Persona 4 post-game impressions

14.06.09 / RPGs, persona 4, ps2, videogames / Author: admin / Comments: (0)
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Meh. Whatever. I liked Persona 3 better.

There, I said it. No one will deny the gameplay elements in P4 are better. In particular it feels really good to be able to hit Square to move around the map. When exploring you can count on an easy supply of Goho-Ms to get out of the dungeon at any time. You can control your party directly. You can control your party directly. You can control your party DIRECTLY. Etc, etc, it’s improved over P3 is every way you can imagine.

When it comes to other elements though, I find it sadly lagging behind P3. Firstly the story feels really trivial. In theory a serial killer in a small town should make for a really tense and gripping game, but nobody really cares in the game. When someone close to them dies, they don’t even attend the funeral, and only one or two people seem to care. The townspeople go about their business just as usual and let their children run around town like nothing’s going on. For your party, which has appointed itself unofficial detectives, solving the mystery involves entering the TV once in a while, saving someone, then getting on with the rest of their lives. There’s never a sense of fear or urgency about the whole thing.

The characters are boring too. In fact I’m bored just writing this because it was such a dry game. I didn’t find the lame attempts at humor amusing at all. The crossgender beauty pageant was a flop, Teddie was just annoying, Chie was a faint shadow with no real presence, Yosuke was meh in battle and meh outside, it just goes on and on. Not to mention if you don’t do their S. Links then their character development stops right after you face their shadows and is never referred to again. Haa.

The soundtrack was another let down. P3 was one of the few games where I rushed out and got the soundtrack right after finishing it. To be honest P3′s soundtrack got on my nerves in the beginning, but in some sort of perverse Stockholm Syndrome way, by the end of the game I loved it. P4…I remember the battle tune, god knows I heard it often enough. That’s it. Yah.

The graphics and colors in P4 somehow managed to be grayer and blander than P3′s, maybe to showcase the fact that it’s set in the boring countryside. The whole thing looks washed out, the blurry dungeon effects gave me a headache and writing this review is giving me another headache so I’m quitting.

I didn’t dislike P4, but I didn’t quite like it either. Plop down, do some S. Links (only good one was Death, IMO), do some more S. Links, fight and clear a dungeon in one day, do some more S. Links. Dating sim with fighting, I can live with that. And now that it’s over I can live without it.