RandomNPC – Video Game RPG Reviews, Editorials, and Features

Hot on the heels of Persona 3 FES, Persona 4 invites players to another year of school in Japan. Slightly modifying and improving the mechanics of its predecessor and mixing in a well-written murder mystery to boot, Persona 4 is a very solid game. The biggest problem it contends with is that it has a hard time setting itself apart from Persona 3, as it borrows more than its fair share of game mechanics from the previous game, but can’t quite manage to tie everything together the same way. Still, Persona 4 is an enjoyable, challenging title with a lot to recommend it.

In Persona 4, the player takes control of a high schooler sent to the rural Japanese town of Inaba to stay with his uncle. Before the main character can settle into his sleepy new life, grisly murders start occurring in Inaba, with victims’ bodies being found strung up on telephone poles and television antennas. Rumors of a strange late-night television program called the Midnight Channel, a bizarre show that appears on rainy nights and predicts who will be the next to die, only serve to complicate matters. In short order, the cast discovers another world inside the television, and your mission expands to include rescuing those who’ve been thrown into this strange reflection of a world to die, all while attempting to discover the true identity of the murderer.

The weather changes every day, and it produces a variety of effects.

The story as a whole is presented mainly as a murder mystery with a decidedly mythological twist, as a lot of it is based off the Japanese myth of Izanagi and Izanami. It’s a well-written and extremely challenging mystery, and it’s set up so that you can’t just ride the rails and expect everything to be revealed. It really requires players to push back, to investigate, observe, and consider, especially since the game will end if the player fails to rescue any of the victims within the allotted time frame. The only real complaint that can be leveled against it is that it doesn’t tie together nearly as well as Persona 3 did, and that the various themes it has, such as the overload of information and the need to see oneself clearly, are used rather inconsistently. In the end Persona 4‘s message is a little muddled.

The reason Persona 3‘s story did so well was that everything in the game, from the Social Links, to the combat system, to the memento mori of the Evokers tied back into the game’s theme of resistance against death. Persona 4‘s theme is more about seeking the truth and refusing to be deluded, and so the inclusion of the Social Link system and focus on the tarot Arcana just doesn’t work as well here. There are a few other technical quibbles, such as a handful of translation errors that reproduce the original Japanese text alongside the English equivalent, and one or two lines in the main plot that aren’t quite right. On the whole, though, Persona 4‘s storyline is very solid and unusually challenging, with an interesting cast of characters and some very unexpected and well-written plot twists, all of which makes the game’s occasional stumble a bit easier to swallow.

Persona 4 uses a turn-based system that will be very familiar to fans of the Megami Tensei series. An extension of the One More system used in earlier games in the series, it focuses on elemental attacks, handing out extra turns for hitting elemental weaknesses. In Persona 3, hitting any elemental weakness would not only grant the caster an extra turn, it would knock the recipient of the attack down, forcing them to waste yet another turn standing up. Persona 4 modifies this somewhat – a monster or character hit by an attack they’re weak to will indeed be knocked down, but standing up no longer takes a whole turn. To balance this out, the game introduces the Dizzy status, which prevents all movement for a single turn, and which only activates after a player or monster has had their weakness struck twice. This modification helps the system a lot, since the original One More system of Persona 3 tended to swing widely depending on who managed to find whose weakness first. There have been other changes to the system as well; party members can now be controlled manually instead of relying entirely on AI, and the game adds a Guard command, which can be used to completely negate a character’s weakness for one turn. Although none of these changes are particularly Earth-shattering, they do make the system more balanced and more enjoyable, so the One More system of Persona 4 is a slight but satisfying improvement.

Persona 4 uses the same system of Social Links as was seen in Persona 3 and FES, but they carry a lot less weight in terms of the game’s overall theme. Essentially, Social Links are the method by which a player strengthens their Personas – the more a player spends time with each person in a Link and builds a relationship with that character, the bigger EXP bonus a Persona will receive when the player first fuses them. As mentioned earlier, this system doesn’t work quite as well in terms of the plot, but the various minor tweaks and rebalancing it has gone through since Persona 3 has done it some good. Persona 4‘s Social Link system is closer to that of FES, with its greater ease in leveling each Link up. Given that Persona 4 is a much shorter game than either version of Persona 3, the easier, more user-friendly Social Link system is a welcome inclusion.

Many of the complaints Persona 3 received had largely to do with its interface. There was a slight but annoying loading time when opening the menu, and the Persona Fusion system was set up in such a way that players couldn’t tell what a given attack or spell did until they were in combat. Persona 4 makes a basketful of changes to the interface, and most, if not all of them, come off as being helpful, useful, and a decided improvement on the past. Menus move smoothly and fluidly, and best of all, the game makes it simple and painless to see move descriptions regardless of whether the player is simply curious about what a move does after fusing a new Persona, or if they’re choosing what to discard after leveling up. The design of the menu continues Persona 3‘s pop-art style design, this time in a series of bright yellow and orange geometric shapes. On the whole, the system works quite well, and doesn’t come off nearly as garish as it may sound.

For the soundtrack, Shoji Meguro continues the pop-ish sound that abounded in Persona 3, but it largely drops the hip-hop side of things. This works in the game’s favor, giving it a much more noticeable central theme and allowing it to feel less like a simple extension of Persona 3‘s sound. Persona 4‘s voice acting is a bit of an improvement over its predecessor as well, with more consistency in characterization and a tighter overall feel to the cast. The only real complaint to be found is that, with all the voice clips flying around in battle, it can be difficult to understand what any one character is actually saying, to say nothing of the number of clips that simply get cut off in the middle.

Shuffle Time is a bit more complicated this time around, and the secondary effects are a much bigger risk.

The visuals of Persona 4 are split very strongly between the real world, which is realistically rendered, and the world inside the television, which is a fog-bound mass of contrasting colors and red-and-black stripes. This kind of visual design works quite well for what the game is trying to convey – that the world inside the television is a neurotic, confusing place that does nothing but try to obscure and destroy the people who enter it. It does come off as being a little garish at times, but on the whole, the visuals would’ve had a great deal less impact if they had gone for greater harmony in color and design. As it stands, the bizarre coloration and construction of the TV world contrasts wonderfully with the mundanity of the real world.

Although not quite as long as Persona 3, Persona 4 is still a very long and involved game, eventually coming out at between sixty and eighty hours. A player’s final time will be influenced pretty strongly by which ending they decide to go for, since there are multiple points at which the player can stop. The best ending, though, will require the full eighty hours. There’s also a fair number of side quests and other activities to occupy players, from fishing to working part-time jobs. From a combat standpoint, a player who pays attention to their equipment and makes the occasional trip into the TV to keep their levels up will find the game to be fairly easy, or at least not overly onerous. The plot, however, is another matter. The player is expected to actively seek out the criminal, especially towards the end of the game, so players who are unobservant or whose memory isn’t particularly good could have a tough time pinning down who the murderer actually is.

Persona 4 is a challenging, well-balanced game with a twisty, challenging plot, but there are places where it feels as though it tries too hard to be the sequel to Persona 3 rather than its own game. Some of the game’s elements which worked so well in Persona 3, such as the Social Link system, the tarot, and the focus on everyday life, don’t work quite as well in Persona 4. On the whole, it isn’t quite the game its predecessor was, but it’s still a solid, entertaining game with a lot to offer.