Category: PS4

Completed Persona 4. For good, this time.
Getting True Ending is not as much pain-in-the-ass, as it’s not obvious at all. On the last day you need to visit a few locations without any good reason or hints in a particular order.
The final plot twists is good, though, I admit. Speaking of “playing the long game”. The real villain is the guy at the fuel station, the one you meet on your first minute of the game and shake hands with. By shaking hands he grants you the power to enter TVs. Only that’s not a “he”, but a “she”, death goddess Izumi. Yeah, the same death goddess you’ve been told about somewhere mid-game during a school trip to the school from Persona 3.
The final fight resembles Persona 3 a lot. Same grotesque female shape, same theme of unbeatable foe that falls to the Power of Friendship. I liked how the music themes are mixed to sound more epic.

I don’t like the Fusion mechanics much, but I still fused Belzebub for the final battle, one of the Personas that require 6 personas to fuse, and it’s epic:

As a visual novel, the plot has to many holes. As a dating sim, the sudden time skips are annoying and prevent enjoying it without a guide. And as a dungeon crawler, the fights are too tedious, with some enemies having no weaknesses or constantly healing, and the boss battles too unpredictable, and beatable only if you died multiple times and have memorized the phases.
But with all those flaws, it’s still a great game. Kind of what it tries to teach you: that you need to bridge the gaps to build something great.

The Magatsu dungeon is just tiring. Full of enemies that have no weaknesses and tons of HP.

You can never clear a floor in Persona 4, new Shadows will continue to spawn. But this is where it gets ugly.
It’s also annoying how the game skips a couple of weeks after Ameno-sagiri fight. Because half of the game is basically a dating sim, and you have two actions each day, you miss a lot of interactions that way without being warned.

I also missed Marie dungeon, because my social link was 9 out of 10 😬
But I’ve read that it’s annoying as hell anyway.

By December things get dramatic. Nanako, the protagonist 7 years old niece, gets kidnapped. Her father and protagonist’s uncle gets badly injured chasing the suspect. Fog descends on the town. After being rescued, Nanako dies in the hospital.
Unfortunately, that’s where the game starts to get annoying too. In order to get the true ending, you need to pick not obvious dialogue lines, such as “I don’t know about that”, while the gang discusses if they should lynch Nanako’s kidnapper by throwing him into the TV World.
Teddy disappears, but Nanako recovers. Turns out that the first two victims where kidnapped by someone else. And Nanatame, the suspect, was throwing people into the TV World because he believed they’d be safe there from the real killer.
The problem with those investigation mechanics is that there are long dialogs preceding them. And if you fail, you get one of the bad endings, and endless credits, so I just end up restarting the game every time that happens. And I don’t remember 20 characters by their Japanese names, so that did happen.

Second big dungeon is a men-only public bathhouse. Kanji is a though guy that is struggling with his homo/bi sexuality. A bold theme for a JRPG for teenagers.

After the rescue, Yosuke keeps making jokes about his uncertain sexuality throughout the game:

The next victim is Rise, a local teenage popstar. Her dungeon is a strip-club, because she gets to expose too much of her working as a model. And the boss is literally a huge pole-dancer.

The fight while not difficult in itself, turns out to be a double-boss battle, as Teddie discovers he also has a persona. This is interesting. Aegis from Persona 3, a cyborg, was given personality in order to acquire a Persona.

That’s my second or even third time trying to play Persona 4. It’s not bad or anything, just long.
The only bit that annoys me is the fact that character mouths are not moving.
The premise is that people start to get sucked into their TVs at night, where they have to face their Shadow, the dark self. And if they die, they die in the real world too.

The problem with the game is same as Persona 3. And honestly, with most shin Megami Tensei games. When your entire combat system is built around exploiting enemy weakness with magic, once you run out of mana, it becomes boring. And since characters are designed to compliment each other, once one character runs out of SP, you may as well end the run. Although SP recovery items seem a little less of a problem than in PS4 version than in the original PS2 release.