Pesona 4 Playstation 2 Review
A refined sequel to last year’s unique role-playing experience.
Dec 24, 2008
Like Persona 3, Shin Megami Tensei Persona 4 casts players as a high school student just moving into town who must balance social life and studies with fighting mosters who’ve appeared to cause trouble. In Persona 4, players must join with their friends from school to track a killer who throws people into an alternate world where demons lurk and latent powers are revealed.
Like its precursor, Persona 4’s contemporary setting and duality between different styles of game make it stand out among RPGs in more ways than one. That plus the refinements made here ensure both an interesting and well-crafted experience. Players must first however be careful of Persona 4’s high barrier of entry.
Understanding Shin Megami Tensei
Like all Shin Megami Tensei games, Persona 4 is marketed towards a niche audience in both style and gameplay. Completing it will take far more determination than most games.
Beating Persona 4’s main quest requires at least 70 hours of play, making it – like Persona 3, about twice as long as most RPGs. Persona 4’s text adventure, role playing, and dungeon crawling elements are well-refined but feel arcane by today’s standards.
Persona 4 also takes place in a thoroughly Japanese setting. Japanese customs, holidays, and terminology are thrown around in this game with little regard towards the average foreigner’s understanding of them.
Persona 4’s Improvements: Playing the Game
For those not familiar, in Persona 3 players went to school by day to make friends with various characters by going through something resembling choose-your-own-adventure books. Those relationships would empower beings called Pesronas that players could use to fight monsters that appeared at night.
Players familiar with Persona 3 will notice the small but many changes made to its sequel. Overall, Persona 4 is really a better-paced and more varied version of Persona 3.
Instead of one huge dungeon taking up the whole game, Persona 4 contains several smaller dungeons which helps break the game up. Players will also level up much quicker than in Persona 3.
Instead of having a special hour at night set aside for fighting, players will have to choose between hanging out with friends and fighting monsters in the middle of the day in Persona 4. This makes balancing out the different parts of the game much trickier but also helps the game and storyline breeze by.
Persona 4’s Improvements: Engaging in the Story
Experiencing the ordinary lives of Persona 3’s characters along with the extraordinary gave that game a sense of normalcy that’s rare in videogames. This helped players better attach themselves to the characters and world which made P3’s story more touching than most.
Persona 4 continues this with more down-to-earth characters and voice acting that is superior despite the mere five months between the Japanese and North American releases of the game. While Persona 3’s music ranged between good and annoying, nearly all of Persona 4’s music is enjoyable despite most of it being Japanese hip-hop.
Bottom Line
To those unfamiliar with the Shin Megami Tensei brand, Persona 4 and its predecessor are each as good an entry point as any into this extensively involving classic series. Veterans of Persona 3 will enjoy returning for the second time in two years and should appreciate the more refined game that Atlus as brought them.
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