for laughs. But only sometimes and with certain characters does it risk to tip over into annoyingly pathological. I was able to stomach it, but I had to sigh my way through chunks of its plot and character development.
Persona 4: Golden threads together its gameplay and plot remarkably well, but if I had a criticism to level at it it would be its absurdly long runtime. While your average runtime will more than likely range in and around 70 hours, I found myself, despite playing at a relatively quick pace, running into the 90 hour range before the end. Part of this has to do with the way the plot dances around possible endings before carrying on, and part of it has to do with an epilogue (plus bonus dungeon I accidentally got stuck doing) that lasts several hours, long enough for a relatively brisk game in and of itself. And while the plot does have a nice wrap up in the end (depending on your ending), there is a lot of messing about before you get there. This comes a bit as a double edged sword, as the times when the game takes our characters on a trip, such as to an outside town, the beach, or skiing, it really lets the characters run wild and it is incredibly fun, paying off the visual novel aspect wonderfully. But it bloats the time greatly with little gameplay involved. Again, this will come down to taste, and I lean towards positive, but it did nag me the closer I got to the end and I was beginning to stress about all of the small tasks I still wanted to complete.
Persona 4: Golden has far more fun characters than in Persona 5, but it will hardly convince an acolyte of the latter game of its superiority. Regardless, Persona 4 is an all-encompassing epic in just about every meaning of the word, full of activities, characters to meet, an addictive monster catching loop, and a mystery with a surprising amount of detective work once things start to tail. It's mechanics interweave with one another in a way unique to the gaming sphere, and with its quality of life improvements over Persona 3, it is hard not to recommend Persona 4: Golden as your first game in the series, even with Persona 5's stylish look. Persona is a Goliath of a JRPG, one that is both large and incredibly strong, and Persona 4: Golden just about reaches its perfect potential.
9.5
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