So I finally finished Persona 4. It was excellent.
Posted On: Oct 6, 2016 4:52:59 GMT
Synile likes this
Post by lordofshadow on Oct 6, 2016 4:52:59 GMT
Finally finished Persona 4. It's a goddamn best-in-class masterpiece. I highly recommend it to anyone who's a fan of relatable slice-of-life anime, PS2-era JRPGs, great music that fuses genres like JPOP/Jazz/Hip-hip/Chill Electronica, stylish as hell UIs, fighting demons as a high schooler in a modern setting, or feel-good coming-of-age stories about people overcoming their *ahem* demons.
I promise you, you'll be a fan of all of those by the time you're done with the game.
Basic gist: You're a high-schooler who's moved to live with his uncle and cousin. Transfer student to local high school. You will spend a year there. The game has a limited number of days, and each day has a couple different beats to it - usually a morning/afternoon and an evening. You're basically trying to forge strong friendships with the different characters in the town and increase your social stats - knowledge, diligence, expression, etc. to unlock dialog options. You can invest each half of your day into actions like... going to work, hanging out with a friend, etc.
At the same time, there are a string of murders that only you and your friends can solve. Also, demons and dungeon-crawling. A lot of the game boils down to learning about people's inner demons and mundane struggles - absent father, pressure to carry on the family business, etc. - and then helping them overcome them. Partially by fighting their literal demons.
A lot of it maps to Jungian and Freudian psychology - Jung's archetypes, Freud's Id, Ego, Superego - which is an interesting lens to see the game through.
I was initially worried that the limited number of days thing would be too much for the min-maxer in me, but it wasn't overbearing. It DOES impart a strong feeling of weight to your decisions - every choice matters, and developing one social relationship might come at the expense of another. It's all the more powerful because it's very relatable. The way you spend your time matters for the same reason it matters in real life: that time is finite and you're paying an opportunity cost. Over a 60-70 hour RPG, so we're not talking a small investment. That seems daunting, but it also imparts more weight to this system, because you're in it for the long haul.
Your options and power in the dungeon-crawling side of the game are directly linked to which social relationships you've developed, and they reinforce each other: the slice-of-life story beats matter immensely on both a narrative and a gameplay level.
The actual combat system is pretty simplistic and seems generic at first glance, but it's tightly balanced and has interesting high points even in mundane battles. Everyone has elemental strengths and weaknesses. Getting hit with your weakness knocks you down. If you knock all of the enemies down, you can do a powerful full-party attack. Some enemies absorb or reflect certain elements. All of this comes together to make many battles feel like puzzles, and the payoff is that snazzy team attack that usually ends battles for you. If you end battles with a team attack, then you get a fast little card minigame, which can provide interesting bonuses depending on your choices. All in all, it's a tightly balanced, satisfying, and engaging combat system that only started to wear thin around hour 70, in the very final true ending dungeons.
The game's greatest strength is how all of these pieces come together to make you feel *very* invested in the game's characters and the outcomes of your choices. It's one of my all-time favorite casts of characters, and I was feeling their struggles *hard*. One of many, many examples: taking my little cousin shopping with my friends in the game was a minor climax of a mundane story arc mid-game, and it was deeply satisfying. That's damn impressive.
Oh, and it does what every story built on character investment should do: gave me a ton of epilogue content, and a strong sense of closure.
I highly recommend this game. If any of this sounds good to you, you will likely love it, IF you can stomach the time investment.
I promise you, you'll be a fan of all of those by the time you're done with the game.
Basic gist: You're a high-schooler who's moved to live with his uncle and cousin. Transfer student to local high school. You will spend a year there. The game has a limited number of days, and each day has a couple different beats to it - usually a morning/afternoon and an evening. You're basically trying to forge strong friendships with the different characters in the town and increase your social stats - knowledge, diligence, expression, etc. to unlock dialog options. You can invest each half of your day into actions like... going to work, hanging out with a friend, etc.
At the same time, there are a string of murders that only you and your friends can solve. Also, demons and dungeon-crawling. A lot of the game boils down to learning about people's inner demons and mundane struggles - absent father, pressure to carry on the family business, etc. - and then helping them overcome them. Partially by fighting their literal demons.
A lot of it maps to Jungian and Freudian psychology - Jung's archetypes, Freud's Id, Ego, Superego - which is an interesting lens to see the game through.
I was initially worried that the limited number of days thing would be too much for the min-maxer in me, but it wasn't overbearing. It DOES impart a strong feeling of weight to your decisions - every choice matters, and developing one social relationship might come at the expense of another. It's all the more powerful because it's very relatable. The way you spend your time matters for the same reason it matters in real life: that time is finite and you're paying an opportunity cost. Over a 60-70 hour RPG, so we're not talking a small investment. That seems daunting, but it also imparts more weight to this system, because you're in it for the long haul.
Your options and power in the dungeon-crawling side of the game are directly linked to which social relationships you've developed, and they reinforce each other: the slice-of-life story beats matter immensely on both a narrative and a gameplay level.
The actual combat system is pretty simplistic and seems generic at first glance, but it's tightly balanced and has interesting high points even in mundane battles. Everyone has elemental strengths and weaknesses. Getting hit with your weakness knocks you down. If you knock all of the enemies down, you can do a powerful full-party attack. Some enemies absorb or reflect certain elements. All of this comes together to make many battles feel like puzzles, and the payoff is that snazzy team attack that usually ends battles for you. If you end battles with a team attack, then you get a fast little card minigame, which can provide interesting bonuses depending on your choices. All in all, it's a tightly balanced, satisfying, and engaging combat system that only started to wear thin around hour 70, in the very final true ending dungeons.
The game's greatest strength is how all of these pieces come together to make you feel *very* invested in the game's characters and the outcomes of your choices. It's one of my all-time favorite casts of characters, and I was feeling their struggles *hard*. One of many, many examples: taking my little cousin shopping with my friends in the game was a minor climax of a mundane story arc mid-game, and it was deeply satisfying. That's damn impressive.
Oh, and it does what every story built on character investment should do: gave me a ton of epilogue content, and a strong sense of closure.
I highly recommend this game. If any of this sounds good to you, you will likely love it, IF you can stomach the time investment.
