Persona 4 (PS2) Review

 Persona 4 (PS2) 7.5/10

Hello everyone and welcome to this colossal game review. Persona 4 was released on July 10, 2008 for the PS2. The game was developed by Atlus and P Studio and published by Sega. What this game did to the gaming industry is nothing short of magnificent. Persona 4 blew up and Atlus milked the hell out of it. The game is well regarded and even got an upgraded version that was released for the Playstation Vita. For this review, I’ll be going over the original PS2 version. Strap yourselves in everyone and let’s take a dive into the small town of Inaba.

Story follows our Main Character (who I named Yu Narukami). Due to his parent’s work schedule, Yu was transferred to live with his uncle and cousin named Ryotaro and Nanako Dojima. As you start to settle into your new home, you get to see your new school: Yasogami High. Here, you’ll meet Yosuke Hanamura, Chie Satonaka, Yukiko Amagi, and your homeroom teacher Mr. Morooka aka King Moron. On your first day of school, the school announces that an “incident” has occurred within the school district. As you start walking home with Chie and Yukiko, you stumble across a police crime scene. Curious about it, you and the group go to look at what’s going on. You discover that someone has been murdered, a TV announcer named Yanamura. Your uncle, who is a police detective, tells you guys to get home. The next day, we get some development on Yosuke. Turns out that he works at the local megastore Junes (which is similar to that of Walmart). His father manages the store, so he has a lot of responsibility to take after. While hanging out at Junes with Chie and Yosuke, we meet Saki Konishi, who Yosuke is fond of. He tries to be friends with her and everything, but she seems to be in a depressed state. After she and Yosuke talk for a bit, she leaves and Yosuke rejoins us. Chie then starts talking about a weird rumor that’s going around called the Midnight Channel. The Midnight Channel is this weird phenomenon that when you watch a turned off TV at midnight while it’s raining, you’ll supposedly see your soulmate. Your character tries it out that night and discovers something very weird. He sees Saki Konishi on the Midnight Channel, He also finds out that he can stick his hand inside the TV, like it’s some sort of power. The next day, you discuss what you saw on TV with Yosuke and Chie and tell them that you almost fell into the TV. Saying that’s bullshit, Yosuke leads the group to the Junes electronics department and they start talking in front of the TV. One thing leads to another and you stick your hand into the TV like before. Yosuke and Chie start freaking out. Yu, being the curious one, sticks his entire head into the TV. They start running around, crash into each other, crashing into Yu, and all three fall into the TV. The trio then finds themselves inside the TV, in a world that’s covered in fog with no way out. They start exploring the place and come across a room where there’s pictures of the TV announcer that was recently killed. Finding their way back to where they first landed, they encounter a talking bear. Saying that we’re disturbing his world, he kicks us out of the world, landing us back into the normal world. The next day, a school assembly was held saying that Saki had been found dead and apparently she was the one that discovered Yanamura’s body. Yosuke, wanting to discover what happened, wants to go back into the TV world to interrogate the talking bear. Turns out that the bear’s name is Teddie and he has no idea what’s going on. He does know that someone is throwing the murder victims into the TV. He then asks us to help him discover who is doing this and to put a stop to it so that his world can return to being peaceful. After some persuasion, Teddie hands us some glasses. Upon putting them on, we can immediately see better in the foggy world. Teddie then leads us to the last place that Saki was at before she was killed. You see, after someone is thrown into the TV and after some time passes, they will get killed by the world’s inhabitants: Shadows. When there’s fog in the TV world, there’s no fog in the real world and vice versa. When there’s no fog in the TV world, the Shadows start to go crazy and attack anything, thus killing the victim and their body pops up in the real world. Anyway, Yu, Yosuke, and Teddie arrive at what looks like the liquor store in the real world, where Saki’s parents used to work. They had to close down shop because Junes was taking all of their business, forcing Saki to start working there too. While outside the liquor store in the TV world, Shadows start to form. Feeling that he’s in danger, Yu summons out his Persona, Izanagi, on pure instinct. After the brief battle, Yu and Yosuke walk into the liquor store to find none other than another Yosuke!? In this world, a person’s darkest desires appear as their other self aka a Shadow version of themselves. After a small boss battle with Shadow Yosuke, Yosuke learns to accept the darkest parts of himself, thus granting him a Persona of his own. Feeling exhausted from the battles, we return to the real world to meet a relieved Chie who is also pissed at us for making her think that we died. That night, we checked the Midnight Channel again and saw that Yukiko was on it. We discover that she’s been kidnapped and thrown into the TV world. Now realizing that she’s the next one to die, we go on a mission to rescue her before the fog settles. Her kidnapping sets off the rest of the game where we have to go dungeon crawling in several dungeons, battle Shadows and boss monsters, and rescue the victims before they get killed all while trying to solve this murder mystery.

I’m so sorry that this section was this long. I wasn’t planning on putting every single detail into it, but I felt it was necessary to explain this crazy ass game. Anyway, the story for this is very good and very interesting. There’s nothing wrong with a good murder mystery, but my God there’s so much detail here. How this world works is very fascinating and an absolute pleasure to explore. I will say that the writing for this game is a massive improvement from P3. I was hooked on following this story ever since Saki was killed.

One of my favorite parts about the game are the characters, especially the main cast. Everybody is so well developed that I might say that I enjoy this cast more than the Phantom Thieves and even more than SEES. There’s so many moments in the game where the group is just hanging out or dicking around and I love these moments. One of my favorite parts of the game is the school trip to Port Island (from Persona 3). While there, we get to visit Gekkoukan High and talk to the student council president (former treasurer from the previous game) and visit the club. This club scene was an absolute riot and it is honestly one of the best moments in Persona history. Yukiko, Rise, and Teddie are getting drunk off of the atmosphere and just seeing everybody either drunk or dealing with their drunk friends was amazing to watch. It was like a train wreck that you couldn’t look away from.

I love all the characters too. Every single one of the main cast was a delight to get to know. Some of my favorite characters (both main and side characters) are Yosuke, Chie, Kanji, Rise, Teddie, Yumi, and Nanako. One of my regrets with this game was not being able to finish Nanako’s, Kanji’s, and Rise’s social links. Nanako is just the sweetest child, Kanji is the tough badass that has unfiltered feelings considering how he grew up, and Rise is an ex-idol and seeing her try to form her own identity away from her stage personality Risette was very interesting to watch, but I wish I was able to finish these three characters.

The graphics are charmingly dated. It’s not as “bad” as P3, but the game still looks really dated. I do like the overall aesthetic of the game, but I’d say this is one of the “worst” parts of the game. Let me rephrase that. The aesthetic of the game isn’t bad. It really isn’t, but it just doesn’t jump out at me like how P3 and P5 did. The 2D animated scenes look better than P3, so there’s a plus.

The music for this game is great. It’s not as good as P5, but it’s still a kickin’ soundtrack. Some of my favorite songs are “Signs of Love”, “Heartbeat, Heartbreak”, “Your Affection”, “Reach Out To The Truth”, “Theme of Junes”, “How Much?”, “Secret Base”, “Heaven”, “Corridor”, “The Almighty”, “Nevermore”, and “The Genesis”. I will say though that I probably prefer the soundtrack for P3 over this.

Gameplay is just like both P3 and P5. By talking to people around town (specifically people of interest), you’ll unlock their social link. By hanging out and befriending these social links, their social link rank will level up. The higher its level is, you can fuse together Personas to make stronger ones (as long as they’re as strong as you initially). By leveling up social links, whenever you fuse a new Persona, that Persona will gain an EXP boost depending on if it’s the same arcana as the social link. There is some grinding to be done in the game too. It’s not too bad (probably considering that I played this on Easy Mode), but it’s there. Dungeon crawling isn’t too bad either except for this one bullshit thing: the fucking camera and jankiness of the attack button. You see, as you’re dungeon crawling, you’ll encounter Shadows. If you attack their back before they turn around and attack you, you’ll get a preemptive attack for the battle. PROBLEM IS is that the camera is at such a weird angle and distance from the Main Character that sometimes you’ll swing your sword and hit nothing! While the animation is playing, the Shadow can easily go around you and attack you from behind, giving it the initiative for the battle. This is so annoying and easily the worst part of the game.

The battles themselves are great. One of my gripes with P3 was the lack of different Shadows to battle. In P4, there is a higher variety of enemies to fight, but it’s still not on the same level as P5. From what I can remember, there were only a handful of color swaps and that was to fit the aesthetic of the final dungeon. Another problem I had with P3 was that I couldn’t control my allies directly. In P4, you can control them. There is an option to have them run on autopilot, but when it came to bosses and important battles, I was glad that I could control my teammates and be able to make crucial moves instead of relying on an AI to do so. There’s also some other slight improvements to the AI, UI, and simple mechanics.

The bosses for this game are weird. A couple that stuck out to me are Kanji’s Shadow, Teddie’s Shadow, and The Void boss. Kanji’s Shadow boss fight was very homoerotic. Kinda felt like I was fighting the Pillar Men from JoJo. Teddie’s Shadow legit terrified me. I was not expecting that fight to be so dark. The boss’ design actually kept me on edge and it was very cool to fight something like this. The build up to this fight was great too. Honestly, I gotta say that Shadow Teddie is my favorite boss of the game. The Void boss, imo, was the hardest boss of the entire game. This retro styled fucker made me use 3 Moon of Tsukibone (if the main player falls in battle, you can be revived and you and your party’s HP and SP will be restored). Idk why, but this asshole was always one step ahead of me with every strategy and power-up. I found this boss to be much more challenging than the final boss, but that’s probably partly my fault. I was most likely under leveled when I fought him, making him much more difficult to fight.

The game does have some problems, but it's a huge improvement over Persona 3. Like I said, the worst part about the game is the camera during the dungeon crawling. Also, I might get lynched over this, but I think the overall theme of the game in relation to the story was somewhat weak. Always seek the truth and never become shrouded in a fog of lies and deceit. This alone is a good lesson/theme, but I feel like it could’ve been executed better. Idk, this story’s ending just didn’t sit right with me unlike P3 and P5 did. The final battle just felt off for me. I didn’t get the same hype that I did with the other 2 games. It’s probably that my disk crapped out on me as I’m about to fight the final boss, so I had to buy a brand new copy in order to finish up the game and I had to wait a whole day to finish it. It might also be that the final battle wasn’t really hyped up at all. With P3, you had 2 in-game months to prepare yourself for Nyx’s arrival. In P5, there was a drastic time limit to change the public’s heart so that Shido would stay convicted which led to the discovery of the Holy Grail. In P4, there was no build up to it. It was just “Oh yeah. We forgot to mention that there’s this ancient Japanese god that sparked all of this and you only have one day to beat her before you leave Inaba. We’ll provide no build up to this encounter except for 10 minutes of exposition when you meet her and another 5 minutes of last minute explaining before you fight her.”

Despite that, I really did enjoy this game. I think people put it on too high of a pedestal, but it is still very entertaining to play through. Is it worth dropping 96 hours into? I’d say so, but you have to be in the right mood for it. This is one of those games where you can’t jump into it all willy nilly. You have to have a lot of time on your hands in order to play it properly. I can keep talking about this game, but I’ll stop it here. Some time in the future, I do plan on playing Persona 4 Golden, but for now I’m Persona’d out.

Thanks for reading and I’ll see you next time.

This is Zorgak, signing off.