Worth Its Weight in Gold
Review
Persona 4
Golden, Atlus (PSVITA)
"Every day's great at your Junes!"
Abstract: Persona 4 Golden, the enhanced remake of the classic PlayStation 2 JRPG slash social
simulation hybrid, is a masterpiece. The game excels on all levels. Persona 4 Golden’s unique fusion of
genres creates an innovative and compelling experience that is hard to put
down. Clever systems keep conversation and combat fresh as you spend a year
getting to know yourself and figure out the supernatural mysteries at the heart
of Persona 4 Golden’s story. Perhaps
its biggest success is its characters, as your allies and fellow students feel
real, like old friends you never knew you had. Persona 4 Golden is an unmissable experience unlike any other game,
and a remarkable achievement that makes me only want more.
Persona 4 Golden is the biggest ‘system seller’ game
I can think of in recent memory. As someone who pretty avidly consumes video
game discussions, be they written, spoken or otherwise, there has been no game more
passionately discussed than Persona 4
Golden. I’ve been told Persona 4
Golden is exceptional. I’ve been told Persona
4 Golden should be the first game you get on Vita, if not reason enough to
buy the $200 console. I’ve been told that Persona
4 Golden is one of the greatest JRPGs of all time. That’s a lot of big talk. Many have funneled
their love of Persona 4 Golden into
excitement for future releases, citing Persona
5 as their most anticipated game of 2015. I so desperately wanted to be
part of the Persona conversation. I
finally got my chance back in April, when Justine got me a PlayStation Vita
with a copy of Persona 4 Golden for
our anniversary. I got going on my playthrough with little delay. And now I’ve
got to write it here: those people weren’t being hyperbolic. Persona 4 Golden is a masterpiece, and a
game I never knew I wanted.
Persona 4 Golden is an enhanced remake of the 2008
JRPG social simulation hybrid Persona 4
for the PlayStation 2. For me, Persona 4
Golden was my first foray into the long-running series and a fully
standalone experience. You play as the aptly named Hero, a Japanese high school
student who, due to his parents’ work, is sent to live for a year in the small
countryside village of Inaba with his uncle. A brutal and mysterious murder
takes place early in your stay, enveloping the once quiet town in a fog of
fear. More than meets the eye with this ever-growing murder case, as
unexplained events lead to suspicion of supernatural forces being at play. Everything
appears tied to the eerie “midnight channel.” Students at Yasogami High begin
seeing strange things on the midnight channel, which only appears when you look
at a powered off TV at midnight while it’s raining. After a death hits close to
home for the protagonist and his slowly growing group of friends, they form an
Investigation Team to go about solving these heinous crimes. Hero quickly
discovers he has the ability to step into TV sets, entering the realm of the
midnight channel. Once there, he and his friends face their inner demons and
achieve the power of Personas: large spirits that fight on their behalf. As you
live a year in Inaba, Hero spends his time gaining friends and allies, and meeting
up with the Investigation Team to discover the mystery of the midnight channel,
the murders, and the Personas themselves. Oh, and trying to live a life as a
normal high school student.
 |
Mysterious murders are at the heart of Persona 4 Golden's plot. Spend a year
in Inaba discovering the truth. |
The slow
introduction of the game, which is spent introducing the player to the game’s
many mechanics, gives way to an exceptional JRPG (and gaming) experience. Let’s
first talk about Persona 4 Golden as
an RPG. It kicks ass. Persona 4 Golden
clearly derives a lot of inspiration from classic JRPGs. As you progress through
the game, you build up a party, find new armor and weapons to equip, and fight
enemies (shadows) through a turn-based battle system. The core of Persona 4 Golden’s more traditional JRPG
systems revolve around tackling the game’s various dungeons. You move from
floor to floor clearing out enemies, discovering treasure chests, and defeating
the game’s many challenging bosses. But the best part? Persona 4 Golden is a highly non-traditional JRPG. I had never
played anything like it. Every single aspect of Persona 4 Golden is rooted in the real world. Those new weapons you
use? You buy them from a replica shop, and only in the midnight channel realm
do they extract their full power. Healing items? You’re using medicine and
food. Special status effects? Pinwheels, other toys.
 |
| How cool is it that you get to enter a TV to do your battles? Pretty damn. |
You know
what else is rooted in real world experiences? Being a high schooler. Social
simulation is the other half of Persona 4
Golden, and what you’ll be spending the majority of your time doing during
the roughly 80-90 hour playthrough. The Persona
series sets itself apart with the depth, engagement and downright
addictiveness with which they incorporate social sim elements. As Hero, you
spend your time going to school, answering pop quiz questions, trying to make
new friends, attending festivals and, sometimes, finding romance. People and the relationships your forge
with them are central to Persona 4 Golden.
To make those connections, you’ll need to perform activities to boost your
social skills: knowledge, courage, understanding, expression. Relationships
determine everything. Looking for a new party member? You need to make a new
friend. Decide to spend the night talking with your little cousin? You’ve just
powered up your Personas for future battles (I’ll get to that in a bit). Playing
through Persona 4 Golden means taking
the time to talk to people: getting to know them. Without compelling characters
or well-written dialogue a game like this could fall flat. Fall flat Persona 4 Golden does not.
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Should I study after class? Or hang out with Yosuke? You get a lot of options
with how to spend your time. And all of it matters. |
As much as Persona 4 Golden succeeds in essentially
everything it does, the cast of characters is the apex of the mountain of
accomplishments. The people you meet feel real. Sure, they have that
tropey-ness endemic to anime styled storytelling, but they change and grow with
the player, revealing their multi-layered personalities as your connection to
them deepens. By the end of my playthrough, so many of Persona 4 Golden’s characters felt like old friends. I would think
of Yosuke whenever I saw some kid in a TV show trying to put the moves on the
ladies. Or Kanji when I saw beautifully knit sweaters. Or Chie when I saw
martial arts. Within your core party especially, I was finding real world
parallels to their personalities left and right. But there are just so many
characters that you talk to, and learn about, who I still think about now a
month out from completion. You spend an entire year in Inaba with these people, going through each day one at a
time, allowing you to grow as Hero, grow with the town, and grow with the
people you call friends and family. In that sense Inaba is a perfect setting:
like any small town, you get to know everyone, and feel a closeness and longing
for their interactions.
 |
| By the end of my playthrough, the Investigation Team felt like old friends. I miss our antics. |
At first it
may sound like the JRPG and social sim elements would be at odds, two effective
but separate parts. Surprisingly, however, the fusion of the two is thoroughly
effective. Forming meaningful relationships creates a social-link (S-LINK).
These S-LINKs are a ranked system showing how close you are to a character.
S-LINKs serve a dual function, powering up your Personas as well. The more time
you spend with your connections, the higher the S-LINK will be, and the more
powerful Hero will be in battle. In almost every instance it feels like a
win-win. The dialogue and scenarios while improving your S-LINKs are so great
they could be their own game, but the fact that spending that time improves
your ability in battle makes it all the sweeter. And then, of course, it goes
vise versa. The challenges you face in the midnight channel shapes your
characters, giving you new things to talk about and new experiences to share
with your S-LINKs. It’s great.
 |
| Want to power up your personas? You had better spend some time with your connections. |
I would be
remiss if I didn’t spend a little bit of time writing about Persona 4 Golden’s battle system. Since,
you know, I’m kind of into that whole game design thing. As you might expect
from how I’ve extolled the successes of the game thus far, I quite enjoyed Persona 4 Golden’s additions to the
standard JRPG foundation. In battle, Personas act a little like Pokemon, for
Hero at least. You can ready a certain number of Personas at a time, and each
one comes equipped with special abilities to use in battle. Some are better at
healing, others are dealing physical damage, others elemental, etc. You can
customize and create new Personas by fusing them together, functionally
‘evolving’ them into more powerful forms. The Pokemon analogy carries through
when you talk battles themselves, as everything relies upon elemental-weakness
exploitation. Certain shadows are weak to electrical strikes, others weak to
wind, and so on. Striking an enemy with the element to which it’s weak will
cause it to be downed. If you can get all foes downed at once, your team can
unleash a powerful ‘All Out’ attack that deals massive damage. The system is
simple, but keeps encounters fresh as you constantly need to feel out enemy
weaknesses to be effective in battle. Like many JRPGs, Persona 4 Golden can be punishing at first—enemies hit hard,
dungeons are long, and your depleted health and mana do not recover when a
battle is finished. A couple hours of grinding solved the issue for me, and was
expected given its existence in so many different JRPGs. Just be prepared for a
pretty tough game if you don’t want to invest some extra time to level up.
 |
| Battles are fast and fun. Pulling off the All Out attacks never stopped feeling great. |
Perhaps
most importantly, Persona 4 Golden is
a game that’s left a long lasting impact on me. With just one game I feel like I’ve become a
massive fan of the franchise. I love the world, I love the characters, and I
love what the game tried to accomplish. I feel attached to a game world in a
way I haven’t felt for so long. Part of me feels like I, too, spent a year in
Inaba. The story and characters are memorable, fun, and silly. There’s also
just so damn much to do in game. My playthrough clocked in at 85 hours—probably
the longest ‘story’ playthrough I have experienced. And the crazy thing? I
would have been fine with it being much longer. You can spend your time in so
many different ways I’ve also considered going back through the game and
getting a whole new perspective on a familiar world.
I know this
is a long review. I promise to be shorter in the future, but I just couldn’t
stop myself. I fell in love with Persona
4 Golden and there’s no going back. Persona
4 Golden is a game I never knew I wanted. Persona 4 Golden gets right what so many JRPGs do wrong, while at
the same time succeeding in ways others could never hope to emulate. While
playing, I almost never stopped smiling. 85 hours is a long time to smile. Go
play Persona 4 Golden. Yes even if
that means getting a Vita. Until then, I’ll just be here waiting for Persona 4 Dancing All Night and Persona 5.
Persona 4 Golden
