The Impact Factor

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.

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

5/5