Persona 4 Golden Review – Stay Golden

A top-tier role-playing sport is usually a finely crafted concoction of a number of substances: an attention-grabbing setting, an interesting story, fulfilling characters and interactions, and gameplay that makes your interplay with the entire aforementioned parts really feel significant and worthwhile. When all of those particular person elements are developed to excessive requirements, the result’s an RPG of remarkable quality–and that’s precisely what Persona 4 Golden is.This re-release of 2008’s glorious PlayStation 2 sport takes place in modern-day Japan. The protagonist is a highschool pupil from an enormous metropolis whose dad and mom have been despatched away on enterprise. They ship him to reside for a 12 months along with his uncle–a police investigator–and his younger cousin in a small countryside city. Almost instantly upon the hero’s arrival, unusual issues start to occur on this in any other case boring little hamlet: a string of individuals flip up useless, and rumor spreads of a supernatural tv broadcast that exhibits weird programming. The hero and a crew of his newfound classmates quickly uncover a horrible secret: there is a separate world inside the televisions that twists human wishes and hidden emotions in probably deadly methods, and it is one way or the other tied to the serial killings. It’s as much as the group of buddies to harness the supernatural energy of personas, put a cease to the sinister killing spree, and decipher the secrets and techniques behind the TV world.The modern, real-world-inspired setting of Persona 4 is already a superb conceit within the closely fantasy- and sci-fi-driven world of RPGs. But it is from the one factor that units the sport other than the crop. Unlike most RPGs, Persona 4 operates on one thing of a time restrict. From the day you arrive within the nation village of Inaba till the day the college 12 months ends, you advance by way of the sport on a calendar. Dates and deadlines are essential; not solely do you’ve vital occasions at school and in your private life to cope with, however you additionally uncover that the serial killings observe a selected time sample. You have to discover and rescue potential victims from the TV world earlier than they’re killed–a activity that normally takes a number of days to finish.It could be simple if you happen to may simply spend all of your days combating, however Persona 4 additionally places heavy emphasis on interacting with different characters within the sport. Every day presents many alternatives for varied noncombative actions, be it college golf equipment, hobbies at dwelling, working part-time jobs for further spending cash, or simply hanging out with friends needing pleasant assist. Spending time on these actions advantages you in varied methods: some enhance your skills, some earn you objects and cash, and nonetheless others enhance your connections with different characters.Some selections may even supply a number of advantages. By far probably the most profitable are the connections with non-player characters, referred to as “social links.” By forming friendships and assist networks with varied characters, you create {powerful} personas to make use of throughout fight. (Some social hyperlinks, corresponding to these along with your social gathering members, additionally supply extra fight advantages and abilities.) Thus, selecting how you can spend your restricted time every day turns into an extra problem with its personal dangers and rewards. If you’re feeling indecisive, an in-game characteristic enables you to hook up with a web-based database to see how different gamers selected to spend that day.Though social hyperlinks pose an interesting puzzle, they woudn’t be practically as attention-grabbing if the NPCs concerned weren’t participating, memorable characters. This is among the methods Persona 4 shines, since interacting with the sport’s solid is fulfilling and rewarding in itself. The characters you meet over the course of the sport are relatable and plausible, as are the struggles they undergo. The bonds you wind up forming with characters make the assorted interludes scattered all through the sport (corresponding to class journeys and group holidays) much more fulfilling as breaks from a generally very heavy story. The high quality of the sport’s writing and localization is an extra triumph, skillfully delivering each laugh-out-loud moments and heart-wrenching plot twists.The story and socialization parts are just one portion of the sport, nonetheless. You spend a variety of time exploring the TV world, as effectively. As the sport progresses, the TV world expands to incorporate quite a few dungeons and monsters created from the darkish, repressed ideas of potential victims which have been solid inside. As the chief of your college buddies’ makeshift “investigation team,” you and your friends discover these randomly generated dungeons, scouring them for treasures and sometimes fixing puzzles whereas trying to find the kidnapped victims. Combat is conventional turn-based RPG combating with a twist: each you and your foes can earn further turns by exploiting one another’s elemental weak spot, a mechanic that fuels some devious methods and devastating assaults. (It’s price noting that Persona 4 Golden is barely simpler than the unique sport, so veterans on the lookout for a problem might need to decide a tougher issue setting when beginning a brand new sport.)The idea of “personas”–supernatural representations of 1’s projected self–comes into play throughout fight. Personas include a set of strengths, weaknesses, and fight abilities, which might change and evolve because the personas degree up. While your social gathering members every have a set persona all through the sport, your lead character has the distinctive skill to rework into many various personas throughout fight. This permits for extra fight technique, supplying you with a approach to choose personas best for exploiting enemy weaknesses whereas additionally working to guard your personal social gathering. The important character’s personas additionally acquire expertise and degree up independently of his base degree, normally being equal to or decrease than his personal.Since finally personas study the entire abilities they probably can and taper off in stat development, you should discover the system of fusing personas to type new, more-powerful personas in fight. This permits abilities from the personas used within the fusion to be handed alongside, and a few well-planned talent inheritance combos can lead to a potent new fight persona. Social hyperlinks additionally enhance created personas with extra expertise bonuses, permitting you to create a lot higher-level personas usually past your attain. Skillfully making a persona array to make use of in battle can typically imply the distinction between victory and defeat.These varied parts enhance an already-fantastic RPG expertise. But what makes Persona 4 Golden an much more spectacular package deal is how a lot further content material has been packed into the sport over its authentic launch. For starters, creating new personas through fusion is way simpler, as a result of the sport enables you to decide abilities to switch (slightly than randomly transferring abilities). You may also give personas particular skills by way of using uncommon objects referred to as “skill cards”–a callback to a few of the earlier Persona video games.Your social gathering members are additionally able to performing extra skills throughout fight: relying on how excessive your social hyperlinks are along with your teammates, they’ll randomly remedy minor standing illnesses and carry out assist attacks–even if they are not within the presently energetic social gathering. Certain combos of social gathering members may also carry out particular follow-up abilities after all-out assaults to deal further harm to already weakened foes. The Shuffle Time card minigame after sure battles has been fully redone, permitting for much less random probability and extra worthwhile bonuses. A community characteristic in dungeons rounds out the fight enhancements, permitting you to request assist from different P4G gamers related to PSN to ship help within the type of well being and talent level restoration.The enhancements go effectively past fight. Two new social links–including a brand-new feminine character named Marie–are accessible to foster, and extra areas and alternatives for constructing different hyperlinks abound. You should purchase seeds and have a tendency to a backyard at dwelling, utilizing the crops yielded as useful objects within the dungeons. You additionally earn a scooter throughout the sport, which you need to use to journey to the seashore and a bigger metropolis for actions, procuring, and questing. More choices can be found to you throughout the evenings, together with hanging out with buddies and a brand new job alternative working at a hostess bar. Finally, many actions from the earlier sport, corresponding to studying or working at dwelling within the evenings to enhance varied stats, have been streamlined to be simpler to make use of and extra helpful.But these aren’t even the largest additions to the sport. In the unique launch of P4, there was some extent the place a major time skip occurred, transferring the sport’s calendar a number of months forward. In Persona 4 Golden, a lot of this time interval is made accessible to you to play by way of, permitting you to additional construct social hyperlinks and have interaction with the characters and setting effectively past what you could possibly earlier than. Some new story occasions can be found throughout this time, and a totally new dungeon additionally opens up (supplied you have accomplished some conditions). The new story additions additionally enable for some vastly completely different endings.On prime of the whole lot are individually accessible in-game TV channels that provide quite a lot of programming. Once you unlock them, you may freely entry archives of the assorted animation sequences seen within the sport, design art work, and promotional supplies and music. There’s even a lesson on the Jungian psychology theories that type the idea of the sport’s story, together with an interactive quiz-show sequence that exams your data of the whole lot associated to Persona 4.As nice as Persona 4 Golden is, there are a couple of minor points. The sport nonetheless takes some time to get going: anticipate to expertise about two hours of plot setup and character introductions earlier than you are turned free to benefit from the sport at your personal tempo. The visible improve additionally feels somewhat missing: P4G’s PlayStation 2 roots present in its pretty basic-looking character fashions and environments and sometimes-blurry textures. The sport seems to be like an HD remaster slightly than a full remake, leaving you feeling prefer it does not make the most of the platform’s graphical capabilities in addition to it ought to.When it comes right down to it, nonetheless, any complaints that may be lobbied at Persona 4 Golden really feel insignificant when weighed towards the standard of the remainder of the sport. Persona 4 stays one of the participating, considerate, and fulfilling RPGs of current years, having already earned its standing as a style basic upon its authentic launch. Persona 4 Golden’s well-thought-out and well-implemented augmentations serve to make an already improbable sport even higher, leading to a superlative sport expertise that belongs in any Vita sport library.Persona 4 Golden (2023) When a improbable sport finds itself wedged between two entries of the same caliber, it at all times runs the unlucky threat of wanting a bit dimmer by comparability. Persona 3 is a macabre masterpiece–a hazy blue exploration of dying and how you can reside life so purposefully you may in the future hope to embrace it slightly than worry it. Persona 5, however, exudes confidence and calls for motion slightly than somber meditation. It is a sport that doubles as a name for authenticity and the braveness to rebel–to stand your floor and resist merciless authoritarians. So, with two phenomenal titles resting gently on both aspect of it, what does that imply for Persona 4 Golden?As its identify implies, Persona 4 Golden stays completely radiant. Even in 2023–and up towards the polish of modern-day titles and the nostalgia we connect to these older than it–it shouldn’t be solely an unbelievable entry within the Persona sequence, however an unbelievable RPG. Persona 4 Golden’s intimate nature, charming solid of characters, and idyllic setting fastidiously constructed to juxtapose its tense and horrific narrative, create an expertise that’s unforgettable and worthy of its essential acclaim.As this can be a temporary overview following Persona 4 Golden being ported to fashionable consoles, I will not regale you with all the identical info relating to plot particulars and mechanics you could find in our 2012 overview. No main adjustments have been made to the sport and the high-praise given to in our overview nonetheless stands. However, 11 years seems like a enough period of time to mirror on elements of the sport that deserved to be reexamined, for higher or worse.Part of the sport that has aged extremely effectively and units Persona 4 Golden other than its friends is its intimate scale. While it does not really feel fully correct to say that the sport’s stakes are considerably smaller–we’re nonetheless speaking alternate dimensions, gods, and homicide here–the rural setting and tendency for all motion, thriller, and tragedy to focus on core group of individuals makes each plot beat that a lot punchier. Additionally, whereas Persona 3 and Persona 5 current you as an outsider in an enormous metropolis, in Persona 4 you’re a metropolis boy welcomed right into a small city. Rather than subsiding on dorm meals or hurriedly consuming curry while being berated, you take pleasure in your meals with your loved ones and spend loads of high quality time across the kotatsu. Despite how eerie the sport will be and express with its violence, there’s a heat that permeates and provides consolation by way of the hardship.This is just amplified by how improbable Persona 4 Golden’s characters and the moments you share with them. While most RPGs have a couple of characters that really feel lackluster in comparison with the remainder of the social gathering, Persona 4 has an exceptionally stable solid. Sure, you is likely to be a Teddy hater–I completely get it if you happen to are–but general the characters within the sport are extra fully-fleshed out and personable than the vast majority of video games on the market. By the time I rolled credit, I used to be heartbroken that the time I spent beside them had come to an finish. I wished extra animated cutscenes feeding me fan service. I longed to go to Junes with Nanako another time, or see Yoske lastly mature a bit and even perhaps ask Chie out on a date. I suppose all of it boils right down to, slightly than feeling such as you have been combating to slot in or increase social hyperlinks to achieve a way of belonging, that sensation is baked proper into the sport’s DNA. It’s a formidable feat that makes it among the many most charming of video games I’ve ever performed.However, even Persona 4 Golden’s charms do not reduce the influence of a few of the story beats that didn’t age fairly in addition to the remainder of the sport. While Persona 4 is a sport all about belonging and adolescents reckoning with their inner-self to turn into the individual they lengthy to be, each Kanji and Naoto’s storylines go towards this premise and do not fairly make sense. Throughout the sport, Kanji discovers he feels attraction in direction of males whereas Naoto repeatedly expresses his need to current himself as a person. However, each Kanji’s sexuality and Naoto’s identification are finally written off as momentary emotions they skilled as a result of of–wait for it–women.Kanji states he noticed males in a sexual mild as a result of he seen girls as overly essential, whereas Naoto reveals he chooses to current male as a result of girls do not fall according to his notion of a cool and aloof detective. While these are probably the most prevalent instances of Persona 4 dismissing or outright laughing off its alternatives to discover queer identities, the sport additionally options a number of extra cases of homophobic and sexist language. While we may chalk this all as much as tradition or name Persona 4 Golden a mirrored image of the occasions, these conditions finally bitter the sport’s general experience–especially when you think about how harshly they conflict towards Persona 4’s message of acceptance and its kindhearted characters.Moving on from the sport’s setting and characters, nonetheless, I do discover a couple of areas the place I really suppose extra reward is so as. For instance, I consider that criticism in our authentic overview in direction of the sport’s artwork and sluggish begin do not ring fairly as true to me. I recognize how ornate locations really feel in Persona 4 Golden–how crammed to the brim each surroundings feels, no matter whether or not it is a dungeon or a small store. While the constancy won’t be there, the artistry is, and the whole lot feels very deliberately designed to evoke a specific feeling, be it consolation or unease. I additionally suppose that, particularly in 2023, slower begins to video games are much more anticipated and accommodating, making Persona 4 Golden’s sluggish burn far much less grating than it may need been in 2012.Over a decade later, Persona 4 Golden provides up the identical heat and radiance its identify implies. The ease at which the sport can leverage ambiance and emotion is exceptional and never simply emulated. And whereas Persona 3 would possibly boast a profound story and Persona 5 an abundance of fashion and flash, it’s that intimate atmosphere–that sense of closeness and belonging–that units Persona 4 other than each of them. Though elements of its social commentary are ignorant and regressive, there’s an underlying tenderness and sincerity that shines by way of most different parts of the sport and make it a must-play.