The RPG of Gods.. and demons.
When you think of an RPG, you typically think of Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest and other typical slaying odd creatures that, at times, look like gelatinous slime. But then there are other RPGs, like EarthBound.. oh wait. No there aren’t. Modern RPGs are a rare thing to come by, at least, from what I’ve seen. The Persona series, however, is a modern RPG.
Persona 4 takes place in a fictional town in Japan called Inaba where you, the protagonist (who you have to name), move in with your uncle Dojima and cousin Nanako. After going to school, you over hear students talking about something called the Midnight Channel. Afterwards, people start to disappear and shit goes down. Big time. Lets back up, though. At the start of the game, you’re in a limo with a long nosed fellow named Igor. Him and his buddy Charlotte tell you you’re gonna save the world, pretty much. Then they explain to you about personas (touched on later) and tell you they’ll be seeing you soon. You eventually watch the Midnight Channel (which can only be viewed at night when it’s raining) and see one of your friend’s classmates in the TV. You later find out people are being thrown into the TV! THROWN INTO A TV!!! To top that off, since the random deaths occurred, it has been noticed that the victims show up when the town begins to get foggy. The whole game is shrouded in mystery. Unless you’re really good at picking up signs from people and noticing tiny details, you’ll never guess what could happen at the end and even if you do guess, chances are you actually don’t really know. That being said, the game doesn’t get old. It always stays interesting and keeps you on your toes. That alone is a good reason to check out the game. RPGs tend to get dull and boring along the way as the story develops until the point where you eventually do care. When Persona throws feces to the fan, however, it really floors you. Twists and turns are abundant in this game, but they aren’t abundant enough to where your head is on the verge of caving in on itself. It does a good job at not overdoing anything and giving you just enough information to keep you in the dark.
In the old Persona games the world was effected by moon phases. If there was a full moon, some creatures would get stronger, but if there was a new moon, they would be weaker. In Persona 4 that is scraped and a weather system is put in place. In my opinion, this is much easier to keep track of. Having played Persona on PSP, it is a chore and easy to forget the moon in the upright corner
An example of the weather system.
of your screen when you’re more focused on getting out of a dungeon and surviving. Yeah, it may sound like I’m bitching that the game isn’t holding my hand. That’s not what I’m getting at. Lets say you need to save someone before the fog sets in. It’s ESSENTIAL to beating the game that you check the weather and keep your outside social interactions as limited as possible so you don’t have someone die on you. Whereas with the moon, it’s not essential. You don’t have to check it over and over again to make sure it’s waxing or waning. By implementing a system like this, Persona 4 drags you deeper into the game, adding even a bigger sense of immersion. You need to be focused in the world of Inaba in order to accomplish the tasks at hand.
The main gameplay is something of a hybrid between a dating sim, dungeon crawler and classic RPG turn-based combat. As you walk around the different places in Inaba, you can talk NPCs (non-playable characters), school mates and friends who you eventually start to make social links with. As you talk to them, you’re given choices of what you want to say and depending on what you say can affect a variety of things. The conversation mechanics in this game are not what you find in a usual game. Lets say you’ve been reading up a book you bought at the bookstore and it focuses on being manly. If you choose to go to your room, sit on the love seat and read, your courage will increase. By increasing your courage, you are given more options when in social situations. If you don’t have enough courage and go to say something that takes more, the game warns that you need more and you can’t say it without improving your stats. That’s just one example of the depth it goes to. Along with courage, there’s also knowledge, understanding, expression and diligence. All of these stats can be boosted in multiple ways. By reading books, saying certain things in conversation and by doing odd jobs.
Your social stats.
Also by strengthening social links with some key characters (the girls) you can establish a relationship with them. You can even have as many girlfriends as you want. There’s no perks included in doing this, it’s just for fun. They don’t even act like they’re your girlfriend aside from being pretty clingy and wanting to hang out all the time. Also by maxing out your social links, their personas change.
Okay so that’s the whole dating sim part of the game. Next is the dungeon crawling. It’s exactly what you think it is. You walk around a dungeon in 3rd person view with your party tailing behind you and you whack shadows on the head, trying to hit them first to get a preemptive strike. What are shadows? Shadows are the demon assholes in the TV who are trying to kill you… because you’re in the TV. Usually they’re purple but some are gold, denoting that they’re rare and usually much more powerful than you. This is one of my favorite aspects of the game. I really can’t stand playing an RPG where I take two steps and I’m in a battle, kill, victory, two more steps, battle. It drives me insane. In Persona 4, though, you can see where your enemies are and take advantage of that. You can walk around them if you like, you can fight them head on, or you can run away in fear that they’ll demolish whatever is left of your HP. Typically you’ll start on the bottom floor and either work your way up or down depending on what kind of dungeon you’re in. Each dungeon is themed around whoever was last thrown into the TV that you’re trying to save. For example: Yosuke’s dungeon (really it’s Saki’s, but eh) is themed after Inaba, but more so a store his parents used to run where he met Saki at. *I COULD BE WRONG ABOUT THIS* That’s how they go. They’re about ten floors long, but some are shorter. Each time you leave the dungeon and enter it again, the floors have changed. From my playthrough, they were never the same paths that I had taken last time. The exit and chests were all in different places. This could either be exciting or frustrating as hell depending on how well your stats are. That doesn’t stop it from being fun, though.
So you ran into a shadow. Good job. Now you’re fighting it. WHOA! It’s not a Ghastly or a Muk anymore! The shadows in this game are WEIRD looking. Some of them are disturbing and others are funny. Anyway, so now you’re going to kill this shadow. Great! Just like a typical RPG would have, there’s options to hit it with whatever weapon you’ve equipped, use an item, run away, or use a persona. Personas are the demons and gods in your heart, according to the game. What you’ll see them as are cards that hold magic power allowing you to crush enemies faster than using a sword or a golf club. Every character has their own persona each
A shadow with his stats shown.
with their own different elemental specialties. Some enemies are weak to elements, so you can put two and two together. Think of it kind of like Pokemon. As you beat enemies, a random event called Shuffle Time may appear, which will preview to you some cards either holding a persona, a blank circle or a penalty card. The cards then flip over, spin, and you press X to choose a card. It’s mind numbingly easy to get the card you want, but you will be hoping for Shuffle Time a lot. If you opt to use a persona in battle and guess the enemies weakness, they’ll fall down, rendering them useless. If all the enemies fall down, you can activate an all-out attack, where all the enemies strike with their equipped weapons at the same time on all the enemies for additional damage. Usually these are one hit kills and save a lot of time in battle. Sometimes, though, your characters will ask you to let them “take care” of an enemy. Basically they want to kick the shit out of it themselves. You can let them do this or cancel it and then attack again. Here’s some more shit about personas. Fusion.
Fusion is a huge part of this game even if it doesn’t seem like it. It could either save your life or end you. Basically it’s like this: you go to the velvet room, you talk to Igor and choose to fusion some personas. When you do this, you make other personas that otherwise can’t be obtained just by getting the card in Shuffle Time. Also depending on the Arcana of the card, you can make
An example of the beauty of fusion: Black Frost. He is of great help if you get him.
certain personas of another Arcana. It’s really in-depth and I can’t be assed to even touch half of the shit you can possibly do with this combining of gods and demons. Just know that you need to do it.
There’s nothing like a great video game soundtrack, right? You don’t want to play a fortress of Bowser in Mario to One Winged Angel. Well, maybe you do, but it doesn’t seem as fitting as it does when taking on Sephiroth. The music in Persona 4 by Shoji Meguro is outstanding. The atmosphere swept in by the music just can’t be compared to anything else. One second the music can be happy bell chimes and the next it’s a disturbing piano melody that flips a switch in your head to tell you this game isn’t joking around anymore. Time to get serious. When a game can take a piece of music and strategically place it in multiple situations, using it over and over again to bring you into the same sense of insecurity or safety, it means it’s doing something right. By not being annoyed from the same sounds repeatedly shows that the soundtrack isn’t your regular every day music. This absolutely goes for Persona 4. The J-Pop sounding anthems of Heartbeat, Heartbreak, Your Affection, and the opening, Pursuing my True Self bring in the modern feel to the game. If these songs were to remain instrumental I know there wouldn’t be the same sense of feeling there. It would be too much like what you’d expect from a traditional RPG or a Final Fantasy title. It adds something different. When I first heard Reach out to the Truth in my first battle, I knew instantly I would never tire of the song and I still don’t. The chords, the vocals, the drums, the overall empowering sense of the song gives you that feeling like “Oh yeah! It’s time to kick some shadow ASS!” Easily one of the best video game soundtracks I’ve ever heard. Also, the voice acting is pretty damn good. That by itself is saying a lot for a dubbed game.
The graphics are nothing to brag about. It’s PS2, after all, and while there are some really good looking games on PS2, this isn’t one of them, but it’s done on purpose. I can’t rag on someone that doesn’t look spectatular when the goal of it is to bring in an anime styled look. For what it is, it looks great. The world can be bright and colorful or dark and murky. Both ways don’t take away from the feel, though. The mugshots of the characters as they talk are pretty funny at times as well. I don’t really have anything to praise the game for and I don’t have anything to hate on about, either.
That’s about all I have to say for this game. It’s a really great experience and, well, the only thing I can think of coming close to it that I also loved was EarthBound. I recommend both of those titles, but for a cheaper option, Persona 4 works just fine.
Verdict:
+ Story is amazing
+ Caring about the characters helps.. a lot.
+ Soundtrack is.. uh.. amazing.
+ The final boss music.
= You need to grind at times
- Enemies get stupid hard out of nowhere in some dungeons
