Apparently, Steam thinks I’m too verbose and I should get a life instead of spending an hour writing a game review.

How. Dare. You. It’s just 1630 words! I haven’t even started dissecting the themes and how they work out throughout the story! I haven’t even talked about how I feel about the ending and the twist! This is brief!

God. Well, at least the good thing is that on this site, there are no character limits. I can talk for however long I want! Take that, Steam! As such, I will post the entire thing here and maybe add some more thoughts that definitely won’t fit in Steam’s petty 8000-character limit textbox later on. I dunno, I’m not reliable enough to keep my promises when it comes to writing. I should fix that some day. Maybe I should also try to learn how to write more succinctly instead of rambling on and on and on- wait.

clears throat Anyway, here goes:

Intro

First in the series I’ve ever played, though I’ve enjoyed watching people play the other games and it’s been on my wishlist for quite a while. It’s a chimera of a dungeon crawler, a turn-based JRPG and a dating sim — or in other words, a distinctly Persona game which is an combination of experiences you seldom have in other games.

I’ve heard quite a bit of flak about P4 from other Persona fans, and I have to agree with a lot of the criticism it gets:

• The pacing is too slow, especially the start where you know quite literally nothing about what you have to do until like, half an hour later, and during the middle where you just go into the routine of “rescue person, person joins team, team remains clueless about who the culprit is and waits for another person to be rescued to learn more” and it gets quite repetitive;
• The dungeons are kinda tedious, especially in later dungeons where you can be forced to beat 10-11 levels of randomly generated labyrinths filled with basically the same encounters over and over again (seriously, I would be so much happier if each dungeon is about as long as the first, which has 8 levels, or if each dungeon has a unique gameplay gimmick specific to the character it belongs to, like the antepenultimate dungeon, in a thematically relevant way);
• The slice of life episodes, while freaking hilarious and lighthearted, rarely contribute to the central mystery of the story;
• etc.

Despite all of that, I still think the unmatched joy and positivity of daily life instead of an intellectually deeper tale is less of a devastating tradeoff than some make it out to be, and I believe everyone can have a fun time with it like I did.

Synopsis

The synopsis (or less fancily, “main plot”) is that there’s a serial kidnapping/murder case happening in a rural Japanese town, and you and your Scooby-Doo-esque gang of high schoolers are the only people who can solve it ‘cos the way to rescue the victims before they get killed is by diving headfirst into a freaking TELEVISION and fighting monsters, called Shadows, inside a hidden TV world.

Yeah. Unhinged for most stories, but fairly typical for a Persona game. (I’m not implying Persona games are unhinged, sit down Persona fans.) I’d say the mystery is quite well structured — there are several false leads, red herrings, and moments of irrationality that fog your journey for the truth which accentuates the mystique. One of the core themes is truth and the journey of finding truth, after all. Though honestly, it doesn’t have to span over like 8 months. It gets kinda drawn out to the middle, and you’re forced to operate on a single clue for the vast majority of the runtime ‘cos the people you rescue don’t know jack, and you have to wait for the killer to make a move. Honestly, kinda lame but… oh well.

It doesn’t really progress substantially until November, when it finally starts on a crescendo all the way to the climax, with maximum stakes, maximum mystery and maximum confusion. The twists and bends really start to make everything around you and the case foggy and unclear, both metaphorically and physically as the town starts to be encompassed in a sickly, yellowish-green fog, which is apparently starting to make everyone feel ill. Is it the end of the world? Is it part of the mastermind’s plan to murder everyone instead of killing them one-by-one? Can you still find the truth with the fog clouding your vision? You’ll have to play the game to figure it out; I’m not spoiling anything ;)

But in summary, the plot could’ve been way less lame had it been paced out quicker and there were more stakes involved throughout the game. Hell, the Investigation Team even gets a bit too cocky for their own good in the middle ‘cos they thought they got this “break into TV and recruit new people” game down pat. That just shows you how slowly the overarching plot is progressing in the middle act and like, that’s lame.

Characters

What is not lame is the characters. Another key theme of Persona 4 is the importance of interpersonal bonds, or Social Links, and how they are the source of strength for people in the society. And as you establish bonds with characters, you encounter the main forte of this game — the depiction of the very real struggles characters experience as you level up in their Social Links. Mechanics-wise, a high Social Link rank allows you to impart XP bonuses in Personas of the same Arcana, but honestly I don’t think that’s the main compelling factor that keeps me experiencing the characters’ stories.

Instead, most characters have full-on character arcs that, thanks to the mysterious Chad Energy™ the protagonist possesses, made them become people with more confidence, certainty, belief and resolve in themselves, whether that be children with absent or deceased parents, stuck in broken and dysfunctional families; adults engulfed with loss of a loved one, who try to hide their sorrows; people who struggle with their identity and what their true selves are; teenagers burdened with tradition and societal pressures, often misguided or jaded due to poor parentage, despite good intentions; the list goes on.

These are real issues that real people face, and they make these characters real and worthy of exploring. Sure, it is weird that there are so many characters that will easily allow themselves to open up to you, a city boy who just came to town and knows virtually nothing about anything or anyone, but there are also lots of characters that maintain their distance at first, who then open up to you as you prove to be a good and trustworthy fresh face that offers some kind of curiosity to a small town where everyone knows each other. It all feels incredibly human. Thanks to video games being an interactive medium, we explore their struggles at our own pace, at our discretion, and to our preferences, making the experience more touching and your presence more important.

In particular…

Some characters in particular, however, grabbed my attention far more than others due to the social issues they reflect. For a game that came out in 2008, the exploration of Kanji’s struggles with sexuality and toxic masculinity, and Naoto’s struggles with gender identity and experiences of systemic sexism is shockingly modern, though the attempt is imperfect.

For starters: I’d appreciate the attempt more if Kanji’s homosexuality is explicitly canon instead of being left ambiguous, and if his homosexuality weren’t presented in a way too blatantly stereotypical way, and from a staunchly heteronormative perspective. C’mon Atlus, you have written very good bisexual characters before, stares at Tatsuya and Jun from P2, at least from my cursory glance at the wiki. Rule 1 for writing LGBTQ+ characters or really, any minority figure in fiction: treat them as normal people, as by making them look “weird” and “exotic”, you implicitly enforce cisheteronormativity and that’s the last thing we need.

A succinct example of this implicit cisheteronormativity is Yosuke. Yosuke’s kind of a jerk around Kanji, when his more feminine or even effeminate side comes up in conversation. His attitude that Kanji’s weird or odd, or even dangerous during the campout, honestly makes me cringe, when you consider that the guy explicitly yearns for acceptance for being who he is, and the last thing he needs is some more teasing from society for being who he is. And like, it’s not that hard. Just be like the girls and be okay with it, and move on. (Damn Yosuke can be such a jerk at times…)

On the other hand, Naoto’s desire to be born male and be accepted in society — while born from experiences of systemic sexism and misogyny, issues that still plague Japan and, sadly, most of the world — cannot be brushed aside or overshadowed by her anxiety about her age; after all, it is gender dysphoria — something trans people, including myself and trans men who resonate with Naoto’s inner thoughts to the word, commonly experience. I’m kinda disappointed that Atlus didn’t go the extra mile and make Naoto trans, but it is understandable, given the social circumstances.

One exception to my general fondness for the characters is Marie. I genuinely don’t see any sort of emotional impact in her story as she just acts like a clueless amnesiac who, despite keeping in line with the whole “reaching out for the truth”/“discovering your true self” theme, doesn’t impact the story AT ALL until like what, February, or like 8 full in-game months into the game? Until that, there is ZERO payoff in her story and everyone else just treats her as someone who doesn’t really exist except when you happen to be hanging around her. I guess a bumbling, lovable, silly girl is not my type then… Fortunately, you can basically ignore her and you’ll just get a massively enhanced P4 experience. I didn’t start to grind up her Social Link till NOVEMBER and still somehow I managed to max it before the deadline. I guess she really likes to hang out in the December fog…

Overall, I think that the characters and their developments are the highlight and strongsuit of Persona 4.

Gameplay

In contrast, the dungeon crawling and the whole summoning Personas and beating up Shadows business don’t nearly appeal to me as much, evident by how little I actually wrote about gameplay, but they’re a nice break between long grinds of Social Link ranks where you get to enjoy some action and a tiny bit of tactical thinking, though that can get old fast.

Man, I kinda wish you can just record commands for a given arrangement of enemies and play them back whenever you see them, because you WILL see duplicate enemy patterns a ton and the way to exploit their weaknesses are almost always the same. It’s just kinda tedious at the end. Also, I didn’t really like the fact you have to switch to direct commands for your party members just to get them to GUARD when a powerful attack is incoming, which is just standard practice for boss fights honestly. The AI is smart, but I wish I had more control over it. (Also, I really wish party members could stop casting Hama/Mudo spells on bosses — y’all, ya should know by now that you can’t ever instakill a boss, right? Naoto?)

Presentation

Finally I’d close off with a brief mark on presentation. The graphics definitely looks dated, which is mainly a problem with the outdated PS2/PSP textures for the more realistic parts of town. The train station looks ESPECIALLY BAD and thankfully you don’t go there very often. Frankly, just imagine how awesome P4G with P5-era textures and lighting would look… Then again, I can say that for literally any other game in the series.

What has withstood with time, however, is the music. The music freaking BOPS. Even the repetitive dungeon themes and battle themes and even the town themes stuck with me and they never get old. I swear, if you don’t subconsciously start humming or singing to “Your Affection” or “Heartbeat Heartbreak” or “Time to Make History” you ain’t really immersing yourself into the game. Even though the tracks are generally pretty upbeat and positive, there are also eerie tracks, gutwrenching tracks, hollow tracks, sombre tracks… They all just accompany the mood so well. Massive kudos to Shoji Meguro.

Final verdict

8/10