Atlus
Anthony:
Hey Atlus, what happened? You see, we were so engaged with Persona 3: FES that it was an absolute no-brainer to pick up Persona 4 when it came out. We even played a preview of the storyline and got all excited, once again impressed by the introduction, characters, localization, and modern settings. And for a little while, we stayed enraptured. Then the other 75 hours of playtime left us somewhere between unsatisfied, to downright annoyed.
Persona 4 follows the story of an exchange student who transfers to a small town that’s suddenly gripped in a mystery as two bizarre murders take place one after another. Those who played Persona 3 will be immediately comfortable with the daily cycles, social links, and battle system. Atlus even managed to make an absolutely enormous list of improvements and corrections to the gameplay of Persona 3... a feat that still impresses me. Whether it was listening to fan complaints or recognizing their errors, they truly delivered.
However, this game is long, and mired in one of the absolute worst storylines and constant strings of bad writing/dialog I’ve seen in an RPG in years. The result, is despite Persona 4 being an excellent game, I absolutely couldn’t wait for it to be over, and couldn’t even enjoy the better aspects of it by the end.
What’s good:
- As mentioned, Atlus improved a ton for this game over Persona 3. Some improvements that immediately come to mind: Save points after school, an option to move to other areas instead of running, ways to make money outside of the dungeon, ways to raise stats in conjunction with social links, more variety in the types of social links, characters able to save you from killing blows, no pointless separation of party members in dungeons, no Reaper in the dungeon, no fatigue/illness levels in the dungeon, the ability to control your partners, no random taking away of and/or forcing characters into your party, clearer prompts to let you know the result of tasks or if social links are close to levelling, more ways to raise social links, allowing social links with male party members, ability to see what abilities do in the future and before swapping them, ability to dictate your party members’ skills, different characters in social links if there are multiple clubs to choose from, more options for things to do at night, condensing the unnecessary three melee attack types into one, options for faster levelling/less time needed in dungeons... I’m sure there are plenty more, but the list is just staggering, and it really showed their knack for making a sequel that improves on almost every aspect of gameplay.
- Aside from one glaringly common exception to the rule, the music in the game is great. While Persona 3 had a bit too much repetition, Persona 4 mixes it up more often, and has a lot of different tracks with unique styles to them. They’re almost always catchy, and I in particular love the boss battle music. The free CD was a nice touch too.
- Once again, they did a great job with the voice acting. Though I was far from thrilled with a lot of the lines they give the characters, I have to admit, the actors all did a great job of delivering them.
- The graphics are a strong point yet again. They added a really nice style to the menus and battles that makes everything look cleaner and still more modern. Characters have expressive portraits, and the town and dungeon environments look great.
- Although I mentioned it briefly on the huge list of improvements, it still bears noting that the overall RPG battling/dungeon crawling aspect of the game was vastly improved. Persona 3 had some overly complicated elements that didn’t quite work well in practice. Persona 4 streamlined where it needed to, simplifying the dungeon crawling and simultaneously increasing the amount of customizing you can do with your character and party. Going into the Tartarus dungeon in Persona 3 was a chore; going into the TV world dungeon of 4 was actually fun at times.
What’s neutral:
- A surprisingly high number of enemy sprites were kept utterly unchanged from Persona 3. Some of the new designs were cool, some weren’t, but in general it was clear they didn’t spend too much time on that aspect.
- Fusing Personas to get the right abilities is still a matter of constantly selecting, checking, de-selecting and re-selecting the Personas to fuse over and over and over until you get the right skills. It’s still repetitive, and given it’s even necessary for one character’s social link, can feel like a waste of time. What kept this from being a negative this time though (it made the bad list in Persona 3), is that they improved the fusion system otherwise... making the skill system more understandable, and only prompting for skill changes after fusion instead of randomly after levelling up.
- Later in the game, mandatory dungeons aren’t available until you learn more about a certain character. This amounts to running around town talking to random people until you find the right flags repeatedly, potentially spanning multiple game days of searching. While it makes sense story-wise, it was an obnoxious chore.
- They added a system this time where weapons and armor become available by selling drops to a shop, which will stock an item if you’ve brought him a certain quantity of a certain enemy’s drop. While it’s a nice thought for customizing which monsters you should fight and which items to work for, that’s basically impossible without a guide. Sometimes you need 4 drops, sometimes up to 10, and not only does it not show you how many you’ve sold to the shop, you’ll never be shown what quantity you need in general... and you also won’t know what item will be produced as a result! So without a guide, you may waste time getting 10 drops just to get yet another weapon for a character you don’t use.
- Taking away the analysis for monsters was kind of a bummer. Having to cast spell after spell hoping to find a weakness for each monster, and to sometimes find none or have them absorbed/reflected on you was pretty annoying. Not to mention the HP estimates from analysis were way off, so why bother?
What’s bad:
- Remember how I said the music was great with one exception? From the beginning to the end of the game, they constantly play this “mysterious” song that’s an uncomfortable, somewhat discordant sounding and repetitive piano piece over and over and over. It sounds unpleasant, and while that might’ve been the intent, by the fiftieth time you’ve heard it for any scene with anything remotely suspicious or bad happening, it may just drive you nuts. Although it was mostly just a nuisance, some very serious scenes near the end were genuinely detracted from by the presence of that dumb song.
- The quest system is the only gameplay aspect that I think took a serious nosedive from Persona 3. In the former game, the same person gave you quests, showed you the rewards from them, and told you what floors had which enemies necessary to get the right item for completion. Sound nice? It was. In Persona 4, random characters in the world at random times will have requests. You won’t know the reward, and you are only given a vague hint as to what monster can drop the item. On top of that, the hint you get only tells what dungeon, not what floor, and there’s a very good chance you won’t remember which floors had which monsters... especially if they want it from a monster you never even encountered. Plus, the quest drops are different from regular drops: they only sell for 0 or 10 yen, and the monsters will only drop those until the quest is over, making farming that area of the dungeon pointless while quests are active. Very weak.
- Never have I seen the quality of a game’s storyline spiral headfirst into the ground as bad as I experienced it here. In all honesty, the introduction and first few hours were very interesting. A murder mystery was about, some genuinely weird stuff was happening, and the characters were charming. However, the next... oh, about 60 hours of the game consisted of absolutely nothing of consequence happening. Your crew sits around talking about the mystery, waits until someone’s kidnapped, saves the kidnapped person, “wacky hijinks” happen between this, and it repeats over and over. And over. With very, very long scenes of nothing/stupid things happening. When all of that’s said and done and the actual plot exposition happens, it’s completely unsatisfying. Although they do tie up all loose ends in the story well, the plot revelations are terrible, unsatisfying, and even the bonus “true” ending path is laughably bad. Awful pacing, awful conclusion.
- Speaking of the story, this game also has some of the worst writing and dialog I’ve seen in an RPG. Scenes often contain every single character pitching in multiple lines to say the exact same thing, only for the same topic to come up 5, 10, 15, 20, and 30 hours later into the game. Some characters are quite likeable, but by the twentieth time they’ve fed you a line to make it obvious that Kanji isn’t smart, or that Chie’s either angry or not quite sure about things, it was very difficult to keep interest. Beyond that, the game was constantly feeding us stories that were a little too ‘convenient’, while simultaneously saying and doing things that left us wondering what the heck they were thinking. The characters are boneheaded and reckless in constantly thinking they’ve found the murderer to the point of absolute eye-rolling obnoxiousness, a cop has a serious lead on murders yet takes absolutely no action until his family gets involved, no one seems to question the person last seen with the deceased, a police house apparently has no surveillance, a doctor just stands and basically says “oh well” as a patient flat-lines in front of him, the killer goes completely unnoticed and acting natural for months, yet has developed no alibi and immediately freaks out when suspected, a hospital room with the prime suspect just happens to have an enormous TV he could escape into, another detective has a suspicion of the killer that is mentioned to no one for ages until after the killer is cornered, the new teacher just happens to be an innuendo-spouting tramp, every character will stand around pointlessly arguing with a shadow for minutes on end as though they’ve never seen it happen before, teenagers instantly come to grips with the fact that they were thrown inside a TV and nearly murdered by otherworldly beings as they spoke to an evil version of themselves, they have no qualms about risking their lives to fight murderous shadows, yet wouldn't dare stay out late trying to catch the kidnapper in the act, and it just so happens that a certain young party member’s plot development involves a shadow that humps a stripper pole to attack you! Absolutely painful.
- Speaking of the writing and the story, get ready to see a lot of it, and in big chunks at a time. As mentioned, this is likely a 70-90 hour game, and a good portion of that will be watching very long scenes with the characters. However, precious little of consequence ever happens in the game, so many of these scenes will either be a) Scooby Doo-level detective work of the characters incessantly talking, repeating themselves, and getting nowhere, b) “Cute” scenes that are just attempts to endear you to the characters (admittedly, there are funny moments), or c) Van Wilder-esque frat movie scenes clearly meant as fan service. Not only are scenes long and pointless, they outright refuse to give you save points between them, or the ability to skip them. Once we even had to just turn off the game mid-scene because we had work in the morning and a scene just kept going on forever and ever. I hope you don’t lose to the bosses either, or you’ll be set to do a lot of listening again before your next attempt. I could’ve gladly taken 20 hours less of scenes like those driving home the fact that the girls can’t cook.
I can go through a variety of emotions when I finish a game: pleased with how it wrapped up, bummed it ended so soon, neutral to the experience, and in rare cases, I can’t wait for them to end. The problem is, if I can’t wait for a game to be over, that’s always meant that it’s a bad game... until now. Persona 4 is a great game, and I absolutely couldn’t wait to be done with it. As much as Persona 3: FES took even longer to beat, I was genuinely interested in the story and developments up to the conclusion. For Persona 4, I wasn’t at all, and even as my efforts came to fruition, I felt even more disappointed with what I had done. By the end, I was just tired, and glad to shelve it for good.
That’s a real shame, because otherwise, the gameplay was spot on, the music was great, the voice acting was great, some of the characters were cool, and it overall showed massive improvements over the previous game. But this game brings to mind a classic problem with the length of RPGs. Sure, a 70+ hour RPG sounds great in that it’ll keep you entertained more for your dollar, but if it’s 70+ hours of a story you can’t get behind, you’ll probably recant your desire for a lengthy game. All of that said, I’m sure a lot of people will eat the characters and their silly scenes up. If you want a modern RPG that plays very well, you don’t have to look any further.
I’d just recommend shutting your brain down the moment any character talks.
Lauren:
This is another game that I'll have difficulty scoring. So many aspects of Persona 4 were done right, but then a few missteps soured my final take on the game. The graphics were slightly improved over Persona 3, and look great for the PS2. The music got even catchier than in P3, but as Anthony mentioned, the repetition of one particular "mysterious" song became so painful that it even detracted from serious story scenes. And while the voice acting was fabulous for the most part, some of the cheesier lines were hard to listen to. Of course, that's not the fault of the voice actors.
On that subject, the dialogue is both wonderful and awful. It's wonderful in that it's extremely well-localized, much like its predecessor. The young characters talk as you'd expect people their age to (for the most part), and even make references to contemporary things like MySpace and Livejournal. But on the other hand, some of the dialogue is downright painful, particularly when the group is working on solving a mystery. We were floored at how many times each character kept repeating the same basic ideas over and over again. It really did start to feel like Scooby Doo with adult themes.
The plot seemed intriguing in the beginning, got a little boring toward the middle, and did nothing but disappoint us in the end. So many things throughout the game - both in terms of fanservice and actual plot - seemed just a little too convenient. "Oh no, our teacher is forcing us to all wear bikinis! Oh no, our teacher is making us stay in a 'lovers' hotel! I guess we just have to go with it! Oh wow, the girls AND boys are at the hot springs simultaneously, like in Persona 3 and every anime ever!" Oh, Atlus. But even worse, the plot revelations were completely unsatisfying. I'm sorry, but "I was bored" is not a convincing motivation for a villain these days. It almost felt as though they'd made up the story as they went along, with disappointing results.
But all that aside, as Anthony mentioned, the gameplay was fantastic. So many great improvements were made over P3, making it a lot more entertaining to actually play. Along with that, it looks great and sounds great. Ah, if only the story had been as compelling as Persona 3. For better or worse, it's a very long game as well. You'll easily spend 70-80 hours on it, and a lot of that is tied up in repetitive scenes. Anime-RPG fans will very likely enjoy Persona 4, but those who are tired of plot and character cliches might find themselves a bit exasperated. Teddie was amazing, though.
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