Readers (if I had any many) may recall that almost exactly a year ago, I heaped nearly endless praise on a video game, a game that took me about a hundred plus hours to beat. That game, Persona 3, apparently caught the interest of more people than me, making it the first game of the series to be a nearly mainstream hit. And so the game spawned an expansion less than a year later, which I admittedly didn't play, and a full sequel also about a year later. That I played. Oh how I played it.
Nearly everything in Persona 3 is also in Persona 4, so I won't go into detail about it. Like the original, Persona 4 is a fairly traditional RPG where the party doesn't travel the world as usual in these games; they barely leave a single city, and instead it involves the passage of time in that location, as the situation gets apocalyptic. Game play is a mix of randomized dungeons that get unlocked with time, offering tougher enemies that must be matched, and social situations like a dating sim that enhances your character's abilities in combat. The full review can be found here:
http://conqueringcreativity.blogspot.com/2008/03/reviews-thanks-you-makers-of-most.html
The primary difference between the two games is the location, and as a result the entire feel of the game. Persona 3 took place in a big city, while Persona 4's setting is a small, rural town. This change could have been cosmetic, but it permeates throughout the game. You can see it as early as the game's opening menu. Persona 3 opened to a cold, static image done in frigid blues while a minimalist tune plays in the background; the same music played in the lobby of the main dungeon. Persona 4 opens to a scene in the main character's high school, as images of your friends run in and a comforting, elegant remix of the game's main theme plays, inviting the player in.
In Persona 3, everything is mechanical and hurried, matching the frenzy of a city. Almost throughout the entire game, a countdown ominously warns how much time the characters have before another inevitable conflict or narrative event. A calendar is available at all times, letting you schedule nearly everything in advance (except when the unexpected occurs to wreck everything.) Every day is meticulously divided into three parts. You spend after school periods building social links, evenings dungeon crawling or boosting your stats, and late nights studying. In Persona 4, you couldn't access the calendar if you wanted, and the only thing warning you of future deadlines is the weather report. You have two times to freely explore, after-school and night. And night is...limited. Nothing says "you're in the country" like trying to go out in the evening and the game telling you, basically, "where would you go?" And at least at first, the answer is nowhere.
The lack of structure, however, offers the characters a needed independence. In Persona 3, within the first hour or so, the hero moves into town and learns that all his dorm-mates are part of a secret society that fights demons, and he gets press ganged into saving the world. In Persona 4, the characters have to learn themselves that there is another threat from another world, and it is tied to the murder mystery that already claimed two lives. Characters can't even enter the new dungeon until investigating the lives of the victims, and they won't even know how long they have until they learn when the next foggy day will occur, which occurs after multiple days of rain in a row.
Speaking of weather, one should comment on this change as well. The weather on any given day can be sunny, cloudy, rainy, or foggy. This changes the availability of social links (sports and most school friends are unavailable when it rains,) what you can catch when fishing, what restaurants are available to eat, and even the music. It quickly becomes as integral to the settings as the town itself, and even a character in its own right.
But enough about how this game is different, the important question is if it's better. The game's first improvement is that frankly, the characters are much better. Most of Persona 3's party members are interesting, but they tend towards obnoxiousness and many are not all that believable. The Persona 4 party conversely felt like a real group of friends. The biggest star in my eyes is Chie, a short-haired, kung-fu loving tomboy who likes to sing songs about steak. Yosuke, the party's best male friend, has a tendency to act like a jerk at times (though who doesn't,) but at his best, he has a self-deprecating charm reminiscent of Xander from Buffy at his best. And the regular S.Links are much better, with none of the uncomfortably creepy friends that want to date teachers, form cults, destroy their legs for high school sports, or develop creepy fetishes for Japan.
The game play also corrects for much of the original game's gaps in believability. Gone are the need to receive cell phone calls at random days of the week to even do a thing on Sundays or an entire empty summer that prevent you from seeing your friends, even the ones you live with. Now, Sundays and school vacations at least let you see your party member friends and the invitation calls are rarer and more superfluous, indicating special events instead. And your freedom to do new events is much more varied and free. You can do more social links at night, or you can make lunches and share them with friends, boosting your links that way. And without karaoke clubs and whatnot, the main characters can spend time and gain abilities and social links through doing simple part time jobs, reading books, and going out to jobs to meet people there. Consequences link everywhere. Your right response can raise an ability mid-conversation at any point, going to school events raise abilities and related social links, giving answers to your friends in class raise these relationships, and even minor social links are interrelated, with one social link giving bonuses to another as they reveal crushes and friendships between them. It's telling that, despite giving the player an entire month less of time (two months for the better endings,) and moving dungeon explorations to the daytime, it's possible to maximize all social links with a month and a half to spare, while in Persona 3 you had to do everything perfect to the day to maximize them at the last possible moment.
Now, there are still some downsides, including new ones. The worst is a side effect of moving the dungeons to the daytime. The game removed the status effects that come from fighting in the dungeon so long that you get tired. As a result, you could theoretically stay in the dungeon indefinitely. Now, your health and magic never automatically regenerate anymore, so that creates a new limitation, but as you get higher level, new options become available and this becomes less of an issue. But that means that to optimize the game's limited days, you're expected to defeat entire sections of dungeons in a single day, and often you have to then go through the entire dungeon a second time just to beat a bonus boss. Instead of the sprints through the dungeons in Persona 3, which rarely took longer than half an hour or an hour at the most, you could be stuck spending several hours trapped in a single dungeon. The balance between social and dungeon elements gets thrown off, which is the entire point. You don't have to play it this way, mind, but every time you don't, the odds of you getting all the social links get less and less. I don't want to be guilted into tedium. Speaking of tedium, the game's introduction is the longest this side of Dragon Warrior/Quest 7. It takes a good three hours to even see your first fight, and even longer before you can explore the city and dungeons freely. Some of this time sink is a necessary evil when you expect the characters to learn about the story themselves, but some editing would have made it a bit more bearable.
In conclusion, the best way of describing the game is by the mental fugue state it eventually causes. The lulling, ever-changing music, the way that days just pass as friendships are made and developed, the strange sidequests that involve finding stickers for children or building toy models to satisfy the magical fox...at times, it practically feels like a fever dream. But a good fever dream. It takes the revealing, sometimes sad ideal of childhood love and friendship that the last game fulfilled and made it less like a chore and more like an experience. And you can't expect more than that from a game about social life.
Oh, yes, one more thing. For another, far less serious look at this game, check out the endurance run that Giant Bomb is doing. Thrill as they verrrrry slowly play a 90 hour game in half an hour segments a day, most likely for the rest of their lives. You can check out the first one here, and the rest can be found quite easily on the endurance run button, at least for now.
http://www.giantbomb.com/endurance-run-persona-4-part-01/17-219/
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