LogFAQs > #949663438

#92 Persona 4 Golden (PS Vita, 2012)


Honestly, there isn't really a reason for me to specify the Golden version. I don't think that it added much positive value than what the original version offered. I didn't care for Marie, the new social links (I think it was just her and Adachi), and I think everything else was relatively minor. However, I think it did add a winter event where all the girls you had a romantic social link with tried to confess their feelings to you. I had a romantic social link with multiple of them, and you could only choose one, leading to a series of gut-wrenching conversations that caused me to turn the audio off and barely glance at the screen so I felt less like a monster.

I actually feel that Persona 4 is a downgrade from Persona 3 in some pretty significant areas. I felt the over-arching plot fizzled out maybe 2/3 of the way through (I started losing interest after Naoto's dungeon and basically all interest with one of the most idiotic emotional manipulations I have experienced). I know that people prefer the combat in 4 over 3 with the full control of the party's actions a big reason why, but I actually preferred the old combat where you only had control of the main character (I prefer less micromanagement). I also found that the dungeons were kind of lame and just had the theme as a backdrop with nothing interesting about them. I found Tartarus from 3 to be neat.

The main reason why I prefer this over Persona 3 and why it is one of my favorite RPGs is because it does something that I feel so few in the genre do; there is genuine party chemistry and camaraderie. WRPGs tend to be far more nuanced with deeper, complex characters to where they have a better success rate at having a group of people who don't seem to have much in common and even less reason to interact with one another more than the minimum seem like there is a understated bond between them that doesn't need to be spelled out in full to the player. JRPGs, and just a lot of Japenese games in general, tend to be overly explicit in just about everything, including pushing the idea that everyone in the party are friends, they were destined to be heroes, yada yada yada. They just either don't put in the effort or have the skill to actually pull it off. It just comes across as weird and unfulfilling.

Persona 4 is one of the rare ones that takes the time and effort to effectively build up the characters, their relationships with each other, how they rose to become (clandestine) heroes, and how their experiences shaped and changed them. It was such a refreshing experience and one that I won't forget.

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KCF can't actually be a real person but he is - greengravy
If you smell what the rock is cooking he's cooking crap - ertyu