Persona 4 Golden

Persona 4: Golden, an updated rerelease of the most recent entry in the off-shoot Shin Megami Tensei series, brings everything from the original title for the Playstation 2 to the Playstation Vita and then some. With additional characters, dungeons, locations, Personae, Social Links, game mechanics, and events, including a new epilogue, Golden adds a ton of content to an already lengthy game. By the end, the game clock read just a little over 108 hours on my final save file. And that’s not counting any time spent in the bonus content such as videos of Persona music events, a trivia game, concept art, advertisements for various Persona games, and for the super nerds, an explanation of Jungian philosophy in the form of a series of lectures given by Professor Edogawa. The game has even added voice acting for some of the unread lines in the original release. This all adds up to an even better version of one of my favorite games.

The game begins with the protagonist, played by you, arriving in a small, rural Japanese town called Inaba. You’ve come to Inaba to live with your uncle, a local detective, and his young daughter while your parents are traveling abroad. Expecting a quiet school year, things take a sudden turn when an outrageous murder occurs that leaves a body suspended from a television antenna. After a second unexplainable murder occurs, not to mention a bizarre encounter with a giant, talking teddy bear from a world beyond the television screen, it’s clear something truly bizarre is happening and only you and a group of your fellow high schoolers can solve the case! On your down time, you can also help the townspeople of Inaba overcome their troubles and self-esteem issues.

Anyone who has played the original Persona 4 or any incarnation of Persona 3 will instantly feel comfortable playing Persona 4: Golden. The gameplay is split between dialogue-heavy cutscenes with just a touch of social sim and third-person JRPG dungeon-crawling with a hint of monster collecting, in the form of Personae you summon in battle. The battle system is based heavily on exploiting an enemy’s elemental weakness and avoiding their resistances while defending the weaknesses of the Personae of you and your party members. It offers fun and challenging fights that require a certain degree of strategy. One wrong move can result in a significant struggle or an outright loss, particularly during the boss battles. The addition of a checkpoint system does help to mitigate any frustration, but I would not call Persona 4: Golden an easy game, perhaps just easier than your average Shin Megami Tensei game. There are multiple difficulties for anyone finding it too difficult or too easy and during a second playthrough there’s the option to adjust specific aspects of the difficulty, such as the amount of experience gained or damage dealt and taken.

The story in Persona 4 is a long rollercoaster. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll wince whenever Teddie or Yosuke say something awful. Though there are numerous main story dialogue sections, and even some anime cutscenes, the strength of the writing is in the side stuff. Talking to the townsfolk throughout the year, in addition to sometimes finding quests and obtaining items, Yen, or raising attributes, shows some zany aspects of the town, such as the businessman who keeps seeing an Egyptian woman around town or the budding childhood romance of Spacy Girl and Errand Boy. And then there are the Social Links.

The Social Links are a tremendous part of the game. While most don’t tie directly into the main storyline, they’re easily the highlight of the writing. You’ll meet a young man terrified of rejection and questioning his sexual identity, a student toiling under a doting mother and the pressure of perfection, a young woman whose deadbeat, runaway father has come back into her life dying in a hospital bed, and numerous others throughout the course of the game. Even your own family needs your help; your uncle’s wife died tragically in a hit-and-run accident and he now neglects his six-year-old daughter to single-mindedly search for the perpetrator. Each relationship is told through a series of ten or eleven events that culminate in them coming to grips with their troubles and accepting themselves, with each of the 10 ranks giving a larger boost of experience points when fusing Personae of the same arcana. The writing is fantastic and the characters themselves are interesting and, at times, heartbreaking, particularly if you act like a jerk.

What few complaints I do have about the game’s story mostly boil down to personal preference regarding the writing. What bothers me most are the changes they’ve made to some of the characters by way of additional scenes and dialogue. Kanji comes across more slow-witted, Yosuke seems more perverted, and specifically my opinion of Chie is completely opposite in Golden. Ultimately, it’s their game to change but it flattened the characters, albeit only a little bit. The most apparent change is the exaggeration of Chie’s love of meat, basically making the internet meme version of Chie canonic. She literally moans the word meat at one point. Also, the new voice actress does a fine job, but the alternate sound and take on her lines paints a very different personality from the original. These two things combine to change a character I enjoyed initially into someone I find incredibly annoying.

There are so many things to do in Persona 4: Golden that I barely, if at all, touched on, from seeing movies with your friends to raising attributes by reading a variety of books to fishing to romance options. It’s impossible to talk about it all without making this even longer, so, you’ll just have to play Persona 4: Golden yourself, probably twice, to experience everything it has to offer. If you already know you don’t like role playing games, this one won’t change your mind. If you’re new to RPGs, specifically Japanese RPGs, or already know you love ‘em and own a Playstation Vita, you should definitely get this game, you will likely enjoy it. And, as someone who experienced Persona 4 two and a half times before playing this rerelease, I can even wholeheartedly recommend Persona 4: Golden to people who have already played the original. The new content and variations to the gameplay are well worth the time investment. It has secured a spot above the original, which was already high, on my list of favorite games.