I have very little experience with the (Shin) Megami Tensei series of (mostly) jRPG titles by ATLUS. I first learned of the series after the huge success of Persona 3 about 11 years ago, which is in itself part of the sub-series of games with a different story and gameplay focus. I did play Persona 3 FES around the same time. I loved the unique blend of social simulation and turn based jRPG dungeon crawling and the overall dark horror mood of the story got me through a huge chunk of the game, but in the end I’ve never finished it. Same happened with the original Persona 4, which I’ve tried a few years later – I liked the premise and the gameplay, but playing on PS2 with its loading speeds get to me in the end and I dropped it, hoping that later the game will be ported to other platforms where its problems will be alleviated somewhat.
Persona 4 Golden was such a port… which I did miss because I never owned a PS Vita. Yet, moving the title to a portable console seemed like a smart move – these are long games and the social/life sim aspect takes a lot of time, while also being very easy on the pick up and play routine and that’s where a lot of people enjoyed the game even more. Fast forward eight more years and Persona 4 Golden made a surprise showing as a PC port with a few more improvements over the enhanced PS Vita port. And now I’ve finally played the game to the end.
Since Persona series (ever since 3) are so unique in their gameplay, I should start with explaining how they work. As the main character in this game is a student (and unlike P3 PSP port you can only play as a boy here), you’re going to live through an entire year of his life. Going to school, hanging out with friends, helping his uncle and little cousin and… solving unexplained bizarre murder case which has a supernatural explanation. An important aspect of the games, and thankfully the game introduces all of these elements at a good and easy to comprehend pace, are “Social Links” – your connections to all these people around you. Which you “level up” by hanging out with them and helping them during the specific times of day when they are available. You also can and should level up your social skills by performing tasks, reading books or sometimes just as part of game events. All of these things have influence over the story, but the most important gameplay part of them all is in how they influence the jRPG mechanics.
Every “party member” that you get in the game unlocks their “Persona”, an avatar representation of their inner power with special powers. While the main character has an ability to “equip” a huge number of these personas, each of which have their own unique skills, stats, strengths and weaknesses (which is also somewhat similar to how Guardian Force worked in FF8, I suppose). Also these Personas can also be fused together to form new Personas, inheriting skills from the ones that are being fused. All of these elements of the game are directly influenced by the social sim elements, hence the constant balance between the typical dungeon crawling and “normal life”.
It’s a pretty cool idea that most of the time works really well, as the gameplay needs and the story needs complement each other. It wouldn’t work, of course, if the gameplay basics weren’t fun and here’s where Persona 4 is especially good – the combat in the game is genuinely engaging and fun. While the exploration of dungeons, getting treasure chests and entering the fights with the “shadows” is somewhat bland, only helped by cool visual design and awesome soundtrack, the fights themselves are great. They’re almost always about smart use of the strengths and weaknesses of enemies against them. Check out the enemies, figure out what they’re weak to, hit the weakness, get extra hit, knock everyone out, get a special whole team attack in for big damage numbers, adapt to the new situation. It’s so often that jRPGs are either really tedious, because the fights never pose a challenge and feel like time wasters, or are way too complicated with a huge amount of interesting systems and mechanics, where those, who don’t care about the pace of a turn-based combat (like me) just get overwhelmed and tired of each fight. But Persona 4, for the most part, keeps the fights brief enough, while also keeping every one of them engaging.
There are annoying exceptions, of course, and some design decisions are more frustrating than anything, like the fact that if your main character dies the game just ends there. Which can randomly happen quite often at the start of the game, yet by the end it stops being a problem at all. Though, at least the retry options are good (how they work depends on the difficulty setting). The extra dungeon originally added in the Golden version for Vita is more annoying than challenging too. And there are some moments and fights were the difficulty simply spikes really hard. Grinding is part of the game, even if it’s not that severe to get through it and at least, with the fights being fun, it’s not annoying to go through. It just takes up more time than you’d hope it would.
Which is another thing that I didn’t enjoy much – the game is really really long. And while it has enough stories and moments to fill all this time, and quite a lot of them are great and emotional, the story is, overall, a bit too trite. The journey through Persona 4 does make you feel like you’re hanging out with weird friends and when it ends it is sad to see it all end, but… At the same time, there are so many predictable and tired tropes everywhere and quite a few of these characters are just stereotypes that aren’t interesting to explore. Even the main story, that has a potential to be something amazing if only it would take itself seriously enough and avoid the tropes, ends up giving in to the typical save the world ancient beings blah blah elements that are fine in a heroic epic jRPG where Hero Person saves The World from The Evil, but feel out of place in a tale which focuses so much on interacting with people, on personalities and characters.
Also the key choices that affect the ending are really badly phrased and don’t fit the “dialogue” system of the game at all. Oh and also some of the jokes and situations are just so eye-rollingly bad – your typical “teenagers do teenager things anime joke #5” stuff that wasn’t funny in 2008 and in 2020 some of it feels tone deaf. I’ve not seen so many “gay panic” jokes since the last time I’ve watched a Michael Bay movie however long ago that has been. And some characters, no matter the situation, are always pervy because haha pervy.
Despite all of that, the great moments, the great gameplay, the great soundtrack and style constantly shine through. Despite being longer than I’d want it to be, I still went back every day to play some more of this game and I won’t be surprised if I do a new game plus playthrough of it some time later. Because Persona 4 Golden is a really fun and unique game. And, I suppose, I did like the mood and the tone of Persona 3 more, at least from what I’ve played of it. Yet, actually playing through 4 was so much more enjoyable. But hey, I wish they’d make an even more updated version of 3 someday on PC anyway.
Either way, Persona 4 Golden is a really good game that you should definitely check out, now that it’s out on PC and more people may have access to it. It takes a lot of your time. Not everything about it is great. And you might get tired of the tropes and comic relief that was dated even for 2008 when it first came out. But there’s a really high chance that you will like it and it will, if nothing else, be a memorable experience.