Persona 4 Golden Review for Playstation Vita

First, the trailer:

One of my favorite JRPGs of all time was Persona 3 (what other RPG has you shoot yourself in the head to summon your inner strength???).  With great translation, writing, characters and gameplay, I thought Persona 4 would have a helluva time to keep up, let alone surpass Persona 3.  Boy, was I wrong.

Gameplay:

What the developers got right in every single facet is pacing.  Because of the way they limit you to what you can do in a given day, you constantly are trying to juggle the same things you would in real life — do I hang out with and value time with this friend, or should I be pursuing a girlfriend… and then there is studying, working, spending time with family — you simply can’t do it all.  And it’s addicting as hell.

Gameplay is really broken up into two distinct sections:  Social (real world) and Combat (other world).  I’m not going to give any spoilers about what the other world is; it’s a great part of the story.  Social is basically you going to school, deciding what to do after school and in the evening each day.  Sometimes you have a choice, and sometimes the story dictates you don’t.  Combat sections involve you going to another world, where you have the power (just like in Persona 3) to summon ‘your inner strength,’ in the form of basically a pokemon/digimon.  Each persona has different elemental strengths and weaknesses, and their spell lists reflect as much.  What’s interesting in this version is that you can collect and use spell cards to tailor your persona however you want.  So you can have a lightning-based persona that also deals fire and physical damage, should you choose.  Plus you can combine personas to make new, more powerful personas that inherit some of the old traits — combining persona is a minigame that you never stop playing, and it’s fun as all get out.  The social side of things comes into direct play with the combat, as the more time you spend with certain people, the higher social rank you have with them, thus affecting the strength of the personas you create under that astrological sign.  It sounds like a lot to keep track of, but the tutorials do an excellent job of explaining the processes, and the pacing makes it so you are swamped under infinite choice immediately.

Story

You are a young man who has come to live for a time with your uncle and his young daughter.  You are the outsider in a small town school, and because you are from the big city, everyone makes assumptions about you.  You befriend another transfer student from the city, and soon you have a whole cast of charming characters that you spend a great deal of time with getting to know and love.  The writing does an excellent job of tying this diverse group of young adults together to help stop a serial killer on the loose, and this group has certain attributes that make it so only they can find the killer and do so.

There are twists, and multiple endings depending on how hard you push.  I got both the worst and best endings on technically a single playthrough (I sensed I was at a fork in the road and saved before making a choice — that choice netted me the worst ending).  It’s a smart story, with not so many predictable outcomes.

But more than anything, it’s how well each character is written — I’m a few weeks away from the game, and I miss these people as if they were real friends.  (My playthrough to the best ending took 74 hours)

My only warning – this is a traditional JRPG grindfest.  If you aren’t into that, there is actually a setting for you to breeze through the combat portions and focus on the story.  I’ve never heard such a thing, but thank god some Japanese developers understand some of us have jobs, families and responsibilities.  That being said, you will still devote quite a bit of time to combat; it just won’t be uber-hard combat.

Presentation

It’s slick!  With a mixture of anime stills, 3D towns and worlds, and full anime cutscenes, the presentation is polish.   On the Vita, I’d say it looks better than PS2 quality.  The color palette is beautiful and the artwork really gets a chance to shine.  The menus are easy to navigate, and the soundtrack is catchy and fun.   The voice acting is spot on, and the translation job can’t be applauded enough.  If I could elect someone to win an award, it would be the head of the localization team.  Pop culture references, translations of complicated Japanese customs and more are all conveyed perfectly.  The framerate never misses a beat.

Summary/Verdict:

Beautiful graphics, great voice acting, catchy audio and a level of writing most games don’t ever get to approach make Persona 4: Golden for the Playstation Vita one of the smartest purchases you can make for the system.  If you like JRPGs at ALL, this should be your next purchase.

9/10 Japanese Idols

Minuses – JRPGs aren’t for everyone.  If you don’t like a lot of combat, you won’t necessarily like this game.