Persona 4 (PS2): I truly am empty inside...

Back when I was in high school (about 15 years and 84lbs ago) I really had a massive affinity for anime. The massive anime buzz hadn't hit yet. There was no Toonami, and I had to wake up at 5am on a Sunday to watch DBZ, a show nobody knew about. But no show resonated with me more than Tenchi Muyo, the story of a socially award guy who has like 6 beautiful alien women fall in love with him. Always gave me hope that despite my nerdiness, I'd find that special someone. (Spoiler alert: that show fucking lied to me.)

But because of this I've never been able to shake my Otaku roots. I don't watch anime like I used to, but I still naturally gravitate to JRPGs knee deep in them like Star Ocean, Tales of {Any}, Final Fantasy and so forth. As you have seen in this blog already, I started to fall for the Persona 4 universe when I played Persona 4 Arena and enhanced it by playing through Persona 3 twice on two platforms. I have since been sporadically been keeping up with Persona 4 and I am ashamed to admit this universe is becoming a bit of an obsession....

PERSONA 4:(PS2/Vita)

Inaba is one of Japan's more rural cities. Its got a high school, a reasonably small shopping district, and lies on a floodplain. The problem is there has been a rash of mysterious murders where bodies are being found hung upside down on television antennas, and with no identifiable cause of death. Around this same time Yu Narukami (renameable) is taking the train in to stay with his uncle Ryotaro Dojima and his daughter Nanako for a year. 

On his way to his first class Yu meets of the son of the Junes megastore owner, Yosuke Hanamura and a friendship is quickly established. This allows Yu to also meet and befriend some of Yosuke's friends: Chie Satonaka and Yukiko Amagi. As they hang out at the food court of Junes after class, Chie askes if Yu has heard of the "Midnight Channel" rumor. Supposedly when you would watch a turned off television at midnight when it rains, it would display your soul mate.

The channel turns out to be real but instead of a soul mate, it appears to displaying the people who are to be murdered next. In a clumsy chance accident, the group discovers they can fall through the screen of a TV and take them to an alternate world where shadows reside. After meeting a friendly shadow named Teddie they discover that when in this TV world, you can be faced with your shadow.

A shadow is a manifestation of of your innermost feelings that you deny and lock away, and if you forsake them it gives them a massive influx of power to become their own identity and kill the original. But if you confront this side of you and accept it, they transform and become your Persona (a manifestation of the Tarot you represent) and will fight for you. After attaining this power, the group decides they will use their new found ability to prevent any further murders and hopefully figure out who is the culprit and bring them to justice.

I hated the Chariot arcana in Persona 3, in 4 MP doesn't stretch is far
which makes chariot arcana's vital to use.

Having played Persona 4 Arena first I was actually a little disappointed to find out that the protagonist was a  silent one in this game. The stories in those games were remarkably long and for the most part fully voice acted and watching the Persona 4 anime was also very entertaining in its own right as well.  But I suppose it makes sense because this was how Persona 3 was played out and I loved the fuck out of that game. 

Persona 4 has one of the most lovable cast of characters I've played in an RPG. Even in games that I completely love there are always a character or two who I just can't stand. I never seem to have this problem in the Persona series maybe because there is nothing really super about them. They are just normal teens with normal teen problems. Cleverly, the whole "facing themselves" aspect is a strong way to make them likable because you pretty much see that they are all flawed.

This scene is faithfully recreated in the anime, and is worth watching the whole thing to get to it.

Its not overly elaborate and emo, not all of them have some tragic heartbreak. Yeah a few of them kind of fall into some anime stereotypes but when every new character was introduced I found it hard not to love them. Probably to the unhealthy level of jealousy of them not actually existing to be my real friends.. I had this problem in Catherine too.. god I need a life.

In terms of play Persona 4 doesn't exactly deviate from its previous iteration all too much but there are some subtle differences.  At its core, its just like Persona 3 it is a combination of Japanese school simulation and dungeon crawling JRPG. The lectures in Persona 4 aren't nearly as long winded as they are in 3 but you still need to pay some attention to them. The main focus is to maintain your social life because the stronger your bonds are with people, the more powerful personas you can create.

Unlike in Persona 3 however, there isn't just one massive tower for you to continuously explore. When you enter the TV world you then can break of into stages where are manifestations of the characters psyches. The levels seem larger on the whole than Persona 3 and the monsters are a bit more sparing, but they are only about 8-9 floors each so you don't feel so intimated needing to climb 200+ floors of tower. You get different settings for each area so the change of pace is great too.

You can tell this is the Vita version by its much more polished looks. 

Combat in Persona 4 has made some subtle improvements to it. It still follows much of the previous Persona protocol of giving you general orders for your teammates so they will fight in a particular style, and if enemy weaknesses are discovered, they will naturally go after them. Just like in the previous game if you hit weaknesses or critical all the enemies off their feet you have the chance to go in for a big all out attack to put them down. 

The biggest difference in Persona 4's combat is probably my most thankful change. Now when you give your characters other specific tactics, you can set them all to direct control which allows you to manually take control of all the other characters  It can slow down some of the combat to a crawl so I don't use it often, but for some of the difficult boss fights in the game its an absolute must.

Hey! Do you like this song?!

I certainly hope so, because if you don't you are going to hate the fucking battle sequences. Now the  Persona series tends to have some music that is all over the gamut such as "Mass Destruction" from the previous game, but with this one I kind of scratch my head at it. Its a decent song and it would work well for a theme or a major plot moment, or maybe even a boss fight. But for every single random battle you come across it just seems horribly awkward and out of place. I think its just the goofy chorus line, and it loops pretty frequently. I know that's pretty common in JRPGs but it hasn't become white noise yet and I have 60 hours in my save....

That being said, I really like the soundtrack for these games, and I certainly liked this ones than 3's. Much of it really seems to fit the setting of the scene and the over world maps music changes ever so often or occasionally isn't there when its raining. You just get the slight rain sound during those moments and I thought that was kind of a nice touch so I wasn't getting hammered to death with all the same music.

The fishing game is pretty simple, But after playing Nier every fishing game is pretty good. 

There are a handful of mild aggravations. Like Persona 3 there are events that happen in fixed intervals, and the wait time between them can be long. You are supposed to use these moments to level up your characters, grind, increase your social links and so forth. I was usually able to march my way though each stage in about a day or 2 of in game time and complete the said goal. This leaves me with like 2 weeks of in game time to burn. I'm supposed to do it to increase social links, but it has the ability to slow the games pace to a crawl.

Atlus must really hate their fans, because much like any other game I have played that says Shin Megami Tensei on the cover, this one's difficulty spike is just as murderous. I didn't play Persona 4 on easy because Persona 3 was a cakewalk on that setting. A few stages in, I was getting smashed by enemies so hard into a stage that I seriously had to consider restarting the whole game to tone it down.You have to choose your team carefully before each area otherwise if you have a weakness monsters will go after it. It's not too difficult, but the game will let you know when you fucked up. Save often.

Kanji is the team's lovable idiot. In both 4 and 4 Arena his dialog is solid gold.

Money is incredibly scarce. You have to fight monsters to get them to drop items, those items allow new weapons and armor to be available. The problem is everything is ridiculously expensive, so you almost never have the money to re-equip your team unless you grind for a few hours. I suppose that's how you stay well leveled, but when you first enter a new stage an ass kicking is eminent.

Many of the maps in the various stages are huge and they aren't packed wall to wall with monsters. On one hand it makes it fairly easy to run and explore and jump through your floors without issue, but as stated above you need to grind your level and get money above all else. Because you have to constantly run there and back to find monsters, grinding can be a bit of a chore. Worse than that the moment you outlevel a certain area? You might as well stop wasting your time there because the experience drops to virtually nothing.

The game kinda can trap you too. I tried to max out my social links by talking to the characters that interested me as a player. What I should have been doing is maxing out of the ones of the types of persona's I used so they can get stronger faster. The big mistake I made was ignoring my Hermit persona, because it makes it less expensive to recover when in the dungeon areas, now I'm at the end of the game and can't recover easily.

This freak'n mutt. If it had told me how important he was I would have paid more attention to it.

While I am not shredding through this game with my usually unhealthy amount of game addiction, I still have managed to put up a ridiculous 74 something hours in this game and I still haven't completed it yet (but I'm right there). I'm sure some of the things I've complained about in this review are some of the reasons some gamers disliked JRPGs (or "idiots" as I like to call them.) But if I can play a pair of games that are nearly 5 and 7 years old respectively for well over 80 hours each time, then that says something.

I have never been so entrenched in a universe like this in a long long time. Tales of {any}, Final Fantasy, Disgaea all have universes I love and are passionate to (too weird?) but the Persona series definitely has me going back to goofy high school roots of falling in love with characters that don't exist and wishing they were my real friends. I've watched through the anime like 3 or 4 times already. I'm fanboying so hard for this series I am considering getting me some yellow contacts, because the shadows look awesome with those.

I'ma frame this and put it on my desk.... Cuz I don't have a picture with actual friends to use.
*sob*

Supposedly in August of 2011 it was announced that Persona 5 is in the works and I hope that its true. Both Persona 3 and 4 had fantastic universes and characters, and Persona 4 Arena did a wonderful job of intermixing the two story lines together. Its my hope that the fifth game picks up where Arena left off since it ended on kind of half cliffhanger, and after introducing the new character Labrys, I would really like to see where that story is looking to go.

Persona 4 is available on PS2 on amazon new for like 18 bucks right now, and if you have a PS Vita Persona 4 Golden is available for 40 (with animated cut scenes, and additional content {those fuckers}). I absolutely recommend this game if you are looking to dust your PS2 off for another 80 hours or so. Its hard for me to believe that almost a year ago (August) I had basically shrugged this series off as too difficult or uninteresting. I'm very glad I went back to it because its proven to be a very satisfying series.

Sadly my love letters Chie Satonaka will go unread.....

Because shes not real... Sigh....