Persona 4 Review

This is one of the finest titles to have graced the ageing PlayStation 2, so don't shelve that nine-year-old console just yet.

Shortly after the main character has arrived at a countryside town, mysterious murders start to occur. Soon you'll get sucked in through your TV into another world, where you'll discover that only you can stop the murders from taking place and find out who's committing the crimes.

Persona 4 starts slowly, very slowly. Although the narrative murder mystery's build up is much more entertaining than Persona 3's opening, it still takes over an hour before your first tutorial begins. It'll take a further two hours until you're let loose to start the game proper.

The game's structure is unique in comparison to other RPGs, since it has two sides: half of the game has you trawling through dungeons fighting shadows and levelling up, whereas the other half consists of living life as a normal teen going to school. The second half is included since what you do in the everyday world affects you and your Persona's abilities in the Persona world.


In your school life you'll improve your abilities by increasing your knowledge, expression, understanding, courage and diligence, which will allow you to create more social links with your peers.

Social links created between school friends will level-up your Persona's. However, when you're first unleashed into the Persona's world you'll be accosted by far too many options that'll make it difficult to decide what to concentrate on. Often your actions might be unnecessary and so you'll often feel like you're wasting your time doing missions for a fox when you could be improving your social link with a party member to reap more considerable benefits.

A Persona reflects the personality of its user and whilst your party members can only have one, you can switch between as many as you want during gameplay, depending on their particular strengths and weaknesses - a bit like Pokemon.


The Dungeons in the TV-world are randomly generated and you're also able to see the enemies before entering battle. You can enter battles by pressing X, which will swing your sword and take enemies by surprise.

However, enemies can also take you by surprise, giving them the upper hand in the imminent battle. Still, I found that your strike in Persona 4 is not as useful as the fencer lunge in Persona 3, meaning that I often mistimed my swing and thus ended up at a disadvantage in battle.

Persona 4 allows you to manually select your party's attacks; a feature sorely missing in the previous game, helping to alleviate the problem that the A.I. occasionally did exactly what you didn't want them to do.

In Persona 3 you had the ability to scan the enemies for weaknesses and strengths to plan the imminent battle around, but this time you'll find out these weaknesses after you've attacked them. This presents a challenge, since you'll go into battle completely blind, leaving you to try out every move in order to find what's most effective; including the moves that can be deflected right back at you.


However, when you do get it right you'll gain great advantages from exploiting the weaknesses of shadows. If you attack an enemy that's susceptible to fire with a fire attack, they'll get knocked down and you'll gain an extra go. This will then allow you attack any other shadows that haven't been knocked down. If you manage to knock them all down you can then choose to perform an all out attack that'll deal extra damage without the shadows being able to attack you. This will also increase social links within your party to provide additional battle options.

Of course, the enemy can also exploit you; though you can avoid their attacks with the option to guard at the expense of a turn. This is mostly helpful against bosses that sometimes clue you in as to which attacks they're going to use.

An interesting change from Persona 3, which required you to level-up enough to get ready for the boss of the month, is that you have to save whoever is trapped in the TV-world before the fog appears in Persona 4. This means that you're given a time limit to beat each boss, otherwise it's game over.

Still, there's a certain amount of level-grinding before you're even able to tackle bosses in the TV-world, which is where most of the fun occurs. Strong weapons are acquired by selling the materials you've acquired from battles, which also contributes to your need to fight as many battles as possible: this can all become a little monotonous.


Nonetheless, Persona 4 improves upon almost everything its predecessor failed at. While doing so the game can overload you with too many options that make you feel as if you're wasting time doing things that won't provide many benefits. Still, the two separate parts of the game are well balanced, which results in such unique gameplay that it elevates Persona 4 to one of the best RPGs on the ageing PlayStation 2.

8/10

Roydel Wilkie-Grey